Sister ship USAPRS Thomas F. Farrel, Jr. underway off the East Coast of the United States, 26 August 1944. US National Archives photo # 80-G-420158 RG-80-G, a US Navy photo now in the collections of the US National Archives.
The ship was never commissioned and never saw U.S. Naval service. Conversion into a Port Repair ship radically altered design and appearance (See photos of a Port Repair ship returned to Navy).
Norma (AK-86)[Note 1] was never commissioned and thus never bore the USS designation.[1]Norma is the name of constellation.
The Army converted the ship into one of ten Engineer Port Repair ships for use by the Army Engineers in clearing war damaged ports. These ships were extensively modified with a distinctive appearance the result of heavy lift bow horns with a forty ton lift capacity.[5] The converted ship saw little or no service as intended as it was one of the conversions completed in 1945.[4]
Final disposition
The ship was returned to the Maritime Administration 8 August 1947 and sent into the National Defense Reserve Fleet, Suisun Bay, Benicia, California. On 31 March 1965 Henry Wright Hurley was sold to Zidell Explorations, Inc., Portland, Oregon for scrapping.
Notes
^Only USS Enceladus (AK-80) of the ten-ship Enceladus-class, composed of Maritime Commission N3-M-A1` type small cargo vessels, saw significant naval service. The other nine, except USS Hydra (AK-82), were transferred within months or days of shipyard delivery from the Navy to the Army. Hydra was transferred to Army shortly after commissioning and trials. The Navy had assumed administration of the contracts for these ships from the Maritime Commission on 1 January 1943 during or before construction so most were only administratively Navy, including names and numbers, during construction.
