Dave wrote in
:

difficult to catch right.

Reading all this advise gave me a flashback into the 1960s when our ship
was anchored out stern to the quay in Naples, Italy....

There always seemed to be these "bumboat operators" in little rowing
gondolas hanging around about 100 meters from our Navy ship every time I
walked out on the weather deck. What they were waiting for was any
scraps of metal or any other stuff they could salvage, row ashore, and
sell to the Italian scrapyards. They became quite a bunch of pests with
all the begging every time some sailor opened a hatch. One day the Deck
Force had had enough. They had an old leaky flexible steam line, about
the size of a 4" fire hose, armored in stainless steel around some kind
of rubber core. It was about 12' long and must have weighed close to
300 pounds. The guys on the deck force simply dumped it overboard as if
it were some kind of accident with lots of "Oh, ****" and other colorful
sailor language for effect.

As if these little gondolas had metal detecting radar, the scrambled
towards the point the big hose went under, grappling hooks at the ready.
One guy got a hook on it but couldn't even raise it off the mud by
himself in 25' of water. A crowd of sailors had gathered by that time
cheering for them to get it, waiting to see how they were going to
engineer this project.

The guy attached already decided to share the profits with two other
boat ops who soon, with some pretty good skill, had their hooks tangled
into the steel wire that wrapped the outside of it. Now attached at the
ends and near the middle, they coordinated their liftings and started
pulling hard on the lines try to raise it.

The gondolas, responding to the increased load, got lower and lower and
really lower in the water, as they DID manage to raise the weight off
the bottom. At that point, physics took over and got to be a problem.
The line was FLEXIBLE, as in hose! Lifted off the bottom, the ends of
the line lifted easier than the middle so the hose formed itself into a
U quite quickly. As the gondola operators had no anchors out to hold
their ground, the two guys on the end soon were headed on a crash course
with the guy in the middle as the hose came up. There was nothing they
could do to stop it, of course, except to LET GO OF THE LINE and lay the
hose back on the bottom. GREED overcame LOGIC at that point and they
just kept hauling up.

The gondola in the middle was much lower, having more and more of the
load as the U got deeper in the middle. Just before the inevitable
collisions of the guys on the end, the BILGE boards of the center
gondola solved the GREED problem by splitting right under the guys shoes
sending his legs right through the hull of his gondola, forcing him to
LET GO. Now with the whole weight of the hose suspended between them,
the speed at which the end guys increased to the sinking center gondola
causing all 3 boats to smash into each other, with lots of new Italian
words I had never heard before spoken VERY quickly and loudly.

The assembled sailors, of course, were rolling on the deck by this time
and some of them rushed below to open the big sea level hatches in our
machine shop to take the survivor Italians aboard. This was winter in
Napoli and the water was cold, so they threw some Navy blankets over
them and took them to our big sick bay where the doc and the corpmen got
them warmed up and checked out. A police patrol boat was summoned who
took them away, I never found out to what.....

I can still see the shocked look on that center gondola guy's face
around his heavy beard and bulging muscles as the deck split under him,
sending him into the Naples Harbor, which was like an open sewer full of
floating garbage our divers just hated.

I salute all the sailors, soldiers and Marines, especially those who
died and survived Pearl Harbor, on this date 1941.....We remember them,
today.