Stormy Seas

I guess you learned a lesson. Like, they try to tell you to make sure you don’t go up on the upper deck when there’s a storm without lifelines and if you don’t listen to them, well, you know, and I always made sure I had a lifeline on. Of course, I was a little guy and I could get blown off pretty quick (laughter). There was storm off of the United States coast and we were with a minesweeper and there were some fellows putting up the ropes across that used to put lifelines across and they didn’t have a lifeline on themselves and they were swept over and two of them drowned and we went back to look for them but we couldn’t find them.Some of those winds and some of those waves you would actually, not exaggerating, you would look up and it would be at least 40 or 50 feet high. You’d be up that way and then you’d come down and you could, the screws, the propellers of the ship would be brrrrrr in the air and come down. We were a couple, three hundred miles off the New York coast or the Boston coast and we ran into a real gale that actually broke one of our portholes and those are all steel into steel. It did break the port holes and flooded the after part of the ship. We had an engineering officer that really knew what to do and that port hole was right beside where my hammock was and I got quite wet and I just grabbed my life jacket and went up top and Mr. Finlayson, I think his name was, Lieutenant Finlayson, he was standing there when I told him that something had hit the ship, but it was just the wave and he took a mattress and some boards and put them up against that and stop the water. We still had through a bad storm. And not being sure whether you’re going to get back, that was the big thing. You know, will I ever get back to see my wife or will I ever get back to see my Mom and Dad? That’s what I always thought about.