Oh...thank you Ric...so Avocet wasn't refueling Lexington at all, correct, just giving her aircraft fuel?
That's right. Battleships burned fuel oil, known as bunker fuel, and they refueled from large barges.
Avocet was a small (187 ft) "bird class" minesweeper commissioned in 1918. In 1925, she and her sisters
Swan and
Pelican were converted to seaplane tenders. They could carry one floatplane on their after-deck, plunking it in the water and retrieving it with a crane, but they often operated as general purpose vessels with no plane aboard.
Avocet had no plane aboard for the solar eclipse trip in 1937 and
Swan had no plane aboard when she acted as plane guard for the Earhart flight later that year.
Pelican was at Gardner Island in April of 1939 with a Grumman J2F Duck aboard to take aerial photos as part of the U.S. Navy's survey of the Phoenix Group.