Anybody want a used (and abused) submarine?

Wednesday, December 24, 2008 by The Chief.

From the AP:

Sunken Soviet sub needs buyer - or it’s scrapped

By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
(12-24) 19:36 PST Providence, R.I. (AP) –

A former Soviet cruise missile submarine that was once featured in a Hollywood film and sank in the Providence River during a storm last year will be converted to scrap metal if no one agrees to buy it, the president of the foundation that owns it said Wednesday.

The 282-foot submarine, also known as Juliett 484, began serving as a floating educational museum in 2002, until it went down during a powerful nor’easter in April 2007.

Army and Navy dive crews raised the sub in a training exercise last July, and inspections showed the vessel had deteriorated and corroded during its 15 months underwater.

Restoring it to an operational museum would have cost more than $1 million, said Frank Lennon, director of the Russian Sub Museum and president of the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation, a private, nonprofit group.

“Based on the input we received from experts, the cost of restoring it was beyond our capabilities,” Lennon said. . . .

More from SFGate:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/12/24/national/a193619S58.DTL

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Been Down?

Friday, November 28, 2008 by The Chief.

Brittney Gilbert posted this on her Eye on Blogs page:

It’s funny, because everyone knows that the best Marine is a Submarine!

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The incredible shrinking submarine

Friday, October 10, 2008 by The Chief.

The USSVI held a sleep-over onboard the USS Pampanito, this week.  We started with a fantastic dinner of Italian Sausages, Roast Pork, and Linguine (and an adult beverage or two) on the pier.  Many true stories were shared, and lost boats and shipmates were remembered.  A submarine-movie marathon was held in the crew’s mess.  Rumor has it that there was some snoring going on in the After Battery, but I didn’t notice it.

The next morning, we were treated to SOS before heading topside for Quarters, Morning Colors, and a Tolling the Boats ceremony.  Everyone who went had a great time.

 

More Pictures Here

I look forward to going back, but maybe I’ll try to get a middle rack.  It’s much harder to get into the upper racks since they shrank the passageway between the racks.  They also seem to have shrunk the doors on the boat.

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Seeing Pampanito, 64 years after a near death

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 by The Chief.

From today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

Seeing Pampanito, 64 years after a near death

Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

To most visitors, the submarine Pampanito is a curiosity, a memorial to another time and place berthed near the restaurants and tourist attractions of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

Alistair Urquhart, an 89-year-old Scot and retired businessman, knows better. Urquhart was nearly killed by the Pampanito. It happened 64 years ago this month, when the sleek, gray submarine torpedoed and sank the Japanese transport ship Kachidoki Maru. He was aboard the ship and barely escaped with his life.

It was one of the tragic incidents of World War II. Unknown to the U.S. Navy sailors aboard the Pampanito, the Japanese ship was carrying more than 900 British prisoners of war, many of them survivors of construction of the “Railway of Death” in Thailand, an experience made famous in the movie, “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

Three hundred eighty prisoners died as a result of the attack. For five days, Urquhart, covered with fuel oil, starving and nearly dead, drifted in the South China Sea.

Urquhart was one of the lucky ones. On the fifth day, Sept. 17, 1944, he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship, taken to Japan and- still a prisoner - forced to work in a coal mine.

This week, he stood on the deck of the old submarine to tell his story.

It was one of those strange coincidences. Both Urquhart and the boat that nearly killed him survived the war.

The old man had come to San Francisco from his home in Scotland to see the submarine, drawn by a pull of memory he couldn’t explain. . . .

More: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/16/BAGD12UGKD.DTL

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Submariners for Palin

Monday, September 8, 2008 by The Chief.

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It is GOOD to be King (or Prince)

Friday, June 20, 2008 by The Chief.

I found this story about the Royal Navy:

Prince William’s secret nuclear submarine mission

 

London, June 20 : Britain’s Prince William spent 24 hours under the sea on secret war games inside a nuclear submarine as part of his two-month attachment to the Royal Navy.
The young royal, who holds the honorary title of Commodore-in-Chief, Submarines, participated in an exercise to track down and destroy another sub.

As soon as he boarded HMS Talent, the T-Class hunter-killer immediately submerged off the coast of Plymouth.

He spent time in the control room, beside the nuclear reactor and in the torpedo room, which has cruise missiles.

And finally he was winched off the sub by a Sea King helicopter.

According to a Royal source, the prince was ‘fascinated’ by the experience.

“Prince William has huge respect for what submariners do and the sacrifices and discomfort they put up with,” The Sun quoted a source, as saying.

“He was very keen to see what their life was like,” the source added.

http://www.newkerala.com/one.php?action=fullnews&id=75536

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Merry Christmas

Saturday, December 22, 2007 by The Chief.

Enjoy this show from TheSubReport.com: http://www.photoshow.com/watch/iE8hP7tr

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The Invasion of San Francisco

Friday, October 5, 2007 by The Chief.

I love Cinnamon Stillwell, and once again, she’s nailed the anti-anything-military crowd in Baghdad-by-the-Bay with her latest on Fleet Week:

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San Francisco Peaceniks in a Panic Over Fleet Week

It’s that time of year again and Fleet Week has descended upon the city of San Francisco. For those who, like myself, appreciate the unabashed demonstration of military prowess, not to mention the spectacular air shows of the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels, it is a time to relish. And, of course, an occasion for gloating about the matter at one’s blog.

It helps that self-proclaimed socialist supervisor Chris Daly’s third attempt to ban the Blue Angels, due, he claims, to safety concerns (never mind that there’s a higher chance of being hit by a car in San Francisco than an Angels pilot crashing), was soundly defeated by his more commerce-minded colleagues on the Board of Supervisors. Ah, the smell of victory in the morning.

Getting to watch the Blue Angels practice throughout the week is another perk for patriots living in the vicinity. There’s nothing quite like the beauty of jets flying silently in formation, that sonic boom as they pass overhead, or the thrill of a jet zooming past one’s very window.

But for local liberals unaccustomed to such icky displays of militarism and residents annoyed that their daily lives of leisure are interrupted by those who, in reality, make those daily lives of leisure possible, Fleet Week is a time of terror.

I know of one such fellow who was in a virtual panic last weekend to, as he put it, “get out of town before the Blue Angels arrived!” Others remained in the war zone, but their grumbling can be overheard at the corner store, the gym, and anywhere else that San Franciscans choose to emote about their political inclinations.

The truth is San Francisco is a city that likes to pretend its favored existence has nothing to do with the generations of fighting forces that have shed blood, sweat, and tears on America’s behalf. . . .

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There are many patriots still in San Francisco. But they tend to not be elected to public office. If you are in the Bay Area, treat yourself to a visit at USS Pampanito, at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, or to the USS Hornet, across the Bay at Alameda.

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Life is Simple

Friday, July 20, 2007 by The Chief.

Life is Simple: Either you’re qualified, or you’re not.

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San Francisco Values

Thursday, March 15, 2007 by The Chief.

Cinnamon Stillwell is my favorite writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. She’s also one of my favorite Bloggers. Her latest column, Anti-War Miseducation in San Francisco, does an outstanding job of documenting San Francisco’s attacks on all things military, and on the Navy in particular. San Francisco has introduced an anti-American textbook, passed numerous anti-military resolutions, banned NJROTC, and refused to allow the USS Iowa to berth there.
This isn’t new, of course. Communist labor leader Harry Bridges managed to keep the Pampanito out of San Francisco for a very long time. However, San Francisco used to have a huge Navy presence, and a reputation as a great liberty port. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I spent yesterday on the Pampanito. At the end of WWII, Pampanito underwent refit and overhaul at San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.
Hunters Point has long since been out of the shipyard business, and will eventually be cleaned up and turned over to the City. San Francisco, ever blind to its own hypocrisy, has decided that now is a great time to ask the Navy for a favor: S.F. seeks Navy’s help in effort to keep the 49ers.
In their effort to keep the San Francisco Forty-Niners from moving to Santa Clara, the City wants to offer them Hunters Point. But first, they need to convince the Navy to speed up the clean-up, and turn the site over to San Francisco within the next couple of years.
I’d like to see the Navy tell San Francisco that they’ll get around to working on Hunters Point after the city finds a new home for USS Iowa (I wonder if Hunters Point has room for a Battleship?), reinstates NJROTC in the schools, and repeals each and every anti-military resolution passed by the School Board and the Board of Supervisors. I wonder what Nany Pelosi thinks about this?

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