Paul Allen's last tweet tells of foul weather causing them to bring the ROV back in, and the ship had to head to Reykjavik for safety.  It's about 360+ miles from Iceland to the site where Hood rests between Greenland and Iceland.  It takes about 18 hours (perhaps the Octopus travels a bit faster?) to make it back to port.  Taking into consideration that they have to wait out the weather, it will take them the better part of a day to make it back to the site.  It will be some time before they will put the ROV back in the water, so if you are monitoring the live stream, it's gonna be down for a bit.  Such is the stuff that happens on an expedition.  I only hope to be able to experience this some day, the good and the bad, in locating Strong. 

Bob Ballard found the wreck of Bismarck in 1989, and published a book The Discovery of the Bismarck.  I've recently been informed that Captain Wellings is mentioned repeatedly in the book, and have decided to pick up a copy I found on Ebay.  Just another great connection between Hood and Strong, and another great resource for my collection. 

Watch for the resumption of the live streaming.  I may get in trouble at work on Monday, but I have to have it up on my screen!  I think my boss may let it slide. 

Tammi

I had no idea there would be live feed, but am so psyched!  If you want to see what's going on then go here: http://www.livestream.com/apaulgallenproject

The feed does have some interruptions, so it's not a direct 24/7 stream.  I've asked David if there will be video clips for when the bell is finally retrieved, as it could come in the wee hours while we're sleeping.  I hope to be able to supply links to these clips when they have them.   Still photos are available on Mr. Allen's Twitter feed, and I'm saving some of the photos hoping to get permission to post them here. 

Enjoy watching!

Tammi

David and Mr. Allen are on board Octopus, and the expedition is underway.  A couple of Mr. Allen's tweets so far:

Paul Allen ‏@PaulGAllen
On Octopus leaving Reykjavik to site where HMS Hood sunk in 1941. We’ll use our ROV to help Royal Navy recover ship’s bell.

Octopus crew working w/ wreck finder David Mearns, Royal Navy & HMS Hood Assn reps. Bell will go to Navy’s National Museum in Portsmouth.

I'll keep you all posted!

Tammi

  Tomorrow August 22nd begins a 10 day expedition to recover the ship's bell of the HMS Hood. We want to wish David Mearns and Paul Allen much luck and safe passage on their journey!  Over the next couple of weeks, I'll post any updates I get on the expedition, along with some of Joseph Wellings insights on his time on Hood. The book “On His Majesty's Service” where these bits will come from can be found here in PDF: http://www.ibiblio.org/anrs/docs/1002wellings_onhismajestysservice.pdf
His personal observations in his diary, letters home and ship's documents are a real glance into the past. Wellings joined the crew of Hood on December 12th, 1940. His first day on board, he makes these comments, from page 78:

“12 December – At anchor – First Lieut. (Lt. Cmdr. J.L. Machin) assigned as my liaison officer. He took me on a tour of the ship – It certainly is a large ship – 42,000 tons or more. The largest man of war in the world. Called on Vice Admiral W.J. Whitworth before dinner. Seemed very friendly type of man. Now all settled in room. Service is excellent – Food much better than on destroyer. Mess well regulated. Breakfast 0730-0900, lunch 1200-1300, dinner 2000. Drinks before lunch and dinner. No special seats at table – except for Mess President and vice president – Different officers preside for a week at a time. Quite a good idea. At dinner tonight Exec. Off. took the chair – He toasted the President of the U.S. - I answered with a toast to King George the Sixth.”

A true diplomat and a gentleman! The following pages go on to describe the types of foods available on ship, and I have to admit to some envy. Those guys ate well and someone else cooked and cleaned up. Maybe there are some perks to life as an officer on board a ship. :o)
I won't be bugging you with an email for every update, unless there's something extraordinary. So you can check on your own if you're interested in the progress. I'm sure there will be a final article from BBC news once all is done, and I will certainly post a link to that. If any of you have any questions or comments along the way, I would be happy to try and get them answered, or pass along the comments.

Happy to have you all along for the ride!

Tammi

      Around August 22nd, David Mearns and Blue Water Recoveries, LTD will begin the work of retrieving the bell of the HMS Hood aboard the Octopus, owned by Paul Allen of Microsoft. Another part of the mission is to film the wreck with equipment that was not available previously in 2001. Once the bell is saved, it will be house at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, and it will be viewable by the public in 2014. The full article and more information about the HMS Hood can be found here: http://www.hmshood.com/
     It's important to follow the progress of this expedition because Wellings has direct ties to the Hood, and retrieving this bell is part of his history as well. For 10 months during 1940-1941 he worked with the British Royal Navy, and spent 5 weeks on Hood. He later was on the HMS Rodney when Bismarck was sent to the bottom. In 1983 then Rear Admiral Wellings published a book based on his time with the Royal Navy, “On His Majesty's Service”. The book contains his personal historical accounts of his time including diary entries, letters home and transcripts of dialogue between ships the night they encountered and engaged Bismarck for her final battle. If you would like a copy of the book you can get a hard copy through the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I also have the entire book in a PDF file that I can attach in an email and forward to you if you would like to read this. Wellings was a wonderful and keen observer of the people and events around him. The fact that he allowed his personal thoughts and observations to be printed is extraordinary and goes a long way to let us into his head, his life and his emotions during the time he served in Great Britain. There are personal accountings as well as information about military movements and actions.
     If you need contact information for a hard copy, email me individually and I will forward you to the person who can send you a copy. Or, I can attach the PDF in an email.
     David tells me that we may be able to follow the progress of this 10 day expedition by checking into the HMS Hood web site. Paul Allen will also be tweeting, so if you have a Twitter account you can follow his musings. I am a bit challenged technologically, I have a very basic phone. But since this is important to me, I set up a Twitter account on line and now can view Mr. Allen's progress. This is easy to do by going to www.Twitter.com, and it's free. If you do sign up or currently have a Twitter account, let me know. We can “follow” each other, and make comments back to Mr. Allen or David this way.
     The man who helped train the sailors of Hood later became the captain of the USS Strong DD 467. Let's show our support of David, Mr. Allen and them men who served and died on Hood.   I will be posting information here in the blog on the progress as well.

Tammi

Hi all,

I’ve  been trying for months to locate the only child of Captain Joseph H. Wellings, his daughter Anne Wellings Heffelfinger.  I found out she lived in the Dominican Republic, but had no luck on Google or Yahoo People Search.  This exhausted, I have a couple of friends in the amber business (kind of another sideline hobby of mine) who travel to the DR on buying expeditions frequently and decided to enlist one of them.  On his last trip down, my friend Yale Goldman found that she did live in La Romana but didn’t have any luck locating anyone who knew her.  When he told me he was going again, I almost begged him to become a Sherlock and track her down.  He took that to heart and came home victorious!  His email to me was quite humorous and indicated that it would be prudent to “bow down before me from afar”, from which I got a few chuckles and then did a happy dance.  He not only had her phone number and email, but talked with Anne on the phone himself.   I pressed him for more details and below is his story:

“As I may have written that I actually met Anne´s husband a number of years ago when I was visiting a friend here in the DR. Over the course of time, I found others who also knew him. My friend Jorge C. a businessman, jewelry maker, and owner of the Amber World Museum in Santo Domingo was also his friend.
 
When you asked me if I could help in your search, I knew Jorge was the person to ask about Anne. I arrived here July 27 and the following day I stopped at Jorge's store only to find that he and his wife and a relative of his wife were in Miami. It wasn't until the following Thursday (a week) that I was able to see Jorge.
 
Anyway, this past Sunday Jorge's middle daughter was going for a two week art course at an art school located in La Romana (sound familiar). On the way, Jorge called a woman named Bibi L. who lived in La Romana if she had any info on Anne. I spoke to Bibi while driving in the car. She was going to give me some info at that time but holding the phone, driving, and trying to write was proving to be difficult. So I told Bibi we would call back once we had arrived. 

The school is located in a small plaza area where there are several restaurants and shops. One of the shops is owned by Jorge. When we arrived, Jorge again called Bibi for information on Anne. We dropped off Jorge´s daughter at the school and then drove over to the area where Jorge's shop was located. As we weaved through the walk towards Jorge's shop, Jorge met another jeweler and shop owner who is a former Peace Corps volunteer. I was introduced to Bill (got all the name's straight) and told him of your story and search for Anne Wellings Heffelfinger. His reply to me, 'I just had dinner with her last night. Would you like her phone number?'  I said sure.
 
We had to go back to his shop for his phone which had her number. He asked if I would like to speak to her. Having never met Anne, I wasn't sure how she would greet a strange man (those who know can agree or disagree to my degree of strangeness).  
 
I told Anne about you Tammi and she was very happy to find out about the project. She would have been more than happy to meet me at that moment but I said that wouldn't be possible. She invited me to contact her my next trip down so I could arrange a visit.
 
This is the story in a very large coconut shell.”

Anne is now on board and has more to share with me regarding her father and some artifacts she retained from his days in the Navy.  She plans to share some of this with me, and with her permission I’ll post up a few things on the web site to share with you all.  Finding Anne has been pivotal in my research.  She is the direct connection to a wonderful man who ran an amazing, tight, efficient ship on which his men were proud to serve.  Welcome Anne, so glad to have you with us!

Tammi

P.S. To give a friend a plug, Yale’s web site is: http://snakefly.tripod.com/

I speak about David Mearns and Blue Water Recoveries, LTD on the home page, because David is working with me to make an expedition to find and document the wreck of Strong a reality.  David located the HMS Hood in 2000, wrote the book and filmed the documentary.  Captain Joseph Wellings, prior to his tenure on the Strong, worked with the British Royal Navy for 10 months between 1940-1941 as an attache of the American government.  During that time, he spent 5 weeks on Hood, training sailors for war time.  After Hood was sunk by the German ship Bismarck, he was on the HMS Rodney, one of the ships in pursuit and ultimately responsible for bringing down Bismarck.  David will be returning to the Hood site to retrieve the bell for the Royal Navy.  The following link explains all.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/29/hms-hood-bell-sea-paul-allen-bismarck-nazi-_n_1715950.html

Just briefly, the man in the article above is Paul Allen, co-founder of MICROSOFT!  So, if any of you have friends at Microsoft and you feel like mentioning to Mr. Allen, "Hey Paul, let me tell you about another historical connection to the Hood.  Ever heard of the USS Strong DD 467?", let's just say it wouldn't bother me one bit.  :o)

Enjoy reading the article and learning about the history of Hood.  This was just one more connection to Wellings, and to the history of the future captain of Strong.   I have David's book on Hood and Bismarck listed on the Navy Links & Research page.

Tammi

  Just to let you know, another STRONG family member has contacted me!

I mentioned this in an email previously, but a few weeks ago I had an a phone conversation with a man by the name of Francis Rieber, who served on board the USS CHEVALIER, also a member of DESRON 21 with STRONG. Mr. Rieber was on CHEVALIER during the engagement with STRONG, and survived when CHEVALIER was sunk in October of 1943. After some time home, he was assigned to the USS STEPHEN POTTER DD-538, and it seems many of the survivors of STRONG were assigned to POTTER! He became friends with Rocky Britton and Carl Ochs who were on STRONG. While we were talking, he gave me the name of a person in the POTTER Association to contact, as I was interested in finding out how many of the POTTER sailors were former STRONG men. I was also hoping to find more family members this way as well. This gentleman put an ad in the POTTER newsletter and through that, I was contacted by Chip Cline, the son of George Clifton Cline, Sr., F1c, of STRONG and POTTER. Chip was excited to tell his family about this effort and about the web site, and I'm excited to hear more about his father who passed in 2000.

So many people to thank along the way for dropping crumbs along the path to follow. It's such a pleasure to have more new people to add to the contact list, and who support what we're trying to accomplish!

If you have a photograph of your STRONG sailor in uniform, or from the time period that they served that you would care to share, I'd love to post it on the web site. Email it to me and I'll be happy to post it up.

Tammi

I'm in the process of transcribing the letters written by Captain Wellings, the letters he wrote home to his wife Dolly (Dorothea) that I copied when I visited the Naval War College.  I took photos, JPEG's of over 200 pages, so it may take a bit.   When I come to Gatlinburg in September, I plan to have them bound in a 3-ring binder so anyone wanting to read them can see them easily.  So you ask, if I have photos, then why not just print out those images?  I thought about it, but there are some problems.  First, the captain has a slanted and very flat style of writing that makes some words difficult to read.  On the Memories of STRONG page, there is a letter that he wrote to my Aunt Lillian, and you can see what I mean.  So a lot of the transcribing is spent in looking closely at the context of the sentence to determine what a particular word might be.  I've worked for doctors in the past, and if I could read their writing, I should be able to read his!  Also, some of the photos are not great.  I did the best I could at the time, but some are just slightly fuzzy or opaque.  I can read them on the computer, but to have that transfer to a printed page might be difficult.   I like things in binders, it's a quirk of mine that I like to organize things and have them at hand.  If people want to read his thoughts and learn about his time on the ship, this is the best way.

Also, I'm thrilled to be "meeting" on line some of Captain Welling's family.  So far I've added a two nephews, a neice and a great-nephew!  They are offering me personal anecdotes and family information, and coming on board to meet the rest of the STRONG family.  I'm very encouraged to have Tim, Cindy, Bob and Ben on board.  It's also exciting to see the hits on the web site increasing every day!  Do keep visiting, I'll try to post something new each week.  And again, if you want to post something here please let me know.  I'm happy to just copy and past anything you'd like to contribute to the blog.

-Tammi