USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg To Be Sunk For a Reef 169
caffiend666 writes "On Wednesday the USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg is to be sunk in 140 feet of water off of Key West to become the world's second largest artificial reef. (The largest was created by sinking the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany off of Pensacola, Florida, in 2006.) The Vandenberg was built in 1943 (chronology) and commissioned the USS Gen. Harry Taylor. In 1963 the Air Force took it over and recommissioned it, naming it after the Air Force general. For decades the ship served as a missile tracker and space relay. It was used in NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects and the Shuttle program. The Vandenberg was the set for some of the scenes in the '90s movie Virus as the Russian MIR relay station. Soon it will become one of the world's most awesome diving spots."
Too deep... (Score:2, Informative)
Too bad at 140 feet it's beyond the limits for sports/recreational diving.
Re:Too deep... (Score:5, Informative)
The recreational limit is 130 feet. So you won't be able to look at the very bottom of the hull. The rest will be much higher. Even beginners will be able to hover over the deck.
Re:Too deep... (Score:5, Informative)
Just clarifying the parent post in case any real beginners are reading: Recommended for beginners is 60'/18m approx. With the next step up (assuming PADI or equivalent, then you'll need Advanced Open Water), then yep, 130/40m is the absolute maximum, with a recommended max of 100'/30m (for those that bounce that extra few feet up and down, and don't keep a close eye on the depth gauge). Also note, many holiday travel insurances will only cover you to 100' (30m).
Spend any time at 40m, and just make sure you know what you're doing; deco stops come into play very quickly.
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I did a 30m dive a few months ago for my PADI Advance Open Water. I got pretty narced - I don't particularly want to do it again unless I'm with an experienced buddy. That doesn't sound like too much fun. Also, the more limited time at that depth (you go through your air faster) makes this worse.
So who is this targetted at? And why does the person who submitted the story think this will shortly be one of the most awesome dive sites? It's either going to be very expensive, or there's some contradictions
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So who is this targetted at? And why does the person who submitted the story think this will shortly be one of the most awesome dive sites? It's either going to be very expensive, or there's some contradictions in the story:
I have over 300 yards (over 900 feet) of line on my fishing reel. Getting down to the wreak is not an issue. My need to use 10-14 oz though. This will be a great fishing spot in a few years. Not just for the fish right on/around the wreak. People will be trolling (not the slashdot kind) over and around the wreak as well for fish.
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My supposed to be may.
I hate Mondays. Especially when they happen to be Tuesdays.
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The bottom of the ship will be resting at 140'. This means the deck will be a lot higher, and the bridge higher than that. I'm not sure of the ship's dimensions, but I'd hazard a guess that the bridge will almost certainly be divable by complete beginners. This will give a great intro to what it's like to peer round a wreck (from the outside; I wouldn't recommend that you do a wreck penetration until well after you're comfy diving at depths , have a little training in wreck diving and would feel comfy ha
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Spend any time at 40m, and just make sure you know what you're doing; deco stops come into play very quickly.
Not really an issue if you're diving with a single cylinder, which is usually the case for someone on vacation. You shouldn't be at that depth in the first place with that setup. But ignoring that, you'd probably be low on air before running into other problems.
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It has been a long time since I was diving but is it still the 60 60 rule?
60 minutes at 60 feet was safe. Of course that usually just about worked out as a single tank.
Re:Too deep... (Score:5, Informative)
The recreational limit is 130 feet. So you won't be able to look at the very bottom of the hull.
Unless you're trained by an agency that includes deeper and more adventurous diving. BSAC, for example, will certify experienced divers down to 55m on air. Decompression stops are introduced (although briefly) to entry-level divers and deco planning is an essential part of training.
To put the depth in context, one of most popular wrecks, the SS President Coolidge sits at about 70m but there are dives available for all abilities. 45m seems about right for a wreck of this size and I look forward to diving it in a few years time.
Re:Too deep... (Score:4, Informative)
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For those following along at home, the draft is the part of the boat under the water line. Judging from the picture, assuming less than 10' of the boat sinks into the seabed, you've got a good three stories (four or five depending on what's still left of the radar dishes) of ship above the 130' depth. Most of the interesting bits (on the deck) should still be accessible to 100' divers.
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I'm not sure about feet, but I wouldn't like to be 43 metres below the surface.
40m is PADI's absolute limit - with their Advanced Open Water certification - and their tables let you stay there for a very short time.
However, you'd probably not find it unpleasant at that depth - it's easy to keep going deeper if you don't monitor your gauge. It's deep enough to risk nitrogen narcosis - that 'just' makes you euphoric and foolish, like being drunk, and clears up immediately if you just swim up a bit.
140 to the Bottom, not the top (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is 100 feet tall, so the top of the structure will start at 40ft. There will be plenty to see without deco stops and tri-mix.
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I was thinking exactly the same. If it is going to be anything like Zenobia [buddydivers.com] outside of Larnaca, Cyprus, it'll offer quite wide variety of possible dives. Shallow dives at Zenobia are very easy but still give you very good view of the huge wreck. Deep dives around the wreck give you access to the entrances to the wreck and main deck where you can still see cars and trucks suspended in their chains.
As they actually plan to use it as a dive site, I'd assume that they also make sure that it'd be available for t
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They're going to prevent it from rolling on to its side?
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It may well be wider than it is tall - in which case if it rolls the top will be more shallow.
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The ship's beam is 71'. I don't think the deck will be vertical if it's lying on its side, so it will less than that above the bottom
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The Vandenburg has a draft of 24 feet. So the waterline should be 115 feet down. From pictures of the ship, it looks like the bridge is about 50 feet above the waterline, so the top of the wreck ought to be no more than 60 feet below the surface.
17000 tons of steel gone to waste (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I'm sure it'll be nice for the fish and a few extreme divers , but wouldn't it have been more use (and possibly be even more envirometally friendly than a new reef) to recycle all that steel? I wonder how much energy it takes to mine and extract 17000 tons of iron from its ore....
Re:17000 tons of steel gone to waste (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, it isn't just nice for the recreational divers, it's good for the tour companies, hotels, restaurants and bars that cater to them as well.
In any case, this is not the only ship waiting to be scrapped. If it were economically valuable to recycle those ships at a higher rate, it would happen. As it is, there is currently a glut of steel, so the choice would be to keep the vessel dry docked indefinitely until steel prices rise enough to justify scrapping. World annual steel production is something like
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That's the mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is a huge opportunity for our species to reduce its environmental footprint, but that doesn't invalidate reuse.
More importantly, recycling is really a last resort. Recycling requires a lot of energy, first to transport the materials to someplace where they can be melted down, and secondly to melt them down and reprocess them. That's why recycling isn't economical in many cases, because it's cheaper to simply mine new raw materials than to try to gather
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Well take the longer view of this.
This ship started off as a troop transport in WWII It was built in 1943! It was mothballed and reactivated a few times and finally turned into a tracking ship.
This ship has been reused often and now is going to be used as an artifical reef. Seems like a great use of resources to me.
Eventually it will end up as... Iron ore again.
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I agree completely. Plus, considering the fact that natural reefs are disappearing at an alarming rate all around the world, any contributions we can make toward preserving the natural order with artificial reefs can only be a good thing.
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Plus I would love to dive this wreck! :)
The whole green thing lets one feel good about a trip the Keys
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Um, no. In case you haven't noticed, the USA is a huge producer of raw materials like iron, copper, etc. There's tons of ugly copper mines in my state (Arizona).
Yes, some particular materials (such as Coltan and lithium) are only available in 3rd world countries, but we're talking about steel here. Iron ore is quite plentiful.
Now, you could certainly make an argument that the environmental and human health damage due to mining pollution is imposed on poor Americans that we don't care about, but don't tur
Re:17000 tons of steel gone to waste (Score:4, Informative)
Except for apparently about the only way the steel is worth more than the cost of disassembly is when you send it to India. And then you get stuff like this:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13443629/ [msn.com]
Where they pay a bunch of workers the bare minimum to wade through the asbestos and other chemicals, risking fire and falling, and leave the leftovers on the beach. I'm not sure the environmental and human cost of these operations makes the energy savings for the steel really pay off.
Of course, I'm all for finding better ways to scrap ships, but the cost of steel right now is low enough there isn't a ton of a market.
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I'm pretty sure that these boats are stripped to bare metal before being sunk. In other words, the hazardous materials part of the problem doesn't really exist.
Still, (safely) chopping a boat up can't be cheap. However, we are hurting for jobs, so it couldn't hurt...
(The deferred dismantling of the Reserve Fleet actually makes a lot of sense from an economic perspective. If the government has a project that it can defer almost indefinitely, it makes sense to wait until there's a recession and/or high une
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Still, (safely) chopping a boat up can't be cheap. However, we are hurting for jobs, so it couldn't hurt...
If you mean "we" as in the USA, no, we're not hurting for jobs. There's a lot of out-of-work people, but strangely enough I don't see any of them moving to California or wherever so they can pick produce. There's tons of poor-paying jobs, but not many people are willing to do them. They'd rather sit around and whine that they can't find a job.
The only "jobs" we're hurting for is extremely overpaid,
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Accepting responsibility for what self-serving actions? It's not my fault your neighbors lost their jobs. Maybe they should have picked better careers. Were they real estate agents by chance?
Yeah, it sucks that a lot of people have lost jobs, but that's what happens in a down economy. But I've also noticed that a lot of people were getting paid way to much money for completely useless jobs (like real estate agents and mortgage brokers) during the bubble (and developing useless websites during the previo
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A bigger issue to me is that Steel isn't just iron and nickel, there's all kinds of other stuff in it. This is littering, plain and simple. Remember in Zodiac when they're talking about some transformers or something which were turned into a "habitat for marine life"? When you drop stuff on the bottom of the ocean, of course it will be a habitat for marine life, that's where the marine life is. But will it be a good home, or will it be like some toxic housing projects where the sidewalks and playgrounds are
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Yes, I'm sure it'll be nice for the fish and a few extreme divers
Why do you say 'extreme' divers?
I suspect this thing will be swarming with dive tours every day the weather allows.
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Most of those divers that swarm all over places are not qualified to dive to that depth. This thing will be sitting far deeper than the 18m limit recommended for most recreational divers.
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As discussed in another thread - you don't have to dive to the bottom. There's lots of popular wrecks that beginners (or even advanced recreational divers) don't reach to the bottom of.
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Reefs arn't exactly well known for their CO2 sucking up abilities unlike rainforests.
Why not recycle the steel ? (Score:3, Informative)
It takes about 25 gigajoules of energy per tonne to make steel, but if you recycle it you can get back 18 gigajoules per tonne.
In carbon emissions it takes 2 tonnes of CO2 to a tonne and you get back about 1.5 tonnes.
If most of the boat is steel that makes 9,000 tonnes of steel wasted , 163 petajoules of energy wasted or 13500 tonnes of CO2 emitted for an artificial reef.
The energy is around the same required to run a 1 GW power station for almost a day.
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This may all be true.
But to make a real economic evaluation of this, we'd also need to know the worth of having a man made reef right there, and the cost of the various alternative ways of creating one.
If that spot really needed a reef, maybe one made out of reclaimed steel is the best way to make one. And one where the steel is already assembled into a suitable shape - so much the better.
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If it's so profitable to recycle steel, then why didn't YOU buy the ship and recycle it?
Most likely, the labor costs to disassemble all that steel would have more than made up for the energy savings in recycling versus mining new iron ore.
Whereas, the profit obtained in tourism from having an artificial reef is worth far more than the money gained from recycling it.
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I wouldn't say it's that straightforward to be fair.
It was public property, bought entirely by the tax payers yet no one asked the tax payers if they'd like it auctioned off or recycled, it's also being sunk in a public place.
If they owned the area they were sinking it in it'd be a little more straightforward of course but I believe it's dubious to simply say it's theirs so they can do what they want.
Residents of Monroe County actually support this (Score:2)
As a Florida [fiscally-conservative] taxpayer, I say this is a smart investment.
Good for fishes... (Score:5, Interesting)
...not so much for fishermen.
Where I'm at we try to sink ships like these (steel ships) on or near fish breeding grounds. This will accomplish two things. First it'll provide refuge for fish and second it'll discourage fishing there. Trawlers can't fish if there's a big ship there. The trawls will break if they try so most stay well clear of sites like this.
Experts say that about 90% of all "large fish" are now gone so we need to do something about overfishing. This is "something" although not nearly enough.
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No, it is great for fishermen. Just not commercial fisherman.
Who is hurting the fish populations more? The guy going out with his buddies can catch 20-25 fish per day when they can get out or the commercial fisherman who goes out and catches 30 tons of fish per day 6 days a week excluding hurricanes?
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Right you are. The most effective measure seems to be to create preserves where fishing is simply not allowed. This allows big healthy populations to build up, something you don't get if you just limit fishing.
The most disturbing result of overfishing is that fish who mature early are more likely to reproduce, since smaller fish slip through the nets. This plays bloody hell with their life cycle.
Ever been to Cannery Row in Monterey? Nowadays a tourist destination. Used to be a major port for landing and can
Can't do it here (Score:2)
Our diving center wanted to sink a 70m long, 40+y old trading ship. The reason was that with it we could have more tourism in the town, more sea life, and the shipyard (which was the owner of the ship, located only 300m from the purposed sinking location) didn't have to pay for towing and scrapping the ship (net loss). But we soon come to an impassable obstacle in the form of a treaty which my country (Croatia) signed barring intentional sinking of any ship (for whatever purpose).
This is what you get when y
Nooo!!! (Score:2)
Don't sink those antennas! I want!
Antenna Envy is a terrible thing.
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It's wild (Score:5, Informative)
I got my PADI certification in Hawaii and for the "deep" dive, we went out to where the U of H had sunk a research vessel that had once been a minesweeper. It was sitting upright at 100ft and that was an experience nothing to date had prepared me for: we descended down and down and suddenly this enormous black shape appeared right below me, and there was this ship, in all its sunken glory.
Standing on the ocean floor, looking up at the ship from "ground" level, was wild. I'm not certified to do the kind of diving you'd need for the Vandenberg, but if I thought swimming over a minesweeper was a mind-blowing experience, I can't imagine what something like that Vandenberg would be.
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Oh the fun of diving on garbage. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a scuba diver myself, I've never been terribly impressed with wreck diving. Oh, I suppose it would be interesting to dive on a historical wreck, as you are experiencing a part of history.
But when they take an old ship, strip it to dilapidated wreckage you wouldn't take money to set foot on while it was floating, and sink it, suddenly I'm supposed to be all excited about seeing it underwater.
I guess you could say that all the wildlife it attracts is what is really interesting to dive on, but then, why not dive on a natural reef?
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Do you really want a bunch of inexperienced divers with no bouyancy control
slamming into natural reefs & kicking up silt?
Aside from being something different to see, wrecks make good training sites for all
sorts of skills.
As an added bonus they have a commercial/tourist value that helps
make providing and improving marine habitat more affordable.
Who suggested that? (Score:2)
>Do you really want a bunch of inexperienced divers with no bouyancy control
>slamming into natural reefs & kicking up silt?
Who suggested that?
>Aside from being something different to see, wrecks make good training sites for all
>sorts of skills.
My point was, and continues to be, that it is funny that you take a nasty, dilapidated stripped chunk of industrial machinery that no one would want to walk aboard if it were tied to a pier, sink it in 100 feet of water and suddenly it's a cool place t
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My point was, and continues to be, that it is funny that you take a nasty, dilapidated stripped chunk of industrial machinery that no one would want to walk aboard if it were tied to a pier, sink it in 100 feet of water and suddenly it's a cool place to visit.
While I get your cynicism, it's a pretty fair argument that everything is more interesting under water. Boulders on land are generally boring. But if you drop it into a warm part of the ocean, it suddenly attracts colorful and often unique wildlife. Within a short period of time, it's unrecognizable.
While you might be unimpressed by wreck diving, there are many out there, myself included, who are awestruck by the manner in which the sea reclaims otherwise uninteresting objects.
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why not dive on a natural reef?
Might as well get used to the artificial ones. Natural reefs recently acquired this terrible habit of dying and disappearing.
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I guess you could say that all the wildlife it attracts is what is really interesting to dive on, but then, why not dive on a natural reef?
It was my understanding artificial reefs not only attract marine wildlife, they also promote it, which is a good thing if many natural reefs are, in fact, endangered. . .
US Air Force Ship? (Score:2)
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Before it belonged to the Air Force, she belonged to the Army. During WW II, the Army actually had more tonnage afloat than the Navy.
I find it interesting that the submitter labeled this ship a "USNS", as does the picture caption in the Wikipedia article. That designates a non-commissioned naval vessel crewed to some extend by civilians. This ship only carried that designation for a few years in the late 50s. Before that she was either a "USS" or a "USAT" (US Army Transport). And then she was a "USAFS" for
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Where do you get the idea that the USAFS period was "brief"? It lasted from the early 60s to the late 70s.
I suppose the navy has a monopoly on fighting ships. But why should they have a monopoly on other kinds of ships?
I don't see any of this as counter-intuitive. It's only strange if you have a superficial understanding of what something is. Like people who think that all finned sea creatures are fish, all non-human animals with hands are monkeys, all warships are battleships, etc.
We all make mistake like
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Not quite. Aside from that, and shipboard security, they were also there so that a fleet had a body of trained ground-pounders available for shore actions. When you read about naval raids on Caribbean islands in the Eighteenth Century, remember that what went ashore was, mostly, the marine contingents of the various ships, with shore parties of sailors if needed, mostly serving as gunners.
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Those naval raids were carried out by the Royal Navy, right? No USMC before 1775. If I'd been thinking about non-U.S. marines, I would have mentioned one of their primary roles: keeping the sailors in line. The U.S. Navy always had an easier time with that because it never relied on pressed men [wikipedia.org].
Even if you do need to do the occasional "force projection from the sea", that's not a serious reason to have a separate naval infantry service. You can always board Army troops, something they often had to do anyway
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AIUI, the problem with this was that first, Army troops would take time to get accustomed to shipboard life while being transported and second they'd need some time ashore to get back into proper shape for the assault. Marines, OTOH, spent most of their active service aboard ship, and as they were expected to help run the ship (moving stores, hauling lines as t
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I suppose marines would indeed have an advantage over regular troops with respect to dealing with the hardships of sea travel. But I find it hard to believe that this played any role in the creation of a Marine Corps. In those days, there just weren't enough of them for that to be a factor. They weren't like modern marines, equipped for big amphibious deployments. They were just small cadres aboard fighting ships.
That said, I have to admit I'm relying on logic and argument when I should be relying on docume
Interesting approach to garbage management... (Score:2)
No officer, I'm not dumping a billion tons of military waste in the ocean to avoid the costs of disposing of it and recycling it properly. I'm making an artificial reef!
There's an idea that started in marketing if ever I heard of one.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:4, Insightful)
It's interesting. Plus, we all like arguing over the environment and this is a perfect article for that. just wait for "how come the government is allowed to dump its old stuff in the sea and the rest of us have to pay for disposal?"
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As if there isn't enough heavy metals in the water supply, the US drops 9550 tons of iron in the ocean. You don't do *anything* by halves, do you ?
(Let's wait for the first lemon to point out that iron is not a heavy metal, then we can all go "whoosh" at his expense).
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Iron is pretty much the most important fertiliser for aquatic plants.
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People who are anemic are suggested to cook with Cast Iron (the iron leeches into the food). Iron also has a tiny role in helping you carry O2 in blood.
Iron's not exactly uranium either, although it is heavy and a metal.
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"'s full of iron, 's good for you"
"Oh great, why don't we just boil the anchor".
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Okay, so we can all go "whoosh" at MY expense then.
You know, a +1 Whoosh moderation would cut down on an awful lot of misunderstandings (and also misplaced IRONy)
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You know, a +1 Whoosh moderation would cut down on an awful lot of misunderstandings (and also misplaced IRONy)
That's actually a feature of language itself. Most people write like they would speak, and they forget that all the other information their voice carries is lost.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:4, Interesting)
It's being paid for by people who want to use it. Most of the preparations required for turning it into a diving target/reef are also required to drag it somewhere to be scrapped.
It was a reserve fleet ship; there's been a big push to dispose of most of them in the past five years or so. Remember those ships floating about through New Orleans during Hurricane Gustav? Yep, at a shipyard being prepped for scrapping.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:4, Interesting)
"Plus, we all like arguing over the environment and this is a perfect article for that."
Not really, considering that dumping a cleaned and purged hull as a home for marine life isn't the same as sinking a dirty ship or dumping pollutants.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:5, Interesting)
It is swimable though [divewreck.co.nz] and it's not an unimpressive sight, but I hope the waters of the Key are less violent than that of Wellington, New Zealand.
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I just got my diving certification at Key Largo a few weeks ago, and it's probably the most fun I've ever had. The visibility is usually 50+ feet in most areas.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:4, Funny)
Assuming the wikipedia article on the ship is true, then the ship is currently owned by bankers and not the government.
I can't help thinking though the ancient tradition of the captain going down with the ship should be applied here, since the captains will be bankers. There's no better place for bankers than Davy Jones Locker.
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And now that the banks are largely owned by the feds ... who really owns it?
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Got me, but... Imagine a beowulf cluster of them! :P
Because that ship looked so cool (Score:2)
Otherwise you got me.
I figure it this way, the interesting point of the story was the ship itself. I really never knew they existed before this announcement and it is very interesting to see in this time and age of being friendly to the environment that the final use of this ship is a reef.
Consider it has been in service from 1943 to 1993 and has had multiple roles. The last of which makes one of the coolest looking ships I can recall. It is part of our technological history. How we got a better understa
Re:Excuse me, (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, I'd imagine the number of geek divers might is pretty limited, but I do know a few.
It's actually quite a geeky activity. Although being unfit makes decompression sickness more likely, it's not an activity that requires much in the way of physical prowess. There's maths in those dive tables, or if you prefer gadgets there's dive computers. Not that there's not plenty of gadgetry involved in the breathing apparatus side of things.
Then there's the geekery of exploring a different world - it's amazing what's there underwater. And (as PADI put it) "floating weightless like an astronaut" (which you don't really, but there you go).
The thing that scares me more is geeks who think they can second guess the tolerances in the dive tables. I'd rather turn my brain off and obey them to the letter.
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Interesting that you'd mention PADI, though.... the deepest they certify recreational divers is 40m. 130 feet. And they recommend that you never go over 100 feet. If you want to dive a wreck that's in 140 feet of water, it requires specialized training... Also, according to PADI's dive tables, the no-decomp limit in the dive table at 40m is 2 minutes. Not a lot of bottom time to explore a sunken warship.
I'll probably make my way down there to explore it at some point... but there's much more accessible ship
Re:Excuse me, (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting that you'd mention PADI, though.... the deepest they certify recreational divers is 40m. 130 feet. And they recommend that you never go over 100 feet. If you want to dive a wreck that's in 140 feet of water
Good points, but I have a critique. There was a Japanese sub that sank off the coast of Hawaii that people dove. It was in about 140 feet of water, but the top deck was at 110 feet. Remember, unless your suicidal or stupid (or working for the Discovery Channel), you don't actually go under or into the wreck; you just go near it and around it. For PADI, wreck dives are one of their advanced courses.
That said, too many untrained divers went to the Japanese sub and went all the way to the floor and had decompression issues. The sub was eventually raised, towed out deeper (way outside of recreation diving range), and sank again. I hope either 1) this ship is bigger (taller) or 2) they have better precautions in place.
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it's not an activity that requires much in the way of physical prowess.
In 2005 I took my PADI open-water certification. It wasn't that hard and I'm not overly fit, however IIRC the unfit in the class had trouble with four things -
- A swimming test whereby you have to swim 200 meters
- A treading water test whereby you have to tread water for 10 minutes
- A "Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent" (CESA) test whereby you have to steadly swim to the surface exhaling continously in a low/out of air situat
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- A swimming test whereby you have to swim 200 meters
- A treading water test whereby you have to tread water for 10 minutes
- Shore dives whereby with all your gear on you've got to walk out and then swim to a dive buoy.
Fair play, these are moderately challenging.
- A "Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent" (CESA) test whereby you have to steadly swim to the surface exhaling continously in a low/out of air situation from a depth of around 15 meters (need good lung capacity).
In fact (and this will appeal to geeks) you can do a CESA starting with near-empty lungs, because as you ascend pressure decreases and the air expands. There are definite psychological barriers that make it a challenge. Geeks who can put faith in what they know about Newtonian physics might do better than most!
Re:soon it will be... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, like almost a whole *gasp* year.
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You don't think a sunken navy ship is worth going and seeing on its own?
I think it will be the best of both worlds for a while.
Re:soon it will be... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm no reef expert, but these things take a really long time to have coral start growing on these to the point where you'd want to go diving down to see them.
For some time, this will be a recognisable ship - that's a cool thing to dive around in itself. Wreck diving is a fairly popular specialisation.
In addition, while coral takes a long time to grow, other plant life takes hold much more quickly, and fish will seek refuge anywhere there's shelter. Go snorkeling somewhere sandy - if you want to see fish, you'll need to find a boulder.
Finally, coral does take hold in human timescales. When Bali started attracting tourists, they quarried coral reefs to build hotels, with diasterous results - not only were the reefs lost, but it resulted in serious beach erosion. The practice was banned but the damage was done. Where I stayed, they had dumped huge concrete blocks where the reef used to be. Already coral was recolonising, anenomes and tropical fish were everywhere. It'll take years before it fully recovers - but not thousands of years, or even hundreds.
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aside from anything else, it will be a good training site for people who want to dive 'real' wrecks.
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> The ship I served on from 1989-1992, the USS Guadalcanal (LPH-7) was sunk as a target.
Bloody hell... I hope they gave you a bit of warning
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Off topic? Really? "What would you do with a free battle cruiser?" seemed perfectly on-topic to me.
I think the off topic mod is just a code for "I don't like this comment, but there's no -1 Disagree to be found."
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I would assume that, these days, when they intentionally sink a ship to make a reef, they get rid of all the toxic fluids and such, such as diesel fuel, lubricants, fire-extinguishing chemicals, etc., before sinking it. In the old days, they probably didn't bother to do that.
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USS, or United States Ship is a designation that is specific to a warship. Being a warship implies active service under the United States Navy.
USNS, or United States Naval Ship is a designation that is specific to a non-warship. Naval hospitals, certain research vessels, some surveillance ships, and other ships not appropriate for combat are included. These are not under direct command of the United States Navy, but are under the command of the Military Sealift Command. Often these ships are crewed by c
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This boat was owned by venture capitalists. If that steel was really worth more money than they got for this venture, believe me they'd have done that.
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You do realize that breaking up most ships for scrap costs more than the value of the materials, unless you do it someplace like India where you can ignore all kinds of environmental and safety rules and pay your workers almost nothing?