While trolling around I came across KCLM Sales in Pensacola who seem to be a clearing house for former USN and USCG small craft including a half-dozen ten-year old (well used) 25-foot Defender boats, a butt-load of old port security Sea Arks and Zodiacs, and several 41-foot Utility Boats.
As discussed earlier in the blog, I have a soft spot for the 1970s-era 41UTB craft, as they held the line in Coast Guard coastal LE and SAR for the past forty years. They were all built by the USCG Yard in Curtis, and mounted a pair of 375hp VT903 Cummings Diesels. They could also mount two M60 machine guns, but these are likely not included.
Prices range anywhere from $65-$200K depending on how many hours are left on the engines, how many cracks in the hulls, and how much working electronics are on board.
Still, if you know a maritime museum, USCG Auxiliary Flotilla, sea school, large NJROTC or Sea Cadet unit, conservation agency, or oceanography center looking for a deal and willing to put in some elbow grease, these could be a great way to save a piece of history.
Or it could always make a jam-up trawler-style yacht.
The USS Ponce (LPD-15/AFSBI-15) the last ship standing of the 1960s era Austin-class amphibious transport docks, has been floating quietly in the Persian Gulf since 2012 as an “Afloat Forward Staging Base, Interim (AFSB-I) with a hybrid civilian (MSC) and Navy crew after she had been selected for decommissioning and began deactivation. Now supporting a fleet of Sea Dragon mine-sweeping choppers, random patrol boat crews (most of the Navy’s operational 170-foot Cyclone class PCs are in the Gulf as well as a few Coast Guard 110’s), and unnamed special ops characters, the elderly vessel also officially has an active laser weapon.
The laser can be adjusted to fire anywhere from a non-lethal dazzling flash at an incoming vessel so they know it’s there or be turned up “all the way to lethal.”
Got this press release from the USCG and thought the image was great:
“A Coast Guard boatcrew towed a sea plane into port after a mechanical failure on the plane forced the pilot to make an emergency landing one mile off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Thursday afternoon.
Watchstanders at Coast Guard Station Cape Canaveral received the initial report of a plane crash at approximately 1 p.m., from the FAA. The station launched a boatcrew aboard a 25-foot Response Boat — Small to respond.
“When we got the initial report it sounded like a plane crash and people in the water,” said Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew Matella, coxswain of the responding boatcrew. “When you respond to something like this there’s a lot of information coming in and at some point you kind of have to do what you’re trained to do. It was one of those ‘plan for the worst, hope for the best’ kind of situations.”
When the boatcrew arrived on scene they discovered that the plane hadn’t crashed, but landed safely. There were no injuries reported from the pilot and no damage to the plane from the landing. The boatcrew took the plane in tow and brought it safely into Blue Point Marina where the pilot will make arrangements for repairs.
ATLANTIC OCEAN (Sept. 28, 2009) The littoral combat ship USS Freedom (LCS 1) conducts flight deck certification with an MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter assigned to the Sea Knights of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 22. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Nathan Laird/Released)
Yesterday the Navy stood up Littoral Combat Ship Squadron 2 with an O-6 in command (Capt. Paul Young) of what is expected to be 900 bluejackets of various rates and ranks.
LCSRON 2, located in Mayport (they traded a carrier for this?!) will consist of the Marinette Marine Corporation built Freedom-type littoral combat ships USS Little Rock (LCS 9), USS Sioux City (LCS 11), USS Wichita (LCS 13), USS Billings (LCS 15), USS Indianapolis (LCS 17), and the yet to be named– or even officially ordered– LCS 19.
The thing is, none of these are currently in commission with only the first two even being laid down. With a three year lead time on these ships from the builder, its likely that LCSRON 2 wont see its first hull till sometime in late 2016 and likely will not be at full strength until sometime around 2020.
Nevertheless, “Construction is currently underway for a two-story logistics-support facility that will house classrooms, an operations work space, a reference library, office spaces for the ship crews when they are not shipboard, video teleconference rooms, and a crew lounge.”
Not a drill…apparently a barge filled with 50 zombie-dressed mannikins sank, appropriately, on Halloween night in Lake Michigan. Now the survivors (?) have been popping to the surface over the past several days.
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday Nov. 5, Mr. Bond’s Blowpipe-carrying smoke boat
HMS Aeneas S-72 seen in 1971 coming alongside HMS Forth A-187 at Devonport Photo from Maritime Quest
Here we see the His Majesty’s submarine HMS Aeneas (P427, then S-72), an A-class diesel boat of the Royal Navy coming alongside HMS Forth A-187 at Devonport. She is named after the ancient Trojan hero who fought his way out of the burning city state.
Trojan hero Aeneas and the god Tiber, by Bartolomeo Pinelli.
The pinnacle of British submarine development in World War II, the crown ordered 46 “A-class” vessels in the last months of that conflict to serve in the Pacific. These 1600-ton submersibles, at 280.5-feet oal, were smaller than American fleet boats of the time and were more in-line with German and Italian designs of the era. Capable of a 10,500-nm range at an economical 11-knot, these were deep divers, capable of over 500-feet dive depth. With half-dozen forward tubes and four rear ones, these subs could tote 20 torpedoes in addition to their modest topside armament of a single 4-inch gun and a smattering of AAA pieces. Capable of being constructed in 8-months or less due to their modularity and all-welded final assembly, the boats were an improvement over the RN’s pre-war T-class boats.
HMS Aeneas at Britsol 1946. Compare this image with the one above to see the differences between the 1960s streamlining and the WWII outline.
When peace suddenly broke out (remember that the Japanese were expected to resist for another year or two before the atom bombs changed their mind), 30 of the class were canceled and just 16 completed. Of these boats, most were constructed at Vickers or by the HM Dockyards with only three completed by Cammell Laird, Birkenhead. Of those three, HMS Aeneas, laid down during the war was launched 9 October 1945, just a month after the Japanese surrender.
Inside the HMS Alliance, H.M. Submarine Aeneas sister. Photo by Marine Photography.
Used mainly for overseas patrol, the class spent most of the next three decades in quiet service. In the late 1940s Aeneas, along with 13 of her sisters, were modified with pneumatic extending “snort mast” snorkel devices patterned after German examples to enable them to travel just under the surface with only their breathing tube breaking the waves. An example of this capability was displayed by sister ship HMS Andrew which covered the 2500 miles from Bermuda to the UK in 13 days while submerged– a record only bested by nuclear-powered submarines.
However, this modification was not without troubles as sister HMS Affray reported hers “leaked like a sieve” and was thought for years to be the cause of that boat’s loss in 1951 with all hands.
In 1953 a number of the class were present at the Coronation fleet review of Queen Elizabeth II to include Aeneas. In the late 50s, she was streamlined and given more up-to-date sensors and the new pennant number S72.
The 1953 Spithead Coronation Review. H.M. Submarine Aeneas was there along with about a half dozen of her sisters.
Besides holding the line against the ever-growing numbers of Soviet U-boats creeping around the world’s oceans, and forward deployment to Canada for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the only tense service the class saw was in enforcing the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation in which they were used to counter blockade-running junks. It was during this long-running operation that sistership HMS Aurochs was machine-gunned by an aircraft unknown off the coast of Indonesia in 1958. In this type of service, the boats made port calls in remote Pacific islands that rarely if ever logged a visit from the RN in modern times. They also carried a mottled camouflage scheme while performing this duty.
HMS Aeneas S-72 after modernization in 1961. Note the lack of surface armament and the new sonar dome. Photo by Maritime quest
The class did make appearances a number of films, with Andrew filling in for a U.S. nuclear submarine in the 1959 post-apocalyptic film On the Beach. Sistership Artemis appeared in a RN training film entitled Voyage North, from which stock submarine footage was lifted and reused in movies and TV shows for decades.
Aeneas however, one-upped her sisters by appearing in the Bond film You Only Live Twice in 1967.
Enjoy two very relevant minutes of You Only Live Twice in which Commander James Bond, RN arrives on a British submarine by being disguised in a funeral casket. The boat, “M1” in the film, is actually the Aeneas in her film debut; this was after she had been “streamlined” during her second refit, which removed much of her WWII appearance.
This fits into a classic story from a jack aboard the sub at the time:
“Coming down from Hong Kong to Sydney on HMS AENEAS we were looking for the loom of the light at Darwin. Our navigator was a Lieutenant RNR and a noted tosspot and womanizer. “Bridge to control room” – “Control Room! Tell the Captain I have seen the light” – “Bridge! Message passed to the Captain, from the Captain, about time too!”
The A-class were the last class of British submarine to have deck guns, with most retaining them into the 1960s while Andrew kept hers as late as 1974. During this time, Aeneas, long stripped of her WWII-era gun battery, was armed with something new for a submarine– a surface to air missile system.
SLAM installed on sail of H.M. Submarine Aeneas
Vickers set up the aging smoke boat with a set of Shorts Blowpipe MANPADS style surface to air missiles that were fitted to a retractable mast on the submarine’s sail in 1972. Called the Submarine-Launched Airflight Missile (SLAM) system, it held 4-6 missiles and could ideally shoot down low-flying helicopters and other aircraft while the submarine remained at periscope depth. While carrying the SLAM system, she was pennant number SSG72.
SLAM Blowpipe missile mast
The problem was that the visually guided Blowpipe never was very good at downing aircraft and was generationaly in-line with the U.S. Redeye and Soviet SA-7 Grail (which weren’t very good either). After a series of trials, the idea was scrapped.
(Note the paying off pennant) and the crest on her sail under the SLAM system which is still fitted. And during this time her unit crest was also modified. In place of a spear, the warrior Aeneas carried a stylized missile.
The class was largely disposed of in the early 1970s, replaced by more modern O-class diesel boats, and augmented by nuclear-powered submarines and several of the class were loaned to the Canadian navy to help jump start that service’s sub branch. Aeneas was one of the last to go, 14-Nov-1974 sold, 13-Dec-1974 arrived Clayton & Davie Dunston for scrapping. By 1975 she was no more.
Only Andrew, scrapped in 1977, and Alliance, who served as a pier side trainer at the RN Submarine School until 1979, survived the Bond ship.
HMS Alliance on public display.
Today Alliance is preserved as part of the National Historic Fleet on land and on display at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, as a memorial to Her Majesty’s 4 334 RN submariners lost in both World Wars and the 739 officers and men lost in peacetime accidents.
Aeneas‘s 4″ Mk XXIII deck gun, removed in 1960, is preserved at the Royal Navy Armament Museum at Priddy’s Head, Gosport, near HMS Dolphin.
Specs
Displacement: 1,360/1,590 tons (surface/submerged)
Length: 293 ft. 6 in (89.46 m)
Beam: 22 ft. 4 in (6.81 m)
Draught: 18 ft. 1 in (5.51 m)
Propulsion: 2 × 2,150 hip Admiralty ML 8-cylinder diesel engine, 2 × 625 hip electric motors for submergence driving two shafts
Speed: 18.5/8 knots (surface/submerged)
Range: 10,500 name (19,400 km) at 11 kn (20 km/h) surfaced
16 nmi (30 km) at 8 kn (15 km/h) or 90 nmi (170 km) at 3 kn (5.6 km/h) submerged
Test depth: 350 ft (110 m)
Sensors (1946) 291, ‘handraulic’ Radar Set with a double di-pole aerial with only an ‘A’ Scan and no PPI
Complement: 5 officers 55 enlisted, up to 75 could be carried to include commandos and MI6 agents as needed.
Armament: 6 × 21″ (2 external) bow torpedo tube, 4 × 21″ (2 external) stern torpedo tube, total of 20 torpedoes,
Mines: 26
Guns: 1 × 4″ main deck gun, 3 × 0.303 machine gun, 1 × 20 mm AA Oerlikons 20 mm gun (removed 1960). Missiles: SLAM system fitted 1972-74.
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The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
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(yeah its broke down old Bulgarian diesel, but I’m trying to make a point here, bear with me…)
According to Hampton Roads.com the Navy is falling seriously behind on ship maintenance and it is affecting deployments. Although the article focuses mainly on the saga of the Dwight D. Eisenhower, which has missed its maintenance window and will now take longer before she is ready to deploy, it also contains this little nugget:
“The problem was complicated last year by the across-the-board defense spending cuts demanded by sequestration. For six months after the cuts came down in early 2013, the Navy’s public shipyards – including Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth – were forced to impose a hiring freeze and restrict overtime for civilian employees. That led to a manpower deficit at a time when the shipyards were seeing increased workloads, said Chris Johnson, a spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command.
The Navy’s public shipyards primarily work on nuclear vessels. Because of the manpower shortage, the Eisenhower will remain at Norfolk Naval Shipyard for several months longer than planned. In addition, work on eight submarines is backlogged, with delays ranging from two to nine months.
Adm. William Hilarides, head of Naval Sea Systems Command, discussed the submarine backlog during a recent defense symposium in Northern Virginia. Although the Navy is trying to hire more workers, Hilarides told the audience, there aren’t enough qualified workers to meet the demands.
Hilarides suggested that this is the new normal for submarines: “We will not catch those schedules back up,” he said.
WATERS SOUTH OF THE KOREAN PENINSULA (Oct. 21, 2014) Mineman 1st Class (SW) Douglas Reynolds gives commands to the crane operator during deployment of the Mine Neutralization Vehicle (MNV) AN/SLQ 48 aboard the Avenger-class mine countermeasures ship USS Chief (MCM 14). The MNV is used to identify and neutralize simulated mines during training as part of exercise Clear Horizon 2014.
Clear Horizon is an annual bilateral exercise between the U.S. and Republic of Korea navies designed to enhance cooperation and improve capabilities in mine countermeasure operations. (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class (SW/AW) Frank L. Andrews / Released)
The Lockheed Martin-led industry team launched the nation’s seventh Littoral Combat Ship into the Menominee River on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2014. The future
USS Detroit (LCS-7) was formally christened prior to her launch by Mrs. Barbara Levin.
How’d you like to be on the toilet (head) on board when that hit the water.
