Exploring the Aircraft Carrier

Continued from yesterday.

Staying on the USS Yorktown overnights for the whole weekend changed the ship from a museum to a home. Having full and free reign for exploring the ship any time (outside of the 11pm to 6am lights out) and anywhere made the experience much more intimate than a simple museum visit.

The ship is freakin’ huge (that’s a scientific adjective): the flight deck (top) is equal to about 3 football fields placed end to end. The hangar deck (right below the flight deck) was wide open and looked the size of being in my hometown mall.

(The interior photos I took don’t look good shrunk down to a size to fit this site. You have to see them full size — considerably bigger than this page — to appreciate the scale of the ship. The above photo shows about a third of the flight deck.)

There are about a dozen WWII era war planes in the hangar deck, and about a dozen Vietnam and later era planes on the flight deck. And even with all these planes, the areas are not crowded in the least. Heck, a B-25 bomber hangs from the ceiling over the snack bar.

The bow-end of the hangar deck houses a theater, and the aft-end has the snack bar. Above both are the crew quarters. Below are at least five decks, and in the island on the flight deck is another several levels. Delving down to the engine room, five stairs down from the hangar, was like entering the Earth’s crust; climbing up to the bridge, five stairs up from the flight deck, was like being in a New York skyscraper.

The most fun of the whole Yorktown adventure was the exploration. Wandering about the ship, up, down, around, finding new passages, new rooms, new information. We were on the ship for almost 48 hours straight, and I don’t think we explored everything. (We also spent a couple hours exploring the neighboring submarine and Coast Guard cutter.) We saw some areas of the ship that normal visitors don’t get to see because we were allowed access to areas as campers.

Calfgrit8 was excited one morning when he, (exploring on his own while I showered), found a new passage through three rooms we hadn’t discovered before. He was a trailblazer.

But all the exploration took a toll on this old body. The up and down stairs (more like ladders), and the stepping over and ducking under to get through small portals between passages and rooms played hell on someone not used to working out every minute of the day from 6am reveille to 11pm taps.

Exploring an aircraft carrier is real exercise. But it was fun. A lot of fun. (And exhausting.)

Bullgrit