Bringing the Rodgers Home

Yesterday was spent dismounting what we would out of the Gearing. We also negotiated with the guy scrapping the old minesweeper - if take off the watertights from the Gearing (doing the Mexican gov't a favor, since they have to be removed anyway before they sink her as a reef) he'll trade us for the WWII watertight doors we need for the Rodgers (she's missing a few) and however many extras we can load on her to bring back as trading materials.

Ward dived her hull with the Chief Instructor of the Mexican Dive School here. A little knot of a man with 25,000 hours in the water. Ward has 1400 hours, and is a decent diver - but he was as a babe next to this man. Her hull is in excellent shape, from bow, to strakes, to sea chests, to screws, to the rudder. We're very pleased!

We spent a lot of time in dark, close, unlit spaces, avoiding the ones with exposed asbestos, and swimming in PCB-laden rainwater...

Regretfully, there's a very nice lathe in the hangar on the Voegelgesang we're going to have to leave behind.

To make up for that - we're going to bring home one of the Voegelgesang's gyros. We'll not manage the whole housing - but we will get the gyro itself (enough of a load to carry up the ladder, believe me!).

We got tired enough that yesterday, trying to remove bolts so we could remove a large indicator gizmo from the CIC, I handed off a wrench to Ward to finish removing this bolt... and watched him promptly start to tighten it.

I tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Um, dude - if you don't mind terribly, we'd like to re-move, not re-tighten this bolt we just spent 20 minutes on..."

Since I'm at the point of muscle failure from schlepping myself and my 100 pound bellypack up and down ladders, my major activity for the day will be taking off the broken sights on the 40's and swapping them with intact sights from the 40's that were removed recently from the Voegelgesang, so that all my 40mm's will have complete spider sights with the little optical portion that's missing from almost *all* the 40mm's you see in displays. After that - I will try to get a few of the gear racks from the Fire Control Computer.

The other thing we have to do is go through the Rodgers and mark and secure all of her spaces, marking them as dry and secured (this is for the tow crew's benefit, and saves us a little money).

So, I get to play with computers and guns all day while the youngsters will be schlepping the doors around an crawling all through the Rodgers.

Then it's home - and fight the last minute battles in the War of the Bureaucrats and then Sweating the Tow.