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Total Run This Leg:
2,602
Nautical Miles
Total Average Speed: 5.17 Knots
Hours / Days This Leg: 503.5 Hours, 20.98 Days
Distance To Go This Leg: 346.1 Nautical Miles
Estimated Time Of Arrival: 9:00 a.m., Friday, October 15, at the Balboa
Anchorage, the holding location for the Panama Canal's northbound transiting vessels.
This earlier estimated time of arrival results from this evening's increase in
speed.
Present Course: 117 Degrees Southeasterly
Winds: Southwest at 20 Knots
Seas: 3 Feet
Swells: 8 Feet from the Southwest
Barometric Pressure: 1012 Millibars
Air Temperature: 75 Degrees
Sea Temperature: 79 Degrees
Visibility: 1 Mile
Skies: Heavy Rainshowers
Sea Floor: Ocean depths beneath the USS New Jersey at this point are
1,240 Fathoms or 7,440 Feet Position:
USS New Jersey picked up a little speed this evening as she continued her
Southeasterly course along the coast of Costa Rica. She is now 31 Miles Southwest of
Cabo Matapalo ("dead trees"), the guardian to the entrance of Golfo Dulce.
The Gulf has a commercial port and the rest of the region
is sparsely populated. Puerto Golfito, a banana exporting port, lies in a small
land-locked bay on the east side of the gulf, 15 miles inside the entrance.
Five Transits Southbound, Five Northbound
With USS New Jersey's upcoming transit through the Panama
Canal on her way home, she will have passed through the Canal ten times during her
Pacific, Atlantic and Mediterranean wartime career.
Five times she passed from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
Southbound, and with next week's transit, she will have gone through the Canal Northbound,
from the Pacific to the Atlantic, five times as well.
Her Southbound passages were on the way in 1944 from her
Philadelphia commissioning to the Pacific theater of World War II; an April, 1951 transit
from Norfolk, Virginia to Korean War duty; again to Korea in 1953 for a second tour of
duty there; in 1968 from a recommissioning in Philadelphia to the war in Vietnam; and
lastly, in April, 1984 when she was reassigned from the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean
to her new Long Beach Homeport.
New Jersey's Northbound transits occurred after World War
II when in 1947, having delivered a thousand troops to their homeland, undergone an
overhaul at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and on her way home for a fourth birthday
celebration, she passed through the Canal to the Atlantic toward Bayonne; in December,
1951, she went through northbound again after her first Korean War duty; in November,
1953, after her second Korean tour of duty, she was Atlantic-bound again; and in
September, 1983, she was summoned through once more on an emergency basis to speed to the
Mediterranean for action in Lebanon.
Next week, she will transit the familiar Canal for the
final time, on her way home, finally.
Submitted by Bob Wernet onboard the Sea Victory.
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