Dependent Cruise

Memories by Lary Harris Cargo Officer: We spent the night anchored in Lahina harbor, with dependent's taking rooms ashore. Being an unaccompanied bachelor I was headed back to the ship around sunset (or a few minutes afterwards). I remember it was dark because the Kawishiwi was dark too, and very quiet. Someone dropped the load. The emergency diesel should have been putting out enough power to at least light up the anchor light and deck lights. In the dark I bumped into the duty electrician and found out the the batteries for the emergency diesel were dead, so when the snipes lost the load everything got real dark. We mustered up all the able bodied guys we could find and started robbing batteries from all the ship's boats, then carrying them clear forward to the diesel compartment and rounding up some cables to hook them all together. The batteries weren't real big and there weren't really enough but it was all that we had. The EM1 and I crossed our fingers and hit the "Start" button. This thing had a weird starter, anyway, sort of like an airplane starter, that would whine for about 5 seconds before it engaged. Well, this time it didn't really whine, it was more like a moan, but after about 10 seconds it did engage, in a feeble sort of way, and the mighty GM 8-148a diesel rumbled to life in a puff of smoke. We made it abundantly clear to the snipes that if they got too enthusiastic with turning a bunch of stuff on, and drug the diesel off the line we were toast, as there was no way the batteries were going to start this thing again. Well. . . the plant was restarted, the batteries were recharged and replaced and we all went to bed around 0200. Another long day on the Kawishiwi. The next day we took the dependents home and very few were any the wiser.