I've given up on trying to remember if it's the 65 cruise or the 66 cruise. Do you remember that fishing boat we tailed off the island of Hanan. I wonder what kind of fish it went for with 50 cal. machine guns that it had under the tarp. I still have some pictures of that. I just figured out what they were really doing. I bought a model of the Cochrane over the internet, and got it today. I swear, it's about three inches long. You can't even see the small parts. It was made in China. I think that boat was tailing me, figuring out a way to rip me off 35 years later.
Go figure!!! We're watching them real closely, and they're building models of our ship.



Edited by - richard Cooper on 02/19/2001 15:57:51

Edited by - richard Cooper on 02/19/2001 18:33:36

Edited by - richard Cooper on 02/19/2001 18:35:30

Richar,
Remember that we checked out quite a few fishing boats but don't remember finding one with a 50 cal. I did admire those people for being off shore that far in a boat as small as those. (I used to fish off the mouth of the Columbia River) Also when i was in county on the 110 YFU's we ran into some storms that for the size of the boat were every bit as bad as the typhoons in 65. the worst thing about all of those boats was the were built in WW2 and some of the hull sections were paper thin. Had one boat that we went around for three months with the forword, port side storage compartment( Just aft of the bow ramp) flooded because one of our deck gang put a chipping hammer through the bottom)

The Hainan encounter with armed fishing boat(s) was in '66. I thought there was more than one boat, armed, at least, but could be wrong. I remember at the time, the Old Salts speculating on the damage a 50 caliber could do at close range to the bridge, CIC, with the thin aluminum skin.

Re Doty's msg about being used with civilians on board.: It is my theory now that the Hainan encounter was to try to provoke the Chinese into an incident with us as the bait. I am guessing we were violating their territorial waters rather blatantly. Seems like we had just come off or were going on a shorebombardment north of the DMZ.