Among my memories of San Francisco, fog plays an important part especially when we arrived back in San Francisco after an absence of almost a year. The battle for Okinawa was still waging fiercely when the Pickens, her duties performed, left for Saipan to drop off the Second Marine Division. From the Marianas we set sail for Noumea, New Calidonia, to pick up some materiel and deliver it to Saipan. We left there in late July arriving in San Francisco August 3 to load on troops and prepare to invade Japan.
We entered San Francisco bay before dawn with fog so dense lookouts were practically blind. It fell my lot to be manning the radar. The navigator was calling every minute for the range and bearing of landmarks so he could determine the ship's position. Fishing boats were heading to sea and the blips on the radar for the boats and for buoys were the same. I had only seconds to determine whether a blip was moving, thus a boat, or stationary and a buoy. I was under so much strain I had a burning in my stomach. After that it seemed that every time we came to San Francisco we arrived just before dawn in a dense fog, and I had to be operating the radar. I wondered why we couldn't have delayed our arrival a couple of hours to allow visibility.
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