The Elokomin wasn’t the happiest of ships. At one time I thought that because of the Vietnam War the best officers were sent to the Pacific fleet and the Atlantic had to make do with what was left. Discipline wasn’t exactly one of the areas where the crew of the Elokomin stood out. Fortunately, my stay on this ship would not last too long. We completed the last couple of months of her deployment to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and headed for Norfolk Virginia. By the time we arrived we knew the od girl was scheduled for retirement.
Decommissioning a ships ought to be a simple thing. There are a number of steps that need to taken. Almost all of them don’t require a lot of special skills. We tied up alongside a pier and began by taking an inventory of equipment. Some installed electronic items were removed to be given to other ships whose equipment was even older than our own. Then we did the same thing with a lot of portable items like electronic testing meters and sextants. When the items on a navy wide critical controlled equipment list had been transferred the remaining items were published to other ships in the Service Force. Other ships could come by and pick them up on a first come, first served basis. Many crew members with special skills were already being reassigned to other vessels.
The ship left the pier for a brief visit to the Craney island fuel depot. When there, all our liquid cargo holds were pumped dry. So were the ships own bunkers. We returned to the pier where we had been previously under tow. We had no fuel, so we couldn’t go under our own power.. The bow was sticking up so high in this empty condition that it was hard to see the tug that was towing us. I was assigned as officer of the deck for this short voyage. I was sure it was primarily to have someone to blame if anything went really wrong. The crew moved ashore because there was no heating and no power for running the galley to feed them. Soon after we returned to pier the process of stripping the ship of almost anything that wasn’t nailed down began. The Captain had already been transferred, and the executive officer was on special leave because his wife had run off with a lover and left him responsible for their 2 children., or so we understood. trucks drove up the pier and parked next to the ship. At first, the loose items that were being taken off were carried down to the pier and loaded on the trucks. Later, when the paint locker was being emptied, the sailors hauled the containers for the paint up to the main deck and simply threw them down into the truck. es, a few missed the mark. The pier had several places where paint tins had broken open and their contents splashed over the pier.
I was very happy to finally get orders assigning me as operations officer in another oiler even though the new ship was operating out of Newport, Rhode Island.
Wetherhorn 