USCGC Dione

USCGC Dione (WPC-107) was a Thetis-class patrol boat operated by the United States Coast Guard from 1934 to 1963; she was designated a cutter. Her and the other members of the Thetis class were designed to enforce Prohibition in the United States by stopping rum-runners; her class had been designed to improve on the experiences of previous cutters. Built by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Corporation in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, Dione was laid down in November 1933, launched in June 1934, and commissioned in October. Prohibition had been repealed in December 1933, so the cutter instead conducted search and rescue operations out of her station in Norfolk, Virginia.

At the outbreak of the Second Happy Time in January 1942, Dione became the only large ship in the Fifth Naval District capable of opposing German U-boats. The cutter patrolled the waters off North Carolina, which were nicknamed "Torpedo Alley" due to the high capacity of U-boats operating there. From January to June 1942, she rescued the survivors of torpedoed ships, escorted Allied convoys passing through Torpedo Alley, and hunted sonar pings suspected to have come from U-boats with the goal of sinking one—though the cutter never sank one. In 1945, she was transferred to New England with two of her sister ships to help escort surrendered U-boats to American ports, which she did in May when she escorted U-1228 to Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Dione served out of Norfolk until she was decommissioned in July 1947 due to a lack of personnel. She was recommissioned in February 1951 and became the first Coast Guard Cutter to be stationed in Freeport, Texas. She operated in the Gulf of Mexico, serving in a search and rescue capacity until she was once more decommissioned in February 1963. The cutter was placed in reserves for about a year before being sold as a supply ship in March 1964.

She was operated as a merchant ship in the Gulf Coast region by three companies and under four different names. She was first known as Dione and was operated by the Palmer Decker Boat Company until it was dissolved in September 1967; Dione was seized by a US Marshal and auctioned off in December. She was known as Big Trouble and owned by Big Trouble Inc. until the company changed its name to Delta Boats Inc. in February 1968, and the ship's name was changed to Delta I. She was sold to Sabik Inc. in March. Delta I caught fire the next month while underway in the Caribbean Sea, and only her hull was salvageable from the fire. The ship was rebuilt, temporarily seized by a US Marshal, and was underway again by March 1970; her name had been changed to Al Rashid by that time. She operated under Sabik until 1992, when the former Dione was last seen in service as Al Rashid.