1971 - Swim Call

1971 - Swim Call

The sea looked like glass. It was smooth and appeared to be completely calm with no swells, waves or turbulence as far as the eye could see. The sky was the color of a newborn baby’s eyes and was reflected in the crystal clear water.

As I gazed out over the water on this beautiful late-September morning I looked forward to diving in and washing all of the gunk off of my body. Having just crossed the equator and fulfilling the ceremony approved by both regulation and Naval Tradition I was in serious need of a rinse. An hour ago I was a “Pollywog” – I was now a loyal subject of King Neptune and now formally called a “Shellback” as any equator-crossing sailor was called, assuming the ceremony was adequately carried out with just the right amount of humiliation and pure fun. In reality was there was very little humiliation and a whole bunch of fun.

Cargo nets were hung over the side and gunner’s mates were stationed around the main deck to watch for sharks, sea snakes or any other dangerous sea creature. As we were at latitude of 00000, on the equator, and a longitude of 105.58.5 the sea was fairly shallow and the bottom was not far below us although considerable deeper than my 5’5”. On this September 22nd, a Wednesday, we arrived at our temporary destination. For the last few days we had traveled through the tropics with beautiful weather, snow-white seabirds in tow and exotic ocean life including flying fish that occasionally landed on the deck much to our delight. There were also hammerhead sharks, very few of which were the monsters we expected. In fact, most of these strange looking fish were no longer than 3 feet long and maybe 9 inches thick. The assorted fishermen on board, having caught a few of these weird looking sharks demonstrated how they seemed to be pure muscle and sandpaper skin. With their eyes spread out to the ends of their radically shaped heads they looked like something out of a Dali painting. The Flying Fish were equally strange looking, with elongated fins that stretched out to allow them to glide over long distances when they were threatened. A glittery silver thin body, big eyes and those long fins gave them a strange, otherworldly look.

Over the last 3 days we had been scheduled for an in-port stop in Australia half-a-dozen times with the ultimate decision to deny the visit. This was made-up for by sending us instead to Singapore, a delightful city with side streets full of strange shops and kiosks as well as snake charmers and fakers lying on beds of nails. There were elephants in the streets and monkeys in the trees. Within the next 24-hours I was to discover all of this as well as a fabulous French restaurant in which we spent every evening while we were in town. We were warned to “keep our noses clean” but to enjoy ourselves, which we did with great gusto. But at this immediate time all of that was in the future. Late the previous night our Captain had informed PACCOM “After the schedule changes of the last few days, these boys have anticipated Australia only to have it rescheduled several times. Since we are headed for Singapore I’m going to take an extra day to head south and fill this ship with Shellbacks.” The Captain, a Polliwog himself, had the same ceremony to look forward to as the rest of us and took it all like a man…or Honored Shellback. Anyway, PACCOM agreed and resulted in the situation we were currently in: disgustingly dirty, covered with grease, food garbage and assorted gunk. Our bodies stunk and our hair clung to our heads in a skullcap that made us all temporarily glad for a military haircut.

After our ceremony we were, initially instructed to climb down the nets to the water, but after a few slips and falls from several other greased-up sailors, most of us took the plunge by diving the 10 feet from the fantail into the bathwater-warm ocean. Although the sea had looked as smooth as glass from the deck of the ship, upon entering the water it was quickly realized that powerful swells continued to roll underneath us in a lazy motion that still raised us a good 5 feet or so above the trough. As the swells were so long and slow and there was not a breath of air turbulence, the surface had appeared to be flat to the horizon…until finding yourself immersed in the trough of one of these swells. The salt stung our eyes as we washed, laughed and played and performed general horseplay until, after about an hour of fun, swim-call was called to an end. This brought an end to our swimming party.

As I climbed over the rail and grabbed a towel I heard someone exclaim, “Hey, someone is way out there! It looks like they’re drifting with the swells!” Turning to see what everyone else was looking at was completely useless as, without my glasses, I was unable to see much but the color of the water and the little speck that was blurred, but obviously, a person at some distance. I grabbed my glasses as someone exclaimed, “I think it’s Louie!” Turning to see with new eyes I saw one of the seamen in my department a good distance away from the ship in a slow but insidious current that continued to move Louie away from the ship. He was about ¼-mile away and moving further away as we watched.

As the senior enlisted man in the department, outside my chief, who was still dressed as King Neptune, I felt responsible for Louie who had been apprehensive about swimming in the middle of the ocean where there was no land visable. Like a good sailor he had evidently overcame his fear and went for a swim anyway. As a fairly good swimmer, I volunteered to swim out to Louie and retrieve him before he was too worn to continue to tread water. Several others joined in volunteering for this job. We dove into the sea and began stroking in Louie’s direction. Although there were 6 sailors in our little company, Jimmy had to turn back when he realized the distance was simply too far. We were at the halfway point so I broke off Pat and asked him to accompany Jimmy back to the ship. We remaining 4 continued to stroke as fast as possible toward Louie who occasionally disappeared into a trough but always appeared at the crest a moment later.

After a little while we arrived to find Louie out of breath and scared – a condition with which we all sympathized. After a short period of reassurance we advised Louie that we were all fairly good swimmers and we would help him get back to the ship. As we mentioned the home base we turned to see the direction in which we had to swim. We all simultaneously realized we were a lot farther than we had been when we started out. The ship was the size of a small toy, about ¾ of a-mile away…perhaps farther. I could barely see any movement on board in my blindness but I was still able to see the blurry gray vessel well enough to know which direction we would need to go.

We reassured Louie, as we reassured ourselves, that this wasn’t as far as it looked and we were all good swimmers who would take turns towing him back. As I began the first leg of our trip Louie, now only having one person to rely upon, grabbed onto my swimsuit pulling it down near my knees. I immediately pushed Louie off and reassured him again that this should be fairly easy but he needed to trust us and not cling to either us or our clothes. We eventually convinced him to hang on with a light touch and we would all arrive safely. After all, we would need to be able to swim ourselves if we were to make the time we obviously needed to in order to overcome the current.

We soon fell into a rhythm that enabled us to slowly make progress toward the ship. After a lengthy and challenging but steady swim we were within hearing of the crew who were cheering us on with full voice and a level of excitement that made it impossible to pick out individual words or phrases. We had probably been gone for the better part of an hour at this point and were all anxious to get back to the security of a firm rolling deck. Talking among ourselves we noticed the gunners-mates were no longer spread out around the ship but were in the middle of the crowd with everyone else cheering and shouting encouragement. Someone asked “Aren’t they supposed to be watching for sharks?” We all agreed that they were becoming a bit casual as we still had people in the water but we chalked it up to typical crowd interest when a crew, desperate for entertainment had a "show" to watch. We simply hoped they wouldn’t be needed and, as we were just a few minutes away we would probably get to the ship before anything could possibly happen.

As we got closer we could more clearly hear the shouts and encouragement of my shipmates. “Come on!”, “Faster!” and “Hurry up!” seemed to be the general gist of the shouts which was actually kind of disturbing as we had been swimming for quite a while and were pretty much played out. Were they really that anxious to get underway? As we voiced our dissatisfaction among ourselves we began to catch other words. The words “Shark!” and “Hammerheads!” managed to get our attention just as we reached the side of the boat and the cargo nets at which we paused to get our breath. That was about when all of those words became so much clearer: “You are surrounded by hammerhead sharks! Get the hell out of the water!” The next line in this legendary tale is, as I overheard later that day, “They came out of the water like they had a rocket up their ass.” I do know we all reached the deck at the same time with our wet feet slapping the deck almost in unison.

Spinning around I looked over the side of the ship. There about 1-3 feet underneath the surface were what appeared to be hundreds of small hammerheads. I was told when they were first spotted we were still quite a ways from the ship and they were circling together in a formation that was about 30 feet across. By the time we reached the ship this circle had shrunk to around 15 feet across with the small knot of swimmers in the center of a circle that put all of us around 5 feet or closer to the wall of fish. this ring of shark-flesh was around 15-feet thick near the surface and seemed to extend at least 15-feet down...kind of like being in the hole of a huge donut made entirely of hammerhead sharks. They were closer than I am tall. We had no idea. Also later that same day Jim related that as they watched every so often a shark would break out of the wall and cruise underneath the swimmers. At times this lone-shark would make a quick break toward the group of sailors but would break-off the run just before reaching a person.

After changing clothes I went back out to the helicopter-deck overlooking the fantail. As I looked overboard toward I saw hundreds of hammerheads still in the area. The deck was going through a salt-water-wash-down after sweeping the ceremonial leftovers overboard and they were happily feeding on anything that hit the water. They were no longer circling and they were no longer confining themselves to depth but instead occasionally broke the surface before rejoining the teaming, frothing school of weird-looking fish.

As we got underway about 45 minutes later I donned the sound-powered telephone to ask the Aft-Lookout on the condition of the sharks. It seems they were still hanging around looking for a hand out…or a foot out…or an elbow out. They, evidently, had been looking forward to and contemplating an exotic meal.

Me? I’m still looking forward to another bath-water swim on the equator on another perfect day…someday.