Museum Ships - United States

Comments

1. July 27, 2018Directrix Gazer said...

   USS Slater (Cannon-class DE), in Albany, NY, was quite nice when I visited back in 2010. They allowed, nay encouraged me to man the forward 3-inch/50 cal gun and slew it around to track a passing tourist boat (the passengers of which seemed rather amused by said act).

   The main deck, galley and CIC (which they do a good job of explaining) are the accessible portions of the ship. No going below at this stage in the restoration, sadly. She's a work in progress but what is accessible is in very good shape. The guides were knowledgeable and personable.

   There's a short pre-tour movie about the ship's service and the context for her design. I was stunned at one point to hear a woman behind me exclaim to her companion "Wait, we fought the Japanese in World War Two?!"

2. July 27, 2018bean said...

   I actually ran into one of their guides on the Iowa when he was visiting. He spoke highly of the ship, and it's nice to have his opinion confirmed. It's definitely on my list eventually, although it's going to be a while.

3. July 27, 2018S_J said...

   Thanks for the list.

   As a boy, I was able to tour a submarine once...from my memories of where/when that happened, I deduce that it was the USS Lionfish.

   I'm a little surprised at the number of museum ships listed in Michigan. I'll have to visit some of them.

   Possible correction to your list: the museum ship USCGC Mackinaw is in Mackinaw City, in Michigan. About a month ago, I was in that area of Michigan. I saw the Mackinaw, but was unable to take a tour.

4. July 27, 2018bean said...

   Fixed. I checked, and the wiki list wasn’t pointing to a Reykjavik, Michigan, it was pointing to the Icelandic city. I have no clue what happened there.

5. July 27, 2018Chuck said...

   Not sure if you are counting replicas or not, but Virginia also has the Godspeed, Discovery, and Susan Constant, functional replicas of the ships that settled Jamestown, where they are currently docked.

6. July 27, 2018bean said...

   The list doesn’t appear to count replicas, as Mayflower II is also missing. (I checked because she’s currently at Mystic for a refit, and I wanted to mark her as one I’ve seen.) Wiki has a list, but it's not in the same format. I may or may not incorporate it at some point.

7. July 27, 2018Black Bellamy said...

   Yeah, you can take the Ling off the list. The black hole has swallowed her.

8. July 27, 2018bean said...

   I know Ling is circling the event horizon, but I'm going to leave her on until she's actually cut up or otherwise totally and permanently gone. She's almost certainly doomed, but I'm rooting for her.

9. July 27, 2018littskad said...

   The Alabama (and Drum) in Mobile is spectacular. When each of my boys was in Cub Scouts, we got to stay overnight on the Alabama. It was a lot of fun wandering around it in the dark with nobody else around.

10. July 27, 2018bean said...

    @littskad

    I can't quite agree with you there. Alabama wasn't bad, but compared to the other major warships I've been to (two other battleships, a carrier, and a heavy cruiser), she was just unimpressive.

    But yes, an overnight, even on her, would be pretty neat. My scout troop did one a year or so after I left.

11. July 27, 2018littskad said...

    @bean

    You have a lot more experience then me, so you're probably right. We did get a very elaborate and thorough tour from someone who had a great rapport with the scouts and seemed to know everything about the ship. Also, when we got there, it was already closed to the general public, so we didn't get any over-the-top commercialism, and since we knew we were going to be there at night, we all had flashlights, so we didn't notice the lighting issues you did.

    I guess the takeaway is: the best way to visit a battleship is to have a son, wait until he's a cub scout, and go then. It takes a bit of planning, but it's all worth it in the end. (It's also the best way to go camping at state parks in my experience.)

12. July 28, 2018bean said...

    We did get a very elaborate and thorough tour from someone who had a great rapport with the scouts and seemed to know everything about the ship.

    That's going to make a tremendous difference. I was there on a Friday in December, and they didn't have anyone for me to talk to (I asked). A good tour guide can make anything interesting, and doing that to a battleship is easy mode. If I dialed out the differences between Alabama and Massachusetts on that front, I'd still give Massachusetts the edge, but they wouldn't be the totally different experiences they were. I'll certainly believe Alabama has someone nearly as good as Massachusetts did (equally good is a big stretch), but they weren't on duty the day I went.

    I guess the takeaway is: the best way to visit a battleship is to have a son, wait until he's a cub scout, and go then.

    That's not a bad way to do it, but I would generalize to say that the best way to visit a battleship (or frankly anywhere) is to go with a good tour guide. You can usually hire one if you want. The rate on Iowa was $75, and I can tell you that you'll get a better tour with a smaller and older group. The guide is spending less time making sure that nobody has wandered off.

    (Well, the real best way is to be able to rely on professional courtesy to meet their most obsessive guide, and have him show you parts of the ship you'd never let the general public into. But that doesn't work for most people.)

13. July 28, 2018Gbdub said...

    As far as notable replicas go, there’s also the “HMS” Surprise in San Diego.

    How was the museum in Mystic? I was recently out there in CT but didn’t make it over there because I didn’t realize the ship collection was that extensive. Did go to Nautilus and the forts in New London though.

14. July 28, 2018bean said...

    Mystic was pretty good, although nowhere near as good as Nautilus. A lot of those "ships" are actually boats, and it was often hard to tell if the thing you were looking at was historic or someone's recreational sailboat. (They let people tie up at their docks.) There were only about four of them they'd let you go on instead of looking from the dock, although those were pretty neat, and the shore exhibits were well-done. Yes, I've written a review of it, but it's going to be a long time before I publish, because I don't want two solid weeks of "nautical stuff around Boston".

15. July 28, 2018bean said...

    I've had a look through the list of replica ships, and I might bring in a couple, but merging looks difficult, and the only one that I really want to see is Dingyuan, a Chinese replica of the Sino-Japanese war ironclad. I want to see her more badly than 90+% of the stuff on this list. Most of the rest is historic sailing ships of various sorts, which are just a lot less interesting.

16. July 28, 2018Mike Kozlowski said...

    ...Sadly, Clamagore at Patriots' Point SC is in grim shape. Her interior is in very good shape, but the outer hull is probably too far gone. The USN threatened a couple years ago to tow her out to sea and scuttle her, but not heard anything since. Yorktown is in surprisingly good shape, but she desperately needs a drydocking. Laffey is good, and the new sound/light show in CIC is worth the visit all by itself.