Page last modified December 29,2011
This is the USS KILAUEA AE-26. This is the ship that I spent nearly all my active duty time on. This ship had four 3'50 Caliber gun mounts, one forward of Unrep Station 3, one forward of Station 4, and the other two were port and starboard aft on the 03 deck.. This was the day before the feminization of the afloat community began. For the sake of you land lubbers that have not been inoculated with your dose of the History Channel, Unrep stands for Under Way Replenishment. Prior to the development of Unrep in World War II ships could replenish at sea but they had to come to a complete stop and conduct the operation basically skin to skin with the aid of fenders. Such operations were haphazard and made units sitting ducks so to speak. (Source: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/logistics-history.htm )
This is a photo of the E-Division taken on my first WestPac. I am kneeling down
bottom far right.
This is a close up shot of picture above, this was Admiral Zumwalt's Navy.
I had to visit the Washington Navy Yard in DC to view one of the Kilauea Cruise
Books in order to get this picture. I used a Pentax 10 megapixel SLR camera to
take these photos. My advise if you take on a similar project it to go there
with a Digital Camera a regular point and shoot or Cell Phone Camera does not
cut the mustard. The family and I originally went up to DC in June of 2009 to
accomplish this with regular cameras the results were not good. I returned to
the Navy yard in October of 2009 enroute to Clyde, New York and retook these
pictures using the digital and the quality has turned out to be far superior.
This
was taken from the 1976 Cruise Book and shows me manning the sound powered
phones during an Under Way Replenishment. I look at this picture now and I
wonder why I had such a hard time with American girls. I was not ugly.
I may have this guys name wrong , needless to say how can you ever forget the
guy who knocked out your two front teeth in the chow line. I believe that his
name is James Strickland. I was too groggy when I got back from emergency dental
surgery to write him up for the assault. He felt so guilty that he went AWOL so
that he would get busted and go to Captains Mast. As time progressed he would
take issue with anyone who was trying to beat up on me.