Visiting ship’s latest work lower profile than past recoveries

Published 9:00 pm Friday, July 16, 2004

The MV Kellie Chouest, a civilian research-and-salvage ship visiting Naval Station Everett since mid-June, has had some pretty high-profile missions over the years.

Its missions have included finding the “black boxes” of downed planes and locating sunken gunboats. This time the mission is being kept quiet.

The Kellie Chouest is one of four submarine support vessels in the Military Sealift Command’s special mission ships program. While the vessel has been in Everett the past month on official business, it’s not something the ship’s crew can talk about.

“We are doing a project with the Navy. But it’s classified,” said Capt. William Jewell.

Still, the 310-foot-long vessel is hard not to notice at its temporary berth at Naval Station Everett. Its light yellow superstructure makes it look like a carnival cousin to its nearby neighbor on the pier, the USS Shoup, shrouded in the Navy’s traditional haze gray.

The Kellie Chouest isn’t a Navy ship, but often times, there are more than merchant mariners on board. The vessel has a civilian crew of 13, and another group of 40 or so military or mission-related personnel when it’s at sea.

The ship, based on North Island near San Diego, Calif., is expected to depart Everett soon. But the skipper said its next destination, too, is something he can’t elaborate on.

Some of the Kellie Chouest’s other activities have been much more public, however.

In early 2000, the ship helped in the recovery of downed Alaska Airlines Flight 261.

Using a remotely piloted vehicle called SCORPIO, the ship pulled the airliner’s “black box,” or flight data recorder, from the bottom of the ocean off the California coast.

And a few years before, in 1998, divers working from the ship explored the wreck of the USS Monitor, the famed Civil War gunboat that sank in a storm months after it battled the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia.

Jewell, who has been the captain of the Kellie Chouest for the past 18 months, missed out on those earlier missions.

But he was skipper during a recent recovery operation in the waters off San Diego. The ship was called out to help find an F-14D Tomcat from the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis that crashed in the ocean during a training flight.

“We found it, and we picked up some pieces,” Jewell recalled.

While the Kellie Chouest was able to retrieve some of the wreckage – one of the strike fighter’s engines, for example – the bulk of the fighter was too heavy for the ship to recover. A Navy crane had to be brought to the crash site for that, Jewell said.

Recovery missions such as the retrieval of the Tomcat in May is exactly why the military leases ships such as Jewell’s.

“We do research, recovery, basically whatever the military needs us to do,” he said.

Reporter Brian Kelly: 425-339-3422 or kelly@heraldnet.com.