I belong to the Elite Fleet Scale Model Boat Club of Virginia Beach. We play at Lake Trashmore on Sundays. I sent for MSO plans of a MSO in 1:96 scale and had them enlarged to 1:72 scale. The RIVAL is approximately 32” long.

The plans are a little fuzzy and no one in our club has served on MSO’s. I researched libraries and couldn’t acquire any photos of a MSO. I sort of adlibbed as best as I could from memory. I was on a LST that played “mother ship” to 4 MSO’s heading to the Med during several trips for 6 month “tours”. (7-65 to 11/68)

I was stationed at Little Creek, VA from Jan 72 to Feb 75 at a repair facility called AMSU. I was the chief in charge of the DC, Carp, and SF shops and did some repairs/maintenance on MSO’s. As I recall, there were approximately over a dozen MSO’s at the base.

I reckon modern minesweeping technology slowly phased out the MSO fleet. I can remember a lot of incidents of the LST I was on trying to pass the fuel and water hoses to MSO’s. We didn’t “high line” the hoses, but trailed the hoses in the water for the MSO’s to pick up. I thought that was a bad idea, and it ended up being so! Not for the “sweeps”, but for the LST, I was on. I don’t know if the CO of the LST was knowledgeable on “sweep” high lining, or on his idea of floating the replenishing hoses to the sweeps, but we had to be towed back to Little Creek by a tug to get cable, hose and phone lines untangled from not one prop, but both props! I don’t think our squadron commander was too happy about his performance. There was a lot of “Brass” waiting on the pier. Boy, talk about being a fly on the wall in the wardroom!!! You may have heard about this LST and it’s story of refueling sweeps!? As you can tell, I haven’t mentioned the name of the LST. Sometimes my memory fails me, as this happened over 30 years ago. I think I’ll leave it there.

Part way through the construction of my model MSO “Plank on Frame”, I was looking through my stacks of Scale Ship Modeler Magazines and came across your MSO featured in the October ’90 issue, which proved to be a big help to me in the construction of the superstructure and “sweep deck”.

I have been working on construction for approximately 3 years. I finally got the (2) motors and servo installed and had successful “Spring 06” sea trials. I am adding details such as hoses, reels, life rafts, motor whaleboat, radar etc. and it is starting to come alive!

This MSO is one of eight models I have built. Our club had an opportunity to run our electric models in a recreation center Olympic swimming pool and my MSO was rammed by a Russian sub. There was no hull damage, but a bilge keel was bent. The sub was surfacing, and my MSO was sitting on the sub’s deck high and dry. The sub was about 6 feet long. We have our share of collisions and scrapes, but this was a first time thing of sitting high and dry!