Page last modified January 8, 2012
The Mizar was my second and last assignment as a wiper. The Master was J.R. Driver and the Chief Engineer was Tommy Thompson who has since passed away a year or so after I left this ship. After Mizar I saw Tommy on the USNS Neptune T-ARC-2 in 1990 up in the Swan Ship Yard in Portland, Oregon. If memory serves me right the First Engineer was a fellow we called one eyed Bob and the Chief Electrician was a Japanese guy named Fuji. I reported to Mizar at Cheatham Annex in Virginia. I had never seen or been on such a small ship in my life up until that point. I thought it must have been a fishing boat of some kind but I would be proved wrong
Mizar is named after a star and is an Arabic word or so the word goes. I think I joined her in March and departed in October during 1989. The significance of the Mizar assignment was that I took up the hobby of photography and painting landscapes while aboard her. She was also the ship that got me to St John's Newfoundland again and to Glasgow, Scotland. From Glasgow shipmates and I would first catch the train to Edinburgh and on a later visit to London.. It was while on Mizar that I was recommended by Tommy Thompson to be promoted to Second Electrician on a permanent basis since I had spent a lot of time working with Fuji.
Mizar really had a weird propulsion system. She had two Alco train engines which turned generators. The generators in turn provided power to a DC electric motor which turned the screws. This was the first time that I had seen such an arrangement. Once again we are dealing with a ship that was converted from something else. Mizar could do some cable work and we did have some cable carrying capacity. What set the ship apart from the Aeolus was the moon pool .The moon pool was an open section in the center line of the ship. In the photo above the arrow points to structure housing the moon pool. Technically when I worked aboard her she was tasked by the Oceanographer of the Navy and CSR Raytheon technicians provided the mission staff. Generally the ship worked on conducting current surveys and the mapping of isotherms. The ship was originally built to provide limited cargo support to stations in Greenland and Canada thus she came equipped with an ice breaker bow and a forward lookout tower connected by a tunnel so that lookouts could stay out of the weather. When she was converted to her oceanographic role she became The Ship that discovered the location of the sunken submarines USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
Mizar would reconnect me to Bill Clews from General Electric, he was a techrep (technical representative that came out on certain controller issues for the moon pool equipment.