![]() ![]() ![]() You can’t blame them for being interested. For a few years she lived on Fishers Island, where she once served as an ambulance for a pregnant woman trying to get to New London to deliver her child. When that child grew up, she came to see the boat. We also had a visit from a guy in his eighties who had been an engineer and maintained Aphrodite during World War II, when she had big aircraft engines installed. We get a lot of unannounced guests who want to hear her story. Is it true there’s a photo of Shirley Temple hanging in the cabin? She looks to be about 9 in that picture, and she’s with a group of her friends. The New York skyline is in the background. I’m told she had a birthday party on board. ![]() Jock Whitney owned the boat at the time and invited her aboard. Is that your favorite piece of memorabilia? I also like the picture of Aprhodite in the war years. This is after Pearl Harbor, when Whitney offered the boat to the government for service. She’s painted gray with big Coast Guard numbers on the bow and a. 50-caliber machine gun on top of the cabin. There’s another good photo of the boat that I’ve seen which we don’t have on board. Roosevelt fishing from the cockpit on the Hudson River. I’m not sure what he was catching, but I can tell you this is not an easy boat to fish from. What type of cruising does the boat do today? It’s used mostly by the family of the owner, Chuck Royce. We do a lot of sunset cocktail cruises, lunches aboard and Stonington for dinner. The Royces also donate her for charity cruises. So that means we can get a ride too? That’s definitely possible, if you donate enough. What type of condition was it in then? Horrible. She had been in Florida for 10 years, where the sun and heat caused a lot of damage. He captured a few of these CGR schooners at work.Worms had eaten the bottom and termites had chewed up the wood above the waterline. Hunter Wood, a skilled maritime artist in the New York City area, joined the Coast Guard in WWII and served as a combat artist. Welch, our trusty lookout in the first image. The nicknames of the force were fitting, as the volunteers, at least in the early days of the patrol, ran the gamut from semi-reformed smugglers and rumrunners to boy scout troops and yachtsmen such as the good Mr. When he was rejected because of his age (74), Bogie volunteered for the Coast Guard Temporary Reserve and patrolled the California coast with his 55-foot staysail schooner, Santana, as part of the Hooligan Navy assigned to the 12th Naval District.Īlthough actual combat with U-boats was slim for the group, they did provide lots of help in so far as OPSEC was concerned as they often shielded coastwise convoys from random small boat traffic and would board vessels to seal their radios in such instances so that random commo traffic wouldn’t accidentally give away positions to those who were listening for that type of thing. ![]() Navy during the Great War as a helmsman of the captured German liner SS Vaterland/USS Leviathan, tried to re-enlist during WWII. The program peaked November 1942 with 1,873 boats in commission with the Coast Guard Reserve, a figure that slowly declined from there, dropping below 1,000 in November 1943, under 500 in April 1944, and under 100 in June 1945, with the last craft disposed of at the end of that year. In all, a remarkable 2,067 converted private motor and sail craft, numbered CGR1 to CGR9040 served with the patrol, with missing numbers in that range for boats that were surveyed but not taken into service. Equipped and outfitted with whatever arms and uniforms the service could spare, these vessels were assigned 15-mile patrol squares extending from the beach to the 50-fathom curve. Made up primarily of private yachts– the plan was advocated King by the Cruising Club of America– and fishing boats, crewed by their owners, and converted for ASW use, the small craft of all sizes made regular sorties along the American coast into October 1943. King to organize into an anti-submarine patrol force officially termed the Coastal Picket Patrol. Welch and his flotilla were part of the so-called Hooligan Navy or Corsair Fleet, members of the volunteer Coast Guard Auxillary ordered on by Chief of Naval Operations, ADM Ernest J. Photo by Alfred T.Palmer, via Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) LC-USE6-D-010130 ![]()
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