A Big Day at the Naval Undersea Museum

Probably *every* day is a big day there though.

The Naval Undersea Museum is a museum located in Keyport, Wash., which is pretty close to the big ol’ Navy base in Bremerton as well as the unknown-sized Navy submarine base in Bangor. Even though the website says they’re closed every Tuesday during the winter months, it turns out they’re open the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s. Or at least they were in 2009. YMMV, but it seems improbable that anyone who reads this blog will ever test it out in future years to see if the policy was a one-off or, like, a real policy.

The periscope actually works! You can scan the entire parking lot from inside the building!

I didn't really get into BioShock. Maybe I'll like 2 better.

Imperial Japan's most effective naval weapon: the man-guided suicide torpedo.

Some bullet-pointed thoughts:

• I learned that I don’t know very much about torpedoes or mines.
• About half the museum is about torpedoes and mines.
• It seems like a rich field — but narrow.
• The museum is free.
• They have a submarine there, the Trieste II iirc, that dove to 22,000 feet — which isn’t a record. The record is 35,000 feet that was set using a similar submarine.
• But they don’t call it a “submarine”, they call it a “bathyscaphe”.
• For some reason the museum merely glosses over the involvement of US submarines in World War II, even though they’re already probably pretty under-heralded.

Interesting enough museum, worth the price of admission. Heck, it’s probably even worth the toll to get back over that stupid new bridge.

And in Bremerton, they had four reserve fleet aircraft carriers each at some stage in the dilapidation process. Hard to get a good photo, plus it’s cloudy all the time there, but anyway:

They're getting parted out.

Two of the four there were Ranger and Kitty Hawk. You could probably look up the names of the other two if you need to.

Endut.

bkd