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Saturday, October 7, 2006
Lightship sailors get chance to reminisce
Ceremony to honor lives lost
By DEBERA CARLTON HARRELL
P-I REPORTER
Once aboard Swiftsure Lightship No. 83, they can't
wait to go below deck.
The engine room beckons, and the mustiness and
fuel smells surround them. Then the memories come -- they were young sailors
on duty aboard the 102-year-old vessel, a unique band of brothers.
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Paul Joseph Brown
/ P-I |
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U.S.
Coast Guard veterans Joe Ratcliffe and Arnold Holt served on the Swiftsure
Lightship No. 83. They are in Seattle for a national reunion for Coast Guard
members who manned lightships. |
An emotional Joe Ratcliffe, 76, finds the hulking
machinery he tended as an 18-year-old fireman apprentice. It is Friday morning
on South Lake Union, but faces, names of shipmates, good times and terrors
flow back as if carried by a current.
"I used to run these boilers and compressors and
pumps," said Ratcliffe, now living in Connecticut.
He is one of 120 lightship sailors in Seattle this
weekend for the annual reunion of the U.S. Coast Guard Lightship Sailors
Association. "I feel like I did when I first went aboard. It's hard to describe,
it's phenomenal, like going into a time machine. How many times did I sit
over there, doing my job, the engine humming?"
Lightships served as floating lighthouses to aid
navigation in the days before buoys, computers, satellites and Global Positioning
Systems. Stationed off dangerous offshore reefs and harbor entrances, the
ships used flashing beacons and their very presence to warn other ships.
Really, they were sitting ducks, the retired sailors
agree.
"It was a lot of work, and sometimes frightening,"
said Arnold Holt, 69, of Silverdale, who was a 21-year-old seaman apprentice
aboard No. 83.
On Friday, he recalled when the ship, stationed
off the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Columbia River, was nearly hit by
a Japanese freighter while he was aboard.
"I don't know what they were thinking, but it was
foggy and stormy," Holt said. "I'd just been relieved of duty (in the engine
room) and heard a bunch of yelling. Compared to us, the freighter was huge,
and it was no more than 100 feet away from us. I don't understand Japanese,
but I heard them hollering when they realized they messed up."
Jay McCarthy, 69, of Del Ray Beach, Fla., sailed
on Swiftsure's sister ship, which was hit by a freighter in 1960, and sunk,
a year after McCarthy transferred to a different vessel.
It remains underwater in Ambrose Channel, a major
shipping channel at the mouth of New York Bay, he said Friday.
"Other ships would aim for the lightships; they'd
get their navigational fixes off the beacon, then rechart their course,"
McCarthy said. "But sometimes they'd miscalculate. Once, the Stockholm (the
same ocean liner that sank the Andrea Doria in a 1956 collision) came so
close to us, I could look into her portholes and see people changing their
clothes. She didn't hit us, but we were scared stiff."
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Joe
Ratcliffe, one of the Lightship Swiftsure sailors in town for the reunion,
was a teenager when he helped man the ship in 1947. Lightship No. 83, built
in 1904, is one of seven vessels retired in Washington with national historic
landmark status. |
Wayne Palsson of Northwest Seaport, the Seattle-based
non-profit organization that owns the Swiftsure, said lightship sailors,
like World War II sailors, are courageous men with a strong sense of duty,
performing a dangerous job that no longer exists.
"The mission was not to move," Palsson said, although
lightships sometimes dragged off even 5,000- to 7,000-pound anchors. "If
you think you get seasick in a ship moving through heavy seas, think of these
sailors, who were not under power, but anchored."
The reunion helps sailors recall their service
and camaraderie, and preserve lightship history, said Larry Ryan, president
of the U.S. Coast Guard Lightship Sailors Association. Ryan said that during
a wreath-laying ceremony Saturday, the ship's bell will ring 50 times --
one time each for sailors, mostly from the East Coast and the Midwest, who
lost their lives aboard lightships.
Northwest Seaport also expects to receive a $580,000
grant soon from the federal government to restore the Swiftsure for historical
and educational purposes, Palsson said.
Lightship No. 83, built in 1904, is one of seven
vessels retired in Washington with national historic landmark status. No.
83, named for being the 83rd such vessel built in the U.S., is one of only
16 lightships remaining, and is the only one in the country with its steam
engine intact, Palsson said. It takes its name from one of the five West
Coast stations where it served -- the Swiftsure bank off the Strait of Juan
de Fuca, between Washington's Olympic Peninsula and British
Columbia. |