Love the paint job on the CAG bird. Welcome back Wildcat. Thanks for sharing the photos and your experience with us 
Funny story about that bird.
So the CAG, CAPT. Stuart "Studa" Baker, is one of the coolest guys on earth. He frequently visits CATCC and starts shooting the air with us, which is very cool to say the least. However he's not exactly the best pilot.
So we're doing night time flight ops, and the seas were a bit heavier than usual so the deck was pitching a bit. We had just completed the first group when all of a sudden, good ol' CAG Baker gets shot off the cat and requests one stick (touch n' go) and one stone (trap). So he does his touch n' go, no big deal. Now comes the hard part. The night time Case 3 pattern is at minimum a 12-mile left hand race track, so it takes some time for planes to go around. CAG Baker lines up, Bolter. Go around, Bolter. 3rd time's a charm..... Bolter. He ends up missing five times before we declare him Bingo on the Ball (critical fuel, if you don't make it this time, your sorry butt is flying back to San Diego, no qual).
We were watching him on the PLAT, which is the camera on the flight deck with crosshairs, shooting up the glide path to show the LSO where the guy is in relation to the glidepath. So he's getting pretty close, looking good this time, all of a sudden we get a call from the bridge that we're in a left turn. So you slowly see good ol' CAG Baker veer waaaaaaaaaay to the right. He turns back to correct, but it's too late. The LSO calls for a wave off at the last possible second, and we tell him to signal Bingo (bye bye, CAG!). good ol' CAG Baker didn't take too kindly to this apparently, as he goes full burner, pitches up, and proceeds to scrape his hook along the entire landing area, before lifting back up and heading home.
The next day, Strike Ops draws a cartoon on the back of the day's Air Plan. It was a cartoon of a Studebaker with a tail hook, scraping along the flight deck. The caption was "No night trap for the CAG tonight!"
