This ought to be fun. A 418 foot long littoral (pronounced like literal and meaning near shore) ship in St Petersburg harbor, and a bunch of us are going to check it out. Got the tickets (free) today. Of course this kind of endeavor can't be done without fueling up first. That will be taken care of at The Dome Grill in downtown St Pete. Been there before so we know the drill. Our tour starts at 10:30AM and lasts an hour. Here is a description of the ship & some specs from Wikipedia.
More info and pictures after the tour. Stay tuned...
04-Sep-2011-Sunday
Well! That was just great! A super ship, and a super crew to show it off. We were anticipating a tour of about 45 minutes or so, but we got more like 1½ hours. Interesting the whole time.
But I'm getting ahead of myself...
The breakfast was as expected. Quick, hot and reasonably priced. I think it's fair to say we ate sufficiently. Well, maybe some more sufficiently than others. After breakfast we headed toward the shuttle pick up area. As we were walking that way, a "city worker" offered to swap her 9:30 AM tickets for our 10:30 AM tickets. Since we were there early (as usual) we jumped on it. The "we" being Paul, Tom, Gary and me. We were on the third shuttle going to the Independence. We went through a fairly rigorous security check, and then we were on the dock looking at the USS Independence. We checked it out from stem to stern. Quite formidable! It's a trimaran. Here's a poster showing the shape. First stop was the the mission module bay. Neat stuff there. The mission they're set up for now is mine detection, but there are a number of missions for which the ship & crew have capabilities. Got a good Fire Control talk here. No fooling around with fire. Taken very seriously here. The deck above, the flight deck, had an SH-60 Seahawk on it. Here's the Wiki page on it. We had a look. It's in the family of the famous Blackhawk and the Jayhawk that we saw at the Coast Guard Air Station. Here are some pictures of the Seahawk: Pic-1, Pic-2 , Pic-3 & Pic-4. The ship can deal with 2 of these.
The Bridge. Oh, wait...try this one. Oops. Actually more like this and this. Did look a little Star Trek-ish though. Here's a view from the bridge. Impressive stuff.
Back down to the flight deck, this time in the hangar. We got an extensive talk on the fire arms available on the ship. The gamut ran from a 9mm hand gun to a 57mm 220 programmable rounds per minute serious attention getter, with almost everything in between. The 50 cal was especially impressive.
Back down to the Mission module bay. In keeping with the mission of mine warfare, there is an unmanned semi-submersible with sonar gear fitted.
There was also a boat that wasn't talked about much, but I'm pretty sure it's for bringing SEAL's into the fight. I've seen one of these before.
One last neat thing I happened to notice before we left was this smoker. Hopefully they get to use it a lot.
As expected we were surrounded by all types of security. There were even two boats patroling the entrance to the harbor. It may seem like overkill to some but I'm happy with it.
A great tour and a great morning. The rain held off and we all were really happy with the tour. It's an impressive ship. But more than that, it's an impressive part of the Navy and it's part of a very impressive military. All the Navy personnel were polite, courteous and seemed very competent. Very willing to answer questions and be as helpful as they could be. I'm glad to be on their side.
Here are all the pictures.
Here are the Official Specs.
Here is the History of the Independence. Definitely a Legacy of Honor
