Day 60: Gig Harbor & Bremerton

Naval Museums

USS Turner Joy

Today marks the 60th day of our trip, and we are firmly past the 2/3 done mark...however, we are still finding new and interesting places to visit.

Today we spent our time about a half hour up the coast from Gig Harbor, in Bremerton, WA. The town is home to a huge active naval base, and we saw a number of big ships as we cruised down the harbor road.  Our destination was the USS Turner Joy museum.  This Destroyer was part of the Pacific Fleet, participated in the Gulf of Tonkin incident during the Vietnam war, and fired the very last round of ammunition in what the official brochure calls the "Vietnam Conflict."

The Destroyer was commissioned in 1959, updated in the 1970s, and decommissioned in 1982. It is 418 feet long, 45 feet wide, had a top speed of 32.5 knots, weighed 4050 tons fully loaded, and had a crew of 320.  Today it had us, and pretty much only us as it was a grey Monday and not quite prime time for tourists.

We had fun wandering around the ship and climbing up and down the ladders (calling them stairways would be a stretch) and exploring all over the ship.  The main picture shows the entire ship-- one shot in each direction.

SIDE NOTE: The ferry in the background in the first picture is the one we watched from the windows of our condo in Seattle.

Bob particularly enjoyed the ship, as he is an avid student of military history. Here he is standing on the stern:

Bob Under the Flag

Here he is climbing into the gun mount, and then peeking out of the top. (As you can see from the sign, you were in fact permitted to do this.)

Bob Enters the Gun Mount

Look Close:  Bob in the Gun Mount

He was also particularly interested in the boilers, and swore that even though we could find no markings at all on anything, all four of them were B&W boilers.

Sectional Side View of a Boiler
(Bob swears the image came from a B&W book)

Steam Drum
(They lit it up just for Bob and the other boiler nerds)

Mechanical Room (Tightly Packed!)

We also walked through crew quarters (three up on the bunks-- I couldn't figure out which one was the best or worst spot-- all very tight), work areas, and dining halls.  Pretty much the whole ship was open, except for a few sensitive or dangerous places.  As it was a destroyer, there were of course guns.  Here is the elevator for the one Bob was sitting in.  It shoots a "projectile" which you can see in the picture below, mounted and ready to rise.

Projectile in Elevator Ready To Travel to Gun

The ship looks a bit like its crew left and just didn't return.  There were many pieces of everyday ship life that were retained for the museum.  Books, typewriters (an IBM Selectric right out of the late 1970s), and signs.  Here is one Bob particularly liked:

10 Commandments of Ship Damage Control

The ship was located on the Bremerton Boardwalk, and a bit further down that boardwalk was the Puget Sound Navy Museum.  This free museum had a bit of everything Navy related.  One comprehensive exhibit covered covert submarine surveillance, and another covered baseball as a military pass time.  The sign below just goes to prove that Norfolk is a great breeding ground for athletes-- both military baseball players, VT football players and ODU soccer players!

Norfolk Navy Training Station Champion Baseball Team

This museum also had the exhibit that made the day complete for Bob:

Photograph mural of a Derrick Crane with a model of the shipyard in the foreground

We headed over for a quick lunch after that museum and had planned to travel about 20 minutes further north to see the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, but it was 3:30 by the time we finished eating (time flies when you're looking at navy museums with Bob) and a quick check of the Internet found that the museum closed at 4.  That nixed that, but we may be able to pick it up later in the trip.

So, we headed back to our house in Gig Harbor for a relaxing evening. (Sorry, cloudy and overcast today so no great pictures from the windows.)

The plan tomorrow is to leave boats and return to cars, at the LeMay Auto Museum in downtown Tacoma.

Until then...

--Lisa