Keith Tillotson
Panama Canal (1945)
We went from the Philippines to the Panama Canal without stopping. Now we're really runnin' out of oil. You're burning up all the reserve oil, and it just gets lighter and lighter. We're almost bouncin' like a cork, by the time we hit the canal.
See, you had to shift the oil back and forth. You gotta stay off-keel. You can't keep it perfectly straight up and down. You gotta shift about one or two degrees one side or the other. Otherwise it'll roll like this, see. That's a thing I had to do – one of my jobs was to shift this oil. They'd tell me how many degrees it was off, and I'd shift the oil.
We took on some oil at Panama. It took about a month to get there. We went through there and we went to New Orleans.
Anyway, we got back to New Orleans and I got off the ship. The first engineer got off. In fact, several of us got off the ship – most all of us that I knew got off the ship there.
Another interesting thing happened on that ship. One of the crew had a boat – I don't know, he had this boat aboard. And he was fixing it up. He wanted to test it, so he put it overboard, and he got in it. He was a big guy – kind of fat guy. He didn't have the engine in it yet. But where the shaft goes out to the screw, he didn't plug that up. So he put it in the water and the thing sank. We had to rescue him – he started floatin' away. That boat was goin' down, you know, and we had to pick him up. He spent a lot of time on that boat.