The Spruance I was on and later left with an honorable in 93 went back to the PG later that year.
Several months after I got out, an acquaintance of mine ran down my phone and called me up. He had transferred on a little after I left but he kept in touch with some of the former crew.
He found out from one of them that the CO had ran the old tub aground on some reefs in the Indian Ocean and went silent for a couple of days. He hoped for a tide to lift him out. It never did. He finally called home to report his problem.
The next day, a chopper landed just long enough for a real captain to come on board and the commander to get on.
A few months back I was talking to some guy at my church who is an officer in Naval Reserves. He was active then. We got to talking some and the Nicholson reef incident came up. He confirmed the story as it was quite the hot topic in some circles.
In Nam, in 1965, we ran our Swift Boat aground on a sand spit...the Navy acted like it was an aircraft carrier.
The boat commander wasn’t sacked, but was the only officer who did not receive promotion in the entire year.
on that whole story. No CO these days or even 20 years ago can just "hide" from higher authority by going silent for a couple of days. The entire chain of command would freak unless it was part of a planned EMCON exercise. Additionally, every grounding generates a lessons learned message that we QMs would get for training. I'm not going to say my memory is perfect, but I don't recall anything about a Nicholson grounding in the early-mid '90s, nor can I find anything mention of it on the net.