San Diego harbour has some real cool naval attractions: The USS Midway which is a World War II era aircraft carrier, The Star of India - a 19th century tall ship, The HMS Surprise - a replica of 17th century warship, a Russian submarine - the b59 and a bunch of real USA warships - by this I mean ships that are in use right now in the fight against camel riding caballeros, rice grinding dong-dongs and a whole bunch of other guys and gals who have their own nuclear navys.
Remember: if you use Chrome browser or and iPad or a MAC (probably) you can zoom on the photos. Intermet Explorer - at least on my laptop - won't let me do that.
The USS Midway is a great ship - we toured her a couple years ago so we didn't go aboard again this time - next time we will though - she is that impressive. Here are a few shots taken from pier level:
A fantastic shot that shows her massive size from a little further out...on the harbour cruise.
Here is a link to the USS Midway website - very cool.
They have a bunch of real old ships in San Diego harbour too. The Star of India is perhaps the best example.
The interesting thing is - is that they still sail this ship from time-to-time. How many cars built in the 1860's can you say that about? Duh?!?!
A shot of the deck:
A shot of the incredible amount of ropes that were required to raise and manage the sails
Another neat boat they have there is the HMS Surprise. This boat is a REPLICA of the original that was built in the 1760s and was built by somebody from Nova Scotia, Canada...somebody with verrrry deep pockets. Appparently he never built another one..learned his lesson I'd say!
Now probably the coolest boat they have is a Russian submarine from the cold war era. The b59
This is the fore (front) torpedo tube area. These torpedos could have had nuclear warheads attached. In fact these particular submarines were involved in the Cuban missile crisis back in the early 60s.
Another area of the sub..look at the hatchway at the left side of the picture...this is how you made your way from one part of the sub to the other. There were numerous hathches like this ...a big fat-assed submariner wouldn't thrive in this environment...c'mon Boris...move your ass...
Last sub pic is the terlet...I don't think you'd spend too much time reading a magazine in this place as there didn't seem to be a door. Not sure what that foot lever was for...maybe if you lingered too long the comander came in and stepped on the lever and sped things up for you with a bit of high-pressure, salt-water, enema-type persuasion. Yoikes, did I just write that???
Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a place for the toilet paper so ....
Now there were a bunch of new boats as noted earlier. These are boats that are being used right now to kick asses all over the world. Here's a bunch of pics and there might be a few descriptions.....
Some of the coolest new boats are the ones that cannot be seen on radar.
Here's a couple pics of these boats. I can't recall the exact details but these boats are pretty much invisible to enemy radar because of their shape - they have few sharp angles and some special paint that absorbs radar.
Now the cruise boat, that we were on, was able to take us quite close to these "state of the art" stealth boats so I suspect the reality is that there are newer boats parked there that are truly invisible - truly unable to be seen. This is probably just a test...letting the tourist boats get so close. If one of us were to scream out.."look - I can see a ghost ship"...we'd probably have been vapourized (or vaporized for the yanks) immediately.
These next four pics are of active Navy boats. They have a HUGE ship building industry here and some are being built and some repaired and some painted, etc. It would be really cool to be able to get on board some of these boats but I suspect that would be impossible.
The two below are 1,000+ foot long air craft carriers. One is the USS Ronlad Reagan and the other is USS Somebody Else.
Here's a couple more of the stealth boats. The actually call these "Destroyers". You don't see any guns or cannons on deck like you would in older, coventional destroyers so I wonder what they are using to do the destroying?!?!
The guy doing te tour just called this one a "heavy hauler". I'm sure there's a more techincal name for it. A boat like this moves very heavy equipment all around he world to wherever there's people who need killing.
And this boat is there to deal with them that didn't get killed but just about did.
These boats are huge.
as always comments to klassen.f@gmail.com appreciated.