Situated a little further out from the ship are two or three islands with houses on them. I am curious to know who lives them. Speaking about bus service they do have regular routes here and what I have seen of the islands to date gives the impression that the United States have made them what they are. That is, as for some of the "extra things in life" that many foreigners do not realize exist. You must realize if I have not said this before, that there is a great amount of poverty, filth and not to mention much begging and illicit romance on most of these islands. Many and most of the native born people are very primitive in their own sort of way.

If you have ever looked through Life magazine or National Geographic or similar magazines and seen pictures of beggars as we would probably refer to as hobos, crouching in the gutters and corners of buildings, this is exactly the picture you would see here.

The temperature is about 90 degrees but since there seems to be a breeze, we don't mind it too much. However, we are told that this is the rainy season for Trinidad, although we haven't had rain since our first night out from the Panama Canal Zone. I hope it doesn't rain, it would be nice sleeping weather out on the deck. It doesn't matter how hot it is as long as there is a breeze to relieve you.

Our purpose on all of these stops is to tend the seaplanes naturally. At each stop we have had a dozen planes at each place. During the day the planes go out on practices and return each evening for repairs and refueling and berthing and food for the crews. Seaplanes these days are "submarine searchers" and they do patrol work when not actually engaged in target practice.

The ship is in quite good condition as far as painting and repairs have been going. They have had sufficient time to get it into such a condition traveling from one place to another, so that when we do get in these places liberty is quite plentiful since spending American dollars is very much a part of good American relations. But I only need a couple of liberties to see and get what I want. As you can expect (seeing this is the Navy) many guys go every night looking for drink and dames. They feel they must live up to the sometimes bad reputation that the Navy seems to possess.

Today has been just like a Sunday at home. I was up at 0530 this morning, had a nice breakfast of pancakes and bacon and relaxed in the nice fresh air until time for church. Since then I have laid around in the sun, until mail call. Yes, we have mail call on Sundays.

We got the latest dope on arrival from Norfolk yesterday. We are arming late Monday afternoon and are going to Craney Island, which is where we will unload about 50,000 gals. of aviation fuel. Then we arc going back to the south side of Pier 5 in Norfolk. Think about that, we arc going to get pier space for a change. Since getting pier space, we will be able to close down everything in communications, except for a possible landline teletype to base communications. If they keep this open we will have to work out a watch list for the telemen.

This has been some weekend and it isn't over yet. I have been standing watch on and watch off, which interferes greatly with sleep. Besides that when we could sleep, we have been off-loading ammunition, then had Captain's inspection on Saturday morning followed by Admiral's inspection Monday morning. I have been making corrections to publications all weekend while I have been on watch. Secret stuff so I have to take it quite seriously. Not much communications business.

We are suppose to leave August 10 for the Scandinavian Peninsula (Norway, Sweden and Denmark) for four months. There are big maneuvers gong to take place there starting in September. In fact, there was a short article in the Norfolk paper saying that air-ground-sea maneuvers were scheduled.

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Continued The next entries cover 1953.

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