Service
On February 8, 1931, LV-117 took aboard the eight-man crew of the fishing schooner Aloma, which sank 5 mi (8.0 km) from the lightship. The men were taken ashore by the Coast Guard on February 9.
During a storm on June 27, 1933, the lightship broke her mooring chain and drifted away from her position. She was unable to regain it for several days. Not until the gales subsided on June 30, was her crew able to return LV-117 to her station.
On January 6, 1934, four months before LV-117 was sunk by the Olympic, the lightship had a less serious glancing collision by another liner, SS Washington, at the time the largest ocean liner yet built in the United States. The radio antenna yards were carried away and minor damage occurred to some hull plates. The near-sinking caused great concern to the lightship's crew; in April 1934, radio operator John Parry told friends, "Some day we are just going to get it head on, and that will be the finish. One of those big liners will just ride through us."
Read more about this topic: United States Lightship LV-117
Famous quotes containing the word service:
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?”
—Public Service Announcement.
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)