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Youngest Captain. Although Yankee Clipper capsized as it hit the water, the astronauts quickly righted their craft by inflating three large flotation bags attached to its tip. Lifted aboard the aircraft carrier by helicopter, the crew was hustled into the same mobile quarantine van that housed the men of Apollo 11. Soon afterward, they were cheered by a call from President Nixon, who told the three Navy commanders that he was promoting them to captain. That made the 37-year-old Al Bean the Navy's youngest to attain the rank.
During their five-day cruise to Honolulu, the astronauts began debriefings, ate a Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner and staged a traditional Navy "pollywog" ceremony for Astronaut Richard Gordon, who had never before crossed the equator at sea. Gordon was draped with a sign reading: "Beware! Luney Wog. Unclean. Unpredictable." Following a hula-skirted welcome in Pearl Harbor, the astronauts were trundled in their van aboard a flatbed truck and driven to nearby Hickam Air Force Base for the flight to Texas.
At week's end, as Apollo 12's astronauts bedded down in the LRL for the remainder of their 21-day quarantine, NASA was making plans for its next lunar expedition. Buoyed by the bull's-eye at Surveyor Crater, the space agency tentatively scheduled the launch of Apollo 13 for March 12 and picked the most difficult site to date for man's next lunar landing: the ancient highlands near the mountain-ringed crater Fra Mauro.