Med Cruise 1972 - 50 Years Ago

I just realized that it was 50 years ago in March 1972 that I crossed the North Atlantic on my second Med Cruise. The previous time was in 1971. Different ship, different crew but the same ocean. The highlight of the crossing was experiencing the Northern Lights again off the coast of Iceland before heading to the Naval Base at Rota Spain and of course spending some time again in Cadiz in Southern Spain was nice too. It would be a six month deployment in the Mediterranean Sea. 

It's interesting to note that during the spring of 1972 that joint Spanish and American naval base at Rota was greatly expanded because of a perceived threat to NATO by an aggressive expansion of the Russian navy at that time. We spent that spring and summer doing amphibious assault landing war exercises all over the area including landings in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Crete and there were always Russian ships nearby.