New Jersey Scuba Diving

First I followed the Portuguese thread, and that went nowhere. Then I tried Seacoast / Hanson Industries, and found an old list of vessels owned by the company that bought-out Seacoast in 1984, today Omega Protein. This list had several FS freighters on it, as they were once a preferred vessel in the bunker industry. Several of the vessels had known histories and could be eliminated, leaving FS-180 Sikeoyness and FS-231 Sinepuxent . Both vessels were built by Higgins company in Louisiana in late 1944 / early 1945 and sent to the South Pacific. Neither had a long career in the military, as the war was soon over. Both were converted to "bunker boats". A lawsuit shows the Sikeoyness was still in operation in 1981, but after that the trail of the FS-180 goes cold, even with an IMO number. However, the Seacoast document lists two more aliases for the FS-231: Blue Laker and Zebrula.

At that point, I had three names, and the search started speeding up. There are no records on Blue Laker, but Zebrula turns up in a number of archives, including NavSource.org, which is fairly authoritative. NavSource has this to say:

There's a fourth name: MV Sinepuxent - a village on the coast of Maryland, in the region where the bunker companies were based. Some more searching, and I came up with the following list on a prominent shipping database:

• USS FS-231 (1945-46)
• Zebrula (1946-60)
• Blue Laker (1960-64)
• Sinepuxent (1964-?) IMO 5046712

There is even an IMO number - a unique identifier assigned to all vessels. Sinepuxent was another dead end, but I found the following at a Canadian university archive:

The same archive had several more photos:

Pauline Marie is definitely either FS-231 or FS-180. Zebrula appears to have a dent in the bow that matches one on the Pauline Marie, and I think that is the more likely of the two, although nothing I can find proves the FS-231 or disproves the FS-180. So not 100% certain, but one out of two is better than one out of 500!

Just to add confusion, that same archive mixed photos of two different Zebrulas, another completely different one from the 1950s, and refers to them as the same vessel. Perhaps the owner liked that name. And he could have been Portuguese - Zebrula is Portuguese for a zebra/horse hybrid. There appears to be another FS in the background of this picture - could this be both of them?

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FS/AKL-type ships served in many capacities for decades:

USS Hewell (AKL-14) served as the fictitious "USS Reluctant" ("The Bucket") in the 1955 movie version of Mister Roberts, starring James Cagney and Henry Fonda. The film, based on a play and novel, humorously documented life on a Navy transport in the backwaters of World War II - travels "from tedium to apathy and back again, with a side trip to monotony." It's a great film, humorous and patriotic, with terrific performances by Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and James Cagney as the Captain.

Several AKLs were later converted to electronic listening ships, including the infamous USS Pueblo, which was illegally seized by North Korea in 1968.