Our arrival at Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Maury AGS
Crossing Paths
It was a mid-February morning in 1960, and our arrival at Pearl Harbor aboard the USS Maury AGS-16 was planned, as it was for all first-time port visits, for 0700. After a 10-day crossing from San Diego, we eased into the harbor with the morning sun off our stern and got our first view of our new ‘home port.’
For many years ‘home’ for the USS Maury was the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City. I had already made two cruises out of that location: one sixty-day trip to the Caribbean; and an Atlantic crossing and a nine-month-long cruise to the Mediterranean and Black Seas. We were now heading to Thailand on a six month cruise, having left New York, transited the Panama Canal, and visited briefly in California before arriving in Hawaii on our Pacific crossing.
The USS Maury, built in 1943 as the USS Renate AKA-36, an attack transport ship, was renovated and re-equipped to conduct hydrographic surveys. The ship was named for Matthew Fontaine Maury, regarded as the founder of modern oceanography. Our job was to collect data from which sea-going navigational charts were produced. Our special focus was deep water surveys. We were scheduled to be at Pearl Harbor for only two weeks, after which we would sail to Bangkok by way of Guam. There was talk about a stop in the Philippines, and a visit to Malaysia with a brief dip below the equator, but neither voyage materialized on the initial trip west.
Our assignment in Thailand, or Siam as many called it, would be to conduct a broad survey of the entire Gulf of Siam delta including the Gulf-side coastlines of Vietnam and Cambodia. Incidentally, this was shortly after the death of Major Buis and MSgt Ovnand, military advisors in Vietnam and the first two Americans to die in what came to be known as the Vietnam War.
Instead of being given a regular portside berth we were tied up next to the dry docks at Pearl Harbor on this first visit. While it added to the on-base travel distances for those who had a need to go ashore, it placed us in close proximity to one of the most notable and inventive craft in existence – the bathyscaphe called Trieste. She was in full view on blocks at the bottom of an adjacent dry dock, resembling something between a submarine and an unorganized collection of odd-shaped tanks, pipes and fittings. From our decks we were able to see her in full view.
Less than two weeks prior to our arrival in Hawaii, that vessel with two men aboard had achieved what no vessel had before, or since. She successfully reached the deepest known location in any of the world’s oceans, untethered and without serious incident. Over a period of eight hours, this Swiss-designed, Italian-built craft with Jacques Piccard, son of the craft’s designer, and US Navy Lt. Don Walsh, aboard, dropped into the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench south of the island of Guam in the western Pacific. After spending just under an hour on the bottom, she resurfaced safely.
Her instruments recorded a depth of 37,799 feet, but this was later revised by Japanese technicians to an official depth of 35,797 feet. In nautical terms, this is over seven miles – straight down. Or, if Mt. Everest were sliced off and placed on the ocean at that spot, there would still be over a mile of water above its peak.
The Trieste was later modified and used as a research vessel in the Atlantic. Among her achievements, she was instrumental in locating the SSN Thresher, a nuclear submarine which had disappeared off the coast of New England. Today the Trieste rests in the US Naval Museum in Washington, DC.
We left Pearl Harbor bound for Guam a few days later. Apparently our Captain had spoken to somebody connected with the Trieste, because after leaving Guam and approaching the Marianas he modified our course slightly in order to transit the Challenger Deep location. We were informed that he wanted to test our on-board equipment against such extreme depths.
My job as an Electronics Technician was to maintain and, if necessary, repair such devices as radios, radar, sonar, and specialized navigational instruments used aboard our ship. I was on duty the evening we approached the Marianas Trench and quickly learned that our transit of the Challenger Deep location where the Trieste made its dive would occur about an hour after midnight. I was assigned the job of babysitting the sonar recorder for the duration in a special room near the ship’s bridge.
The sonar device had a hinged front with a viewing window, behind which was a metal plate. A supply roll of graphed paper to the right and a take-up roll to the left allowed the paper to move steadily across the plate from right to left. Fixed to sprockets above and below the plate, a small chain trailed a wired ‘trigger’ downward across the paper. The returning sonar echo emitted a pulse in the trigger that was evidenced by a tiny burn mark on the paper. Remember, this is all 1950’s stuff.
If the ship happened to be crossing over a section of flat ocean bottom, then the return signals would be steady and the resulting marks on the paper would be a straight, horizontal line. Since most ocean bottoms are irregular, the depth indications recorded on the paper would take the shape of that bottom, moving up and down as the depth changed across a given distance.
Of course, for hydrographic survey work, it is necessary to know depth and location. On this night, we were in open ocean, south of Guam, in the dark, with no shore-based references to fix our exact position. Our position this night was as good as our Navigator could make it. He had us located on a chart plotter begun at Guam, supplemented by sextant readings and star sightings, and we were about to transit the mysterious Trench.
Reaching what we projected to be the Trieste’s dive point, I recall how we watched the line on the paper move steadily downward, eventually reaching the maximum scaled depth on the paper chart of 30,000 feet. And then it stopped recording! We were literally ‘off the chart,’ although the stylus kept cycling and the paper kept moving. After some time the echo returns began to show again along the bottom edge of the paper, this time arching back upwards in the opposite direction.
We later used a ruler and some educated guesses to ‘fill in the blank’ and extrapolate where the lines would have crossed, which turned out to be approximately 37,000 feet! The depth chart made that night was on display in the mess hall aboard the ship for a short time, but our attention soon turned to more immediate matters. I have no idea what may have happened to that plot.
We spent most of the next six months sailing around the Gulf of Siam and sampling its depth and measuring its tidal movements, currents, temperatures, floral contents, and salinity. I recall the finding that the Gulf’s relatively shallow bottom was a sand-covered, featureless mostly flat surface. The explanation for this was the endless supply of silt washed annually into the Gulf from numerous rivers and inland water systems over the course of uncounted centuries.
The return trip to Pearl Harbor that next summer included stops in Hong Kong, Formosa, and Guam. Although we passed near the Trench for the second time, we gave little thought to the Trieste or the Challenger Deep. At Pearl Harbor, the Maury was immediately dry docked and underwent months of repairs and renovations, including new air conditioning. I didn’t pay attention, of course, but we might well have been in the same dock where we earlier had seen the Trieste. The ship returned to Thailand and Vietnam while I returned to civilian life back in the States.
Over the years, reminders of the Trieste’s achievement might be an occasional mention of the dive, or a side-bar to some new discovery in the ocean’s depth by Robert Ballard and company. And of course, there was the Distinguished Public Service Award given to Captain Walsh by the US Navy in 2010.
I have always remembered the first-time visit to Pearl Harbor with fondness, and my appreciation of the achievement of the two men aboard and the support crew for the Trieste has grown over time. In 2008, on a motorcoach trip to southwestern Washington State to see my daughter and grandchildren, I paused for a night at Seven Feathers RV Resort in northwest Oregon. More recently, after learning that Dr. Walsh calls this general area home, I realized I was within an hour’s drive from the man with whom I almost once crossed paths in the western Pacific. I now understand I almost did it again.
June 13, 1957 to July 28, 1960. Places visited while in the Navy: Bainbridge, Maryland (basic training) / Newport, RI / Great Lakes Naval Station, Illinois / New York Naval Ship Yard / Guantanamo, Cuba / Tangiers, Morocco / Barcelona, Rhoda, Spain / Genoa, Brindisi, Italy / Athens, Rhodes, Greece / Istanbul, Iskendrun, Antalya, Alanya, Trabzon, Turkey / Odessa, Ukraine / Panama Canal / Hawaii / Guam / Bangkok / Hong Kong / Formosa / Treasure Island, California.