Transferred To The United States Coast Guard
While Willoughby was at Mare Island Navy Yard at Vallejo, California, between December 1945 and June 1946, the United States Coast Guard inspected her for possible Coast Guard service. Barnegat-class ships were very reliable and seaworthy and had good habitability, and the Coast Guard viewed them as ideal for ocean station duty, in which they would perform weather reporting and search and rescue tasks, once they were modified by having a balloon shelter added aft and having oceanographic equipment, an oceanographic winch, and a hydrographic winch installed.
Willoughby was transferred to the Coast Guard at Government Island, Oakland, California, simultaneously with her Navy decommissioning on 26 June 1946. After undergoing conversion for use as a weather-reporting ship, she was commissioned into Coast Guard service as USCGC Gresham (WAVP-387) on 1 December 1947.
During her Coast Guard career, Gresham's primary duty was to serve on weather stations in the Pacific Ocean to gather meteorological data. While on duty in one of these stations, she was required to patrol a 210-square-mile (544-square-kilometer) area for three weeks at a time, leaving the area only when physically relieved by another Coast Guard cutter or in the case of a dire emergency. While on station, she acted as an aircraft check point at the point of no return, a relay point for messages from ships and aircraft, as a source of the latest weather information for passing aircraft, as a floating oceanographic laboratory, and as a search-and-rescue ship for downed aircraft and vessels in distress, and engaged in law enforcement operations. She also served on the Bering Sea Patrol, took part in United States Coast Guard Reserve training cruises, and participated in the U.S. Navy's underway refresher training program to ensure her readiness to support military operations.
Read more about this topic: USCGC Gresham (WAVP-387)
Famous quotes containing the words transferred, united, states, coast and/or guard:
“Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“God knows that any man who would seek the presidency of the United States is a fool for his pains. The burden is all but intolerable, and the things that I have to do are just as much as the human spirit can carry.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“What do we want with this vast and worthless area, of this region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds, of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs; to what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of 3,000 miles, rockbound, cheerless, uninviting and not a harbor in it?”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)