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Grounded cruiser off Hawaii pulled free

The cruiser Port Royal was pulled early Monday off the rocky shoal where it had run hard aground after the ship was lightened by 600 tons and the high Pacific tide came in.

The cruiser was towed to a pier at Naval Station Pearl Harbor, where Navy engineers will assess damage the ship sustained after grinding onto the rock Thursday and then rolling with the waves over the weekend. The cruiser will go into a dry dock next week, said Capt. Scott Gureck, a spokesman for Pacific Fleet.

He said the Navy knows the ship’s rubber sonar dome was damaged in the grounding, but he didn’t know how badly, nor how many other problems the grounding may have caused. A lighter barge brought alongside over the weekend was also slammed by waves against the Port Royal’s side, although it wasn’t clear whether that damage was serious.

To lighten the ship enough to pull it off the rocks, engineers emptied the cruiser’s tanks of seawater pumped in to compensate for the fuel oil burned by its engines. The ship also jettisoned its anchors and anchor chains, and offloaded more than 100 crew members, Gureck said. Then the Military Sealift Command salvage ship Salvor, the powerful tug Dove — which is used to tow the Sea-Based X-Band radar — and seven other Navy and civilian tugs worked at high tide for 40 minutes early Monday to pull the Port Royal off the rocks.

The Coast Guard was scheduled to fly over the site where the Port Royal grounded to survey whether the ship had leaked any oil. Although the results of that survey hadn’t come in yet, Navy officials believed the cruiser hadn’t had any spills.

The Navy plans to conduct an investigation of what caused the grounding, Gureck said, but a few early details were already clear: At around 8:30 local time Thursday night, the ship was stopped or just dead slow off the Honolulu Airport so it could drop off members of Afloat Training Group Mid-Pacific, who planned to take a small boat to Hickam Harbor. At some point during that process, the ship ran aground.

Gureck said there was no reason to believe the ship had lost power and floated onto the rocks. He also said that besides the ATG team, there were no people aboard who were not members of the ship’s company or usual sea trials ship-riders. The commander of Navy Region Hawaii, went aboard the Port Royal on Friday after the ship ran aground to take charge of salvage operations, Gureck said.

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