Does anyone remember the bomb test in the Hawaiian Islands in 65(?). I could be wrong but I thought it was 500 tons of TNT. I remember working parties going ashore to stack the dynamite.About leveled that little Island.

I remember but wasn't onboard then. It was called "Operation White Hat" and the pics I saw of it looked like a giant white hat...soiled of course!

Yes it was 500 tons. Remember we were tied down with cables as they didn't know if we would roll over or not? there were a couple of old mothballed ships and a Canadian ship that were closer than us if I remember right. There was a earthquake near Chili and we were expected to have a tidal wave hit us as a result. They cut the cables holding us down so we could ride out the wave when it hit. We didn't even notice when it hit as it was so small. They had to re tie us down before they conducted the test. I remember seeing the pictures in the paper. It made quite a cloud.

The pile was huge! Somewhere I still have some pictures of the explosion taken throught the screened off windows of the bridge. The explosion was large enough the it looked like a mushroom cloud.
I believe that the pile was actully made from the explosives in torpedoes.
One of the ships inboard of us was an unfiniched crusier hull that had been outfitted with all kinds of radars to see how they woud survive the blast.

I also believe that they moored us so that we would be broadside to the blast, rember the ship had all kinds of strain gauges on it.

I also rember watching the ripples as the blast came towards us and watching all of the rocks hit the water on both sides of the ship and being amazed that we had very little damage from debris.

The tug that was out there to set all of the anchors and assist with the four point mooring had a classmate of mine from high school on it who was also a QM2.

I will see if I can find photos and scan them in. were taken with a really cheap camera though.

Could someone tell me when the explosion was? I remember waiting for the earthquake and only finding a ripple pass us, but I don't remember the bomb. Were they the same event?

Richard;
No they were not the same events. We were anchored in place when the earth quake hit and we had to unhook our moorings and get out to deeper water in case the wave was big. I have seen on TV that a Tuami is a title wave caused by an earthquake. They say that the wave is actually underwater and only about a foot on top (sometimes). The real problem comes when it gets to shore because all of the water is then forced up and it can be huge. Ever since I saw that I wondered if that was the case with us because they said it was only a foot high when we passed it. There was a story on that show about an Island village where all the fishermen were out to sea fishing and came in to find that a title wave had wiped out the village while they were at sea. They didn't know it because the wave was only about a foot when it passed them.