USC&GS Guide
Flamingo remained inactive for almost a year and one-half before an executive order of 25 March 1922 authorized the Navy to transfer the vessel to the Commerce Department, and she was accordingly decommissioned on 5 May 1922. Turned over to the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for use as a survey vessel, at Portsmouth, on 23 January 1923, the erstwhile minecraft was renamed USC&GS Guide, first ship of the name, on 1 March 1923.
After she had been converted and fitted out on the United States East Coast, USC&GS Guide departed New London, Connecticut, bound for her new duty station, San Diego, California. On her voyage to the west coast, the ship made history by using—for the first time by a vessel of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey—a sonic depth finder to measure and record the depth of the sea at points along her course. Before she reached San Diego, California—the date of her arrival has not been found, but she transited the Panama Canal on 8 December— USC&GS Guide had accumulated much data beneficial to the study of the movement of sound waves through water and measuring their velocity under varying conditions of salinity, density, and temperature.
Based at San Diego, California, and surveying off the west coast of the United States, USC&GS Guide performed her important duties for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for nearly two decades. Meanwhile, as war clouds gathered and tension mounted in Europe and the Far East in the late 1930s, the United States Navy expanded to meet the emergency—especially after the outbreak of hostilities following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.
On 27 June 1941, USC&GS Guide was transferred back from the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to the U.S. Navy.
Read more about this topic: USS Viking (ARS-1)