EN2 Thomas Phipps

Tom Phipps here (crewmember 1974-76). This is part tale, part confession. You guys remember the Captain’s Gig that Tom Buell seemed so fond of? Remember that it had that huge slant-eight diesel back aft and that made it low in the stern. In port it was usually tied along the port side, just aft of the quarter deck, and the engineering watch was supposed to go down a rope ladder once every watch and check the bilges. I shinnied down the mooring line instead of using the rope ladder, just to be entertained, but I wasn’t lifting that rear hatch to check that bilge. This wasn’t that big of a deal until two things happened. Some Seaman removed the name in brass individual letters off of the stern of the gig to polish them. Lots of quarter-twenty sized holes. Then it rained. A lot. I heard that the very first person to discover that the gig was on the bottom of the river (in Charleston) was the skipper himself, when he came aboard in the morning.


So, it was hauled up and sent down to the destroyer tender to clean it up and flush the engine, which took a few days. On the day it was scheduled for us to go retrieve it, a Seabee was going to drop it in pierside with a cherry picker in the afternoon. He apparently got the afternoon off, so he came early, dropped it in without us and tied it pierside…with the drain plugs out. So it sank again.


There were plenty of reprimands to go around, but somehow I was missed. It seemed the watch officers remembered seeing me go down to the boat because I shinnied down that line, so I was excluded. Survivors guilt. But not enough to go seek a reprimand! Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.