I have to admit I was pretty surprised when the President of the United States just walked up to me and started chatting about the weather.

It was December 1989 and we were aboa rd the battle cruiser USS Belknap, the Sixth Fleet flagship, and we were anchored in stormy Marsaxlokk Harbor in Malta for a summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, which history records as the end of the Cold War.

The winter weather was terrible - howling winds, heavy seas, and the summit meetings were on hold until the waves calmed down. I, a Navy Chief and Sixth Fleet photojournalist, was on the helicopter flight deck talking with the White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, which I thought was pretty tall cotton in itself.

Then suddenly at my elbow, in a windbreaker and khakis, was President George Herbert Walker Bush himself. And he even called me by my first name.

"Chief," he says to me, "When I was a young Navy officer, we thought Chief Petty Officers could speak to the waves and calm the seas, but I guess…."

I allowed as how I was a pretty new Chief, barely able to calm a bathtub, but I'd do my best. Then we talked for some time about seas, motorboats, and sailors, and I remembered that the elder Bush, raised on the coast of Maine, was pretty handy at the helm of a small boat.

Half in jest, I suggested to the president that he, at the helm of the admiral's barge, a 40-foot, twinscrew diesel craft, could slog over to the Russian cruiser Slava anchored nearby, pick up Gorbachev, then fight the waves to the Russian cruise liner at the pier where all the staff weenies were waiting for the summit meetings.

The president rather liked the idea, but after high-level conversations, it turned out that ol' Gorby had no sea legs at all, and apparently didn't much cotton to the idea of negotiating with the U.S. while pale and shaky from near-death by seasickness.

But President Bush still liked my idea enough to take the admiral's barge out later that day, piloting the boat through the waves for a few triumphant laps around the Russian cruiser to wave at the Russian sailors and to give the international press something to show on the evening news. It was a great PR move for the president, and I was proud to have thunk it up.

I was reminded of my small brush with fame this weekend when the elder President Bush helped commission the Navy's newest aircraft carrier, named in his honor. It was the last of the Nimitz class of supercarriers, and I'm a plankowner - an original crewmember -- of the second ship of that class, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. Seeing a giant aircraft carrier come alive with thousands of sailors charging aboard the ship to man the rails brought back great memories of my sailor days, haze-gray and underway.

So I wish the crew of the USS George H.W. Bush the traditional Navy blessing, "May you always sail with fair winds and a following sea."

Which you will not find in Malta in the dead of winter.