DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM Above, the USS Salvor backed away yesterday from the pier at Pearl Harbor.

Pearl ship heading
to Indonesia

The USS Salvor will take part
in training exercises there

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By Gregg K. Kakesako
gkakesako@starbulletin.com

Twenty-one-year-old seaman Kelvin Walker has never been to sea.

"It'll be a new experience," Walker, one of the junior members of the Pearl Harbor-based rescue-salvage ship USS Salvor, said before the vessel left yesterday for duty off Indonesia to support a Southeast Asia training exercise.

Word of the mission came only two weeks ago when the USS Safeguard, normally based in Sasebo, Japan, was called to another mission, said Lt. Cmdr. John Carter, Salvor's commanding officer.

"We were called in to back-fill," said Carter, "and it will be our first WESTPAC (Western Pacific) deployment in four years."

DEAN SENSUI / DSENSUI@STARBULLETIN.COM Will Wittman cast off one of the last lines to the departing vessel. Wittman had his last day aboard the ship after serving three years as a diver.

The 225-foot vessel, which specializes in firefighting, salvage, diving and rescue towing, will spend the next four months participating in a series of naval exercises the Navy calls Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training, which will begin in Indonesia and wrap up in Brunei three months later. Also participating in the exercise will be the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia.

"We have the foremost divers in the world," Carter said, "and we will be doing diving exercises with these countries."

Salvor and its crew of 100 officers and sailors played a crucial role last year in the deep-sea search and recovery of the Japanese training vessel Ehime Maru, which sank Feb. 9, 2001, nine miles south of Diamond Head after being struck by the nuclear attack submarine USS Greeneville. Divers were able to recover eight of the nine missing victims' bodies.

Yesterday, Mia Boyd, a storekeeper third class who has been in the Navy for three years, said she does not mind leaving.

"I look forward to it," said Boyd, one of the Salvor's 15 female sailors, "since I am single. It would be harder if I was married."

Walker, who has been in the Navy less than a year, said he knows the deployment "will mean working with different navies and helping maintaining our friendship with them."

Although his first deployment is something Walker is looking forward to, he acknowledged that it will be rough being away from his girlfriend, Bernadette Penn, a Schofield Barracks soldier.