On 5 June 1922, Beaver sailed for the west coast via the "Great Circle Course" across the central Pacific. In between visits to Guam and Hawaii, she paid a brief call at Wake Island on the 19th to make a survey of the island. One officer on the survey team, Lieutenant Commander Sherwood Picking from the Aeronautical Test Laboratory in Washington, D.C., later wrote, from "a strategic point of view, Wake Island could not be better located, dividing as it does with Midway, the passage from Honolulu to Guam into almost exact thirds." The survey concluded that some dredging and blasting would be necessary for Wake Island to serve as a submarine base.