CDR Salamander - The Wonderfully Enigmatic MV Kellie Chouest

It’s funny how some things stick in your head.

Remember what was at the top of the list yesterday for the:

“1 x special mission ship of unknown capability“

…

UPDATE: the special mission ship is probably a replacement for this.

It keeps popping into my head. In case you were too busy to follow the link, here she is.

A leased civilian ship advertised as:

…Kellie Chouest is deployed to the U.S. 4th Fleet area of operations to support Joint Interagency Task Force South’s mission, which includes counter-illicit drug trafficking missions in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

OK, it has a helo pad, 4th Fleet is the maker of smuggler’s blues: sure, fine.

I’d move on to other things, and then it just came back again and again to mind, “Really? That big crane. That funky stern. Huh.”

So I started digging around and saw this.

The SCORPIO sits on the MV Kellie Chouest after retrieving the flight data recorder from the downed Alaska Airlines Flight 261.

The remotely piloted vehicle SCORPIO sits on the deck of the MV Kellie Chouest after retrieving the flight data recorder from the downed Alaska Airlines Flight 261 off the coast of Ventura County, Calif., on Feb. 3, 2000.

….which, being an early-cohort GenX, immediately made me think of this.

Glomar Explorer II: Electric Boogaloo? I have no idea, but this isn’t just for chasing drug runners.

I mean, sure, she does standard issue 4th Fleet stuff, sticking out like a cygnet being raised in a clutch of ducklings, she shows up now and then in DVIDS doing a wide variety of things, and maybe that is what she is. Perhaps she fits that “multi-tool” niche that is always Salamander-approved.

Perhaps.

Well, that is enough speculation. I’m just glad that we’re going to get some honest shipyard work for a ship that we will now own—and not lea—for whatever mission it does, and in a new design that will hopefully better fill that niche.

Hopefully they leave “white space” for the future to do that do that she does so well, and may she and her future replacement do it well for decades to come.

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