WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 2012
Today Susan and I along with our
daughter Sara and granddaughter Cara went to the Norfolk waterfront. While they
went on a hunt for mermaids, I took the tour of the battleship WISCONSIN.
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| Bow of WISCONSIN |
It
cost $12.95 to tour the deck and another $12.95 if you wanted to see anything
inside. The inside tour lasted about an hour and a half and was conducted by a
gentleman that served on the ship in 1947 as a medic.
The tour started in the
officers' ward room. Then we toured some crews’ quarters, the captain’s cabin,
the communications room, the war room and the bridge.
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| Bomb-proof helm station (3' thick walls) |
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| Looking forward from bridge (These windows have to be cranked down when the guns are fired or they will be blown out from the shock wave.) |
The ship is one big maze
of passageways and would be very easy to get lost. The passageways have a
numbered code painted on the walls that tells you what deck, how far from the
bow or stern, how close to the centerline and what the area is used for.
The deck was just a walk around on
your own tour. Compared to our little 30 foot boat, the things on this ship are
huge.
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| 16" guns |
The pictures below do not really give the feeling of how big things
really are. The picture of the base of the gun turret is deceptive. The
distance from the deck to the top of the black boot is about the height of a two story
house.
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| Base of one of the 16" guns |
Each chain link on the anchor chain is about a foot long and probably
weighs about fifty pounds each.
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| Size of mooring & anchor chain |
The tour didn’t take you to
places like the engine rooms which I would really have liked to tour, but they said they are working on adding
those areas to the tour.
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| Starboard side |
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