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Icy Swim Incident, Long Ago

    Through the Pane   by Weldon (Vern) Payne

    Illustration by Hal Boyer

A true story of an incident which occurred in the winter of 1953

Introduction 

In his weekly newspaper column “Through the Pane”, Weldon Payne recently recalled the day in 1953 when two Daly bos’uns took a unplanned “swim” in the cold waters of Narragansett Bay of Newport, Rhode Island.

He had just heard from W.B. Bledsoe, one of the survivors of their tangle with an ice-covered buoy, which inspired this recollection of the tale. 

Payne, known as “Vern” during his time on board the Daly, edited “the Daly News” during most of the ship’s world cruise in 1953. After his discharge from the US Navy he graduated in journalism from the University of Alabama and worked for several newspapers in the south. He presently lives in Manchester, Tennessee and writes his column for various small newspapers in the state.

I remember the day that two bo’sun mates took an unplanned swim in the Cold Atlantic of Narragansett Bay, in Newport, Rhode Island, but I never knew until the other day just how it happened.

I knew that Bledsoe, a strapping third- class bo’sun mate from Virginia was one of the sailors who wound up being fished out of the choppy waves, shoved into a hot shower, and given a shot of whiskey by the ship’s doctor. Though I had forgotten the other man, now I know who he was and that he was from California.

 I also know it was January 22, 1953 and that the air temperature was 22 degrees. At least that’s what Bledsoe tells me in our first contact since I left the USS Daly in a bo’sun chair ferried across blustery waves to a sister ship in the fall after the Korean conflict ended that year. (For all I know Bledsoe may have been handling the lines for my transfer at sea. Some of the line handlers threatened to give me a salt-water bath, but all I got was a little salt spray.)

 I stumbled upon Bledsoe’s address and recently wrote him in Weber City, VA – almost a mile from where he grew up.

I remembered sitting on the deck late one night talking with him while lights from Sasebo, Japan winked across the dark waters. I remember his hickory strong voice quietly saying, “I haven’t found what I’m looking for over there (on the beach).” I always thought of him as polite and thoughtful young man. Now I know that after four years on the Daly, he went to East Tennessee State and graduated with a major in Industrial Arts and a minor in History and worked for many years with a Chemical company in Kingsport before going back home.

Anyway here’s what he had to say about that fateful day: “We were mooring to a buoy, and I had already hooked a line to it and got back in the boat while the ship was being hauled up to it by windlass. The chain was meanwhile run through the bull-nose and I was to mount the buoy again to shackle the chain to it. There was a strong wind and with the force of the ship pulling against it, the buoy was now standing on its side."

"It was also covered with a sheet of solid ice.  A fellow seaman, Ward T. Montgomery was with me. The buoy was spinning and threw us both…as we tried to mount it.”

 The old waves still roll back in now and then and occasionally the years get caught in the undertow so that it doesn’t seem that long ago that those two boys were wrestling with a spinning “top” trying to get a foothold on the ice. Arthur F. Johnson was our Captain that day, and Bledsoe remembers “there was a man for you!” and can’t “imagine a finer seaman or Commanding Officer”. He wondered if the Skipper might still be with the living; I’ll have to tell him the “old Man” – whose career included action at Pearl harbor, Guadalcanal, The Marianas, raids on Okinawa & Formosa, the Borneo Campaign and the reoccupation of  the Philippines, to name a few of his exploits in WWII – sailed beyond his last horizon. He would be pleased to know that the strong silent kid from the Appalachians who took an unplanned icy swim one day is still proud to say: “My respect and admiration for Captain Johnson has no reservations.” I suspect the Captain would say the same about W.B. Bledsoe.