The USS Vandenberg

The USS Vandenberg is still parked at Truman Waterfront, the crews working busily to clean the last debris, scrape paint, and otherwise clean her up for this month’s deployment. Everyone is very excited, and the local paper claims people who haven’t dove in years are renewing their SCUBA certifications just to see what will become the world’s second-largest artificial reef. It’s a big deal for everyone, just just the Key West diving community. Well, you can tell it’s a big ship just by looking at it, but you also might like to know what in the world this behemoth was used for when she was an active military ship.

Well, she was a real live War ship from World War II. The USS Vandenberg was originally a Navy transport ship, but her name wasn’t USS Vandenberg. She was called the USS General Henry Taylor and didn’t get her Vandenberg title until the 1960s. She’s a California girl, built in 1943. She plied the waters between the US west coast and the Southern Pacific for her first two years of existence, then moved over to the Atlantic side, after the war when troops and dependents needed to come home. Plus, she did a lot of shuffling refugees back and forth as well.

Her travels took her all over the world in the 1950s, from India to Germany and France, the Meditteranean and Northern Europe, and also the Caribbean. She carried Hungarian refugees to Australia in the short-lived Hungarian revolution in 1957.

The 1960′s brought a very different purpose to the USS Vandenberg: she acquired new instrumentation and helped the Navy track (our) incoming missiles and spacecraft during testing. This job lasted about 20 years, then she was retired in 1983.

Then she just sat floating in the James River Naval Reserve Fleet near Norfolk, VA for almost a quarter of a century. Now she’s here in Key West, pulled from the mothball fleet, towed down like a dead barge, and will be sunk soon for divers to enjoy. The Vandenberg sinking is supposed to be by June 1, 2009.

Vandenberg Launch

Well, it’s finally here in Key West and soon we’ll be seeing the much-anticipated Vandenberg launch. The 528-foot ship is docked at Truman Waterfront while crews work on it. We went over today and there were crews all over the ship, doing clean-up jobs before the big day of the Vandenberg launch. It’s so exciting, even if you don’t ever do any Key West diving, since the sinking itself is awesome. Who ever gets to see a giant ship sink in the ocean? Anyway, the upcoming Vandenberg launch is the most exciting thing to happen in Key West this year. It’s a close tie with the dropping real estate prices, but a huge sinking ship that will become the world’s second-largest artificial reef definitely wins out!

The actual Vandenberg launch must take place by June first. That’s the official start of hurricane season. Towing a 528-foot long behemoth that’s basically dead in the water, was risky enough during March, when it traveled from Jacksonville to Key West. High winds and rough seas can really make that sort of operation extremely difficult, to say to the least. The day it arrived in Key West, they had to prohibit any cruise ships from being in port. That made the conglomeration of Duval Street businesses very unhappy of course. They actually wanted to keep the Vandenberg out at sea for one more day, until Wednesday of that week, when there weren’t going to be any cruise ships anyway. No dice! Too risky! Winds were in the 20-knot range that week anyway. So you can see why they want the Vandenberg launch to happen before June 1.