Bob Cleek

Bob, I'm most impressed with your Hoga/City of Oakland.  You did very well under the constraints imposed by the lack of informational resources.
 
Just a brief historical correction: Hoga is the only Navy hull still afloat of any kind which saw combat at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (The USCG's cutter Roger B. Taney was also present and saw combat that day, she being the only other such US vessel in existence and now an historical memorial.)
 
To my regret, I came across your build log a day late and a dollar short.  In 1995, I wrote the original application to the Navy's ship donation program for Hoga's donation as an historical memorial.  I had access to technical assistance from the Navy's Sea Systems Command and the Oakland Fire Department crew that had just then returned her to the Navy.  Let me assure you that at that time she was hardly a hulk.  She had just recently enjoyed a motor rebuild with new platinum contacts and a major servicing of one of her two ALCO diesels and was "good to go."  (The supplemental hose manifolds and fire fighting equipment mounted for service as a fireboat were in large measure powered by a couple of large diesel generators and pumps mounted on the after deck and not present in her service configuration.)  As politics sometimes have it, Oakland's city council was sold a bill of goods by a vendor in the form of a smaller jet propelled shallow draft fireboat and so, over the objections of the fire department crew, Hoga was declared no longer needed. 
 
I would expect that you would have been able to secure line drawings from NAVSEASYS or the Navy Historical Department at the Washington Navy Yard, which I believe retain copies of everything the Navy has ever owned, but that's water under the bridge now.  She was at that time surveyed in detail by Tri-Coastal Marine in Berkeley, CA, a well-known vessel surveying firm and I also had their reports.
 
The application I wrote for a local yacht club and for the purpose of securing Hoga for restoration to her 12-7-41 configuration for use as an operating tug serving the Liberty Ship Memorial vessel, Jeremiah O'Brien, in San Francisco.  The application had wide-spread support in all the right places, but ran onto the rocks when, at a certain level, a Navy bureaucrat refused to waive the usual requirement that memorial vessels be essentially "gutted" and rendered entirely non-operational, which, of course was a ridiculous proposition in this instance.  She'd been meticulously maintained by the OFD since Oakland had obtained her on a post-war surplus dollar-a-year lease right after WWII.  That was "game over" for our proposal.  We had no interest in rendering Hoga non-operational.  We wanted to see her sailing.  (The legalities of all this are fascinating, if one has an interest in them.  The Jeremiah O'Brien is fully operational because as a Merchant Marine vessel, she was obtained from the Maritime Administration's ("MARAD") "mothball fleet," not from the Navy.  The carrier Hornet now on display in Alameda, CA, was preserved only at the last minute because a group was able to buy it from the winner of the auction when she was sold as scrap.  The Navy wouldn't sell or donate her for memorial purposes, but insisted she be sold for scrap, although once sold, the scrapper could do whatever he wanted with her... go figure!)
 
Actually, as it turned out, we turned over a rock at NAVSEASYS that nobody ever saw coming.  Although it was originally thought that Oakland's "return" of the leased surplus vessel would make our obtaining it, also as surplus, an easy task, it was, supposedly to everyone in Washington's amazement, ascertained upon our application that Hoga had never been stricken from the Navy roll and had been carried on the Navy roll and funded as an active USN vessel in the Navy budget since the end of the war!  While I wasn't a "fly on the wall," it seems there must have been a lot of fancy dancing and dust swept under the rug to correct that paperwork.  Who knows what it cost for crew, fuel allotments, maintenance and the rest, year after year, and where did that money really go?  Your tax dollars at work, no doubt!  Pretty amazing that the Navy wouldn't have noticed they were "missing" a 100 foot tug for fifty plus years, no?
 
Once the Navy got Hoga stricken from the rolls, they sent her up to the MARAD "mothball fleet" in Suisun Bay where MARAD preserved her, after a fashion, as they do with various surplus vessels such as Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer.  A group in Honolulu applied to take her as a memorial at Pearl Harbor, hoping to operate her in conjunction with the BB Missouri memorial.  I heard that they were unable to justify the expense of shipping her out to Pearl from SF because the Navy had by then decided that she was a "treasure" which could not be risked on making the trip on her own bottom.  The last I heard, she was supposedly donated to a group in Arkansas, IIRC, who wanted to display her in a local park up some river there, but they had run out of money and she was languishing again.  The last time I was up at the "mothball fleet," which I guess was maybe a year ago, she was still there, covered in seagull poop.  I have no idea what justification the Navy had for giving Hoga to a group in Arkansas which has not the remotest connection with the vessel's long and illustrious history.  She spent her entire working life at Pearl Harbor, "for the duration" and then as the City of Oakland.  One or the other... but Arkansas? Well, I guess at least the seagulls won't be using her for their head.
 
And to provide a further ironic finish to the whole sad story, the Oakland Fire Department found upon taking delivery of their new jet propelled shallow draft fireboat, that when they cut loose with the monitors, the "recoil" from their flow of water pushed the lightweight shallow draft bucket all over the place, so much so as to pretty much render it useless.  It might have been faster than City of Oakland getting to a fire, but it wasn't much help when it got there!  The old City of Oakland was like a rock and indeed no lightweight.  Last I heard, Oakland had sent their new fireboat back for modifications to try to cure the problem.  At least that was the rumor.