In the summer of 1992, I was stationed on the frigate USS Rentz FFG-46. The Rentz is a guided missile frigate 453’ in length with a complement of 319 personnel. The powers that be in our destroyer squadron decided to send us to the Eastern Pacific to patrol waters between Panama and Ecuador searching ships possibly trafficking cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. Our home base for 3 months would be the US Naval Base in Rodman, (Panama City), Panama. The USS Rentz eventually accumulated a reputation for busting ships for a total of more than 200 million dollars of illegal drugs most of which was cocaine from Colombia.
Upon arriving in Rodman, I left the ship to explore the city. Before I finished walking the length of the pier, I found myself soaking wet because of the 100 degree temperature and 100 percent humidity. I knew then it was not a place that I would care to live or spend a holiday during the summer months. I had lived in Spain for a year and had a BA degree in Spanish so I had no trouble communicating with Panamanians. It is a beautiful and modern city due mainly to multimillion dollar investments by Americans.
The temperature and humidity changes with elevation. The mountains outside of the city offer a much more hospitable living environment. There are many developments in the mountains where American expatriates have purchased homes. In many cases the Pacific and Caribbean coasts are less than a 30 minute drive from these developments. There are also many beautiful developments on the Caribbean side if you don’t mind the heat. The cost of living is much lower than the US and retired Americans can save a lot of money by retiring there.
After two or three weeks at sea stopping and searching vessels, we would return to Rodman to refuel the ship. One of my duties as the Engineering Division Work Center Supervisor was to go ashore and take fuel samples before we refueled. We wanted to make sure the fuel was uncontaminated before filling our fuel tanks. I didn’t look forward to it because I had to leave the air conditioned ship and go out for a soaking walk in the 100/100 environment.
On one of our trips out to search for drugs we made a port visit for three days in Guayaquil, Ecuador. It’s a beautiful port city famous for the sale of straw hats among other things. These straw hats are known as Panama hats although most people do not know that they are not made in Panama. On our way back to Panama one of our lookouts spotted a group of large plastic floats connected to lengths of polyurethane line that was in our path and it was necessary to change course to avoid entanglement in our propellers. These are the type of floats that fishing boats use on their nets. The closer we approached the floats, the more obvious it became that there was a whale tangled in the lines attached to the floats. This was keeping the poor whale from diving to feed and would have been fatal if we had not removed all the lines and floats connected to them.
We had personnel on board with video equipment and they filmed the release of the whale. We launched a small rubber raft with personnel that cut away the line and recovered it and all the floats so it wouldn’t happen again to any more whales. We had no idea how many days that poor critter had been without food, but it was one very lucky whale.
The executive officer on the ship gave the tape to the DESRON 1 commander when we returned to NAVSTA San Diego and they gave it to one of the TV stations where it was shown on the nightly news. Our ship and the Navy got a lot of good publicity from that video.
Hope you enjoyed my little story, more to come.
