"Sun Dragon" wrote in
:

A roll of aluminum foil and a "green" deckhand made for good humor, I
would instruct the deckhand to wrap himself in foil, stand upon the
foredeck, as we would command him to hold himself in rather odd body
positions while the chief and myself up in the wheelhouse "tuned" the
radar. If possible we would do this in port, prefferably so the crews
of other vessels could be witness to the charade. The tinfoil hat was
always the crowd pleaser.




Darn. I never saw that trick.....(c; Thanks.

Bored to tears crossing the Atlantic for Naples at our breakneck speed of
17 knots, some of the boys in the DASH helo hanger got the bright idea to
screw with the CIC watch (an oxymoron in a tender with 2 3" cannons the
gummer's mates have to break out the manual to fire). They built a tin
foil kite out of Reynolds Wrap stolen from the galley, a really nice box
kite with fiberglass spars. The DASH helo deck was above our fantail and
a great place at sea to fly kites, which up to this point was no problem.
They had about 3 miles of some exotic monofilament line with an amazing
tensile strength, but little weight/mile.

After darken ship (why we did that was always a mystery), when you
couldn't see it, they flew the kite behind Everglades and payed out lots
of this tiny line. The kite was quite large and had a lot of lift. It
would fly back until you could hardly see it, its line seemingly trailing
off to nowhere. Flying above the fantail watch, who was looking at the
horizon, not for the Luftwaffe above, he reported nothing. Not so the
radar operator in CIC. He sounded the alarm of a UFO trailing the ship
on the Raytheon Pathfinder (SPS-21) display at about 2 miles. The watch
reported no sighting as the kite was too far away by the time he looked
for it. The ship's log was duly noted and everyone aboard, mostly the
enlisted ratings who knew all about what was going on, was told to keep a
sharp eye.

Every night, for over a week, this "thing" would show up on radar in the
dark and trail the ship for hours...Then, just after midnight, it would
approach the ship and disappear, suddenly, off the radar less than a mile
away, undetectable.

Finally discovered what it was by the Comm Officer who observed its
launch from the deck outside Radio Central one night, the jig was up.
The airdales on the helo deck apologized and said they'd been flying many
kites. This one was just new. They pleaded innocent, which they
weren't. Our captain decided it was a great test of CIC efficiency, an
unintended drill of great success. The kite continued to fly, but with a
new Saran Wrap covering that was radar transparent, compliments of the
Chief Radarman and cooks....(c;



Larry
--
VIRUS ALERT! VISTA has been released!
NOONE will be spared!