She got us through a small hurricane in the Caribbean, and a month in the N Atlantic (just South of Iceland) in November; the worst weather I saw while I was aboard. I never felt unsafe in it, and she had a very smooth, 7 second roll. The worst roll we ever took was about 20 degrees. If you look closely, the stacks make the ship look top heavy, but they are essentially hollow cylinders of sheet metal, not very massive. She was also equipped with some very good foul weather features: the high "hurricane bow", and a deep draft for her size (about 30 feet). The superstructure was aluminum, not steel, so it was very light, although that was not a good place to economize on weight. It would have been shredded under cannon fire, even a rifle bullet could have gone through it. The hull and main deck were steel.

She was a bit more unstable in the fore-and-aft direction though. We often took green water over the bow, and a few times in a heavy seaway her screws were exposed to air when her stern came out of the water, causing the engines to briefly rev way up and the whole ship to shake violently.

Dewey was 520 feet long and 52 wide, and displaced about 6000 tons. Her wartime complement was about 400 men. She was built in 1959 as a Guided Missile Destroyer Leader (Hull number DLG-14), but was reclassified after I left as a Guided Missile Destroyer (DDG-45). She was decommissioned and broken up for scrap in 1994. There are some better pictures of her and some history here:

http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/gormady/

Dewey took me from Norfolk, VA through the Canal to San Diego, Pearl Harbor, Midway Island, Okinawa, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam, and then the US Virgin Islands and Scotland. I was aboard her for most of 1968.