A Sea Story.

[Dr.Hess]

Helping Dave out with some sea story posting.

I was an Apprentice on the SS Cove Explorer in 1980, built in 1945. Don't recall all the previous names, but it was a T2 tanker, jumbolized twice. Once with a longer hull and once with a higher hull. The deck house was picked up and put on the stern house. A true adventure. In the six months I was on it, we broke down several times, dead in the water. The most memorable time was heading into SanFran from Long Beach. For those unenlightened on the T2's propulsion system, it was turbo-electric. 2 steam boilers ran a turbine which ran a generator which ran a very large electric motor that ran the prop. This gave very good speed control, so it was very good at keeping a pace with a convoy in WWII. We had a long term steam leak that blew live steam into the electric motor driving the screw. Engineers: "Yeah, we should fix that." So we're heading into San Francisco harbor and the engine room calls up the bridge and says "The main engine (electric motor) is smoking! We're shutting it down!" So now we have no steering and are heading right for one of the supports of the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh yeah, we were also technically "sinking" at the time, with the fo'c'sle taking on more water than we could pump out. The deck crew ran to the anchors and dropped one, dragging it and damaging the windlass/brake, barely managing to stop us before we took out the Golden Gate Bridge. That would have been "a bad thing." They patched the engine together with electrical putty (amazing stuff, I keep it handy in my shop to this day) and we limped on into SF, probably the oil terminal at Martinez. The USCG was not amused.