One of these missions nearly cost us our boat. A ship at anchor in the harbor at White Beach couldn’t leave when a typhoon came in due to engine trouble. At the height of the storm she broke her anchor chain and began drifting with the wind. We had to secure her before she ran aground.
Navigation in a typhoon when near shore was always tricky and inside a harbor it was particularly dicey. Our Chief Mate and Quartermasters were taking bearing every five minutes and laying out as many danger bearing as possible but our charts were thirty years old and reefs have a way of moving around.
We passed cables up to the ship and held her off the shore until another set of anchors could be set. On the way back to the pier we hit a reef. The chart and the navigation showed that we were well clear of it but we
were solidly grounded.
The hull started pounding on the reef and the danger of having a large hole knocked into the bottom of the hull was very real. If that had happened, we would have slid off the reef as the weight of water built up and the vessel would have been lost. It wouldn’t be too good for the crew either. We tried to back off but were stuck hard.
A man was posted in the bilge to watch for holes and incoming water but there wasn’t much else we could do until after the storm. Most of us stayed on deck in case we were needed. The Steward’s Department gathered near the lifeboat. They weren’t yet real Army sailors and were a bit overly concerned.
There wasn’t a lot we could do while waiting. We launched our work boat and took soundings around the tug, trying to find a way off the reef. We found only that we were hard aground and nowhere near an edge. The officers all took more bearings only to find that according to our charts we should have had over a hundred feet of water under us.
While working on the tugs I met a woman and moved in with her. Shimogi Mitzu was Ryukyuan (Okinawan), not Japanese. I was the only American in our apartment building. We became very close – maybe we were in love? No, we did fall in love.
We had a very good relationship but we did have our differences of opinion. She liked to watch American cowboy movies in English, I preferred Japanese Samurai movies in Japanese. She liked blue jeans, I thought a kimono was very comfortable. We did agree on a radio station. There were two English Language stations on the island, one the military’s Armed Forces Network and the other one a civilian radio operated by Americans. Their format was alternative rock – hippie music like Steppenwolf, The Doors, Grand Funk and some of the new Beatles stuff. They picked up new albums from American GIs and Merchant Marines. It was not the music that the US Military Establishment wanted us to listen to but they had a large listening audience. They originally wanted the call sign KLSD but the Military Government refused the request.
There were a lot of young locals listening too and occasionally a commercial would be aired in Japanese. The hippie movement had arrived in Okinawa as it had elsewhere in the world and there were parts of Okinawa that resembled the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco.
