A lovely warm and bright day today. Enjoying such a day I thought of my one grandson who is toughing it out off the coast of Florida with the Canadian Navy. That led me to thinking of an incident which occurred when I was sailing off the coast of Florida with the Canadian Navy back in 1962 or 63. The day back then was a warm and bright day. . . .

. . . . Our squadron along with some of our Cadillacs had been on maneuvers with the Americans along the eastern seaboard. It was now Sunday, we were off the Florida coast and a 'make-and-mend' (afternoon off) had been called throughout the flotilla. We were steaming at about 10 knots, the sun was bright, the breeze was warm and it seemed most of the ship's company (those not on watch) were basking all over the upper deck.
A shadow fell over me and I squinted up. Petty Officer Huffman was standing over me. It was after tot time and one never knew what Huff would get up to. "Stainless," he said. (by then that was the nick-name which had stuck to me. Seemed everyone had a standard nick-name -- 'Dusty' Rhodes, 'Shady' Lane, 'Killer' Kane, 'Nobby' Clark (that one I could never figure out) and of course, me, 'Stainless' Steel.) "Wanta' do some fishing?" "Sure, P.O.," I replied. "Is the old man gonna stop the boat for a while?" "No, we are going to troll," said he.
We rousted up a couple of more mortar men and went down to the galley. Huff talked it over with the duty cook who was pretty drunk by then and he handed us some raw steaks. Huff then rummaged around in the ordnance work shop and reappeared with quite a large treble hook which on some previous occasion he had made up. We then headed up top and back to the quarter deck.
( When we were on anti-sub exercises the Weapons Underwater gang had to string over the stern a device called the CAT. I believee this stood for Canadian Anti-acoustic Torpedo gear. It looked like a model airplane with a double bar running over the body forming what looked like wings (probably three or four feet in length). A steel tongue went between the bars to stop any vibration. When the CAT was towed astern from a steel cable and we wanted to disengage the tongue and cause the bars to chatter, a tripping arrangement on the deck was activated. (The order was, "Trip CAT!) The noise given off by the activated CAT was about fifteen times louder than that of our screws, so, theoretically, any acoustic torpedo would home in on the CAT rather than us.)
We fed the CAT's cable through the stern fairlead, attached the treble hook on to the end of the cable, baited it with three lovely steaks and fed it out over the stern. When it was run out about 100 yards, we locked the cable drum and returned to our basking. I assume Huff went back down to his mess for another 'wet.'
About an hour later Huff was back. It was time to bring in the cable. A crowd gathered along the after guard rails. We manned the cranks on either side of the drum and began the tortuous job of winding in the hundred yards of cable. The Cap was still steaming merrily along so this was quite a chore.
Shortly a cheer exploded from the stern. "Shark, shark. Jesus Christ, you guys got a friggin_ shark!" We cranked it up level to the deck and the guys began clubbing and stabbing at it with their seamen's knives. Eventually the poor thing was subdued and rather dead. It was not big. Maybe five or six feet long. Nobody wanted to take the hook out of it's jaws. Nobody really wanted to get near the damn thing now that we had it. Eventually we convinced Huff to pull the pin from the shackle which held the hook and let the whole works fall back in to the sea.
As we cleaned up the deck and the mob dispersed I over heard Huff to say, "Hey, anybody wanna try to water ski?"

I can imagine our Canadian Navy is the same today as it was those many years ago and I imagine there is probably a P.O. Huffman on every ship.