The Vandenberg is About to Sink!

The actual day of the Vandenberg sinking, dozens, maybe hundreds of boats made the six mile trip out (5.8 miles from Stock Island). There were so many boats headed out, it made the seas choppy! Even tiny boats and a few jet skis made the trip out for the Great Vandenberg Sinking Event. We all had to keep about a mile away, although some VIP boats got to get in a little closer. This included Key West Express, a ferry boat that makes trips between Key West and Fort Meyers (also Miami Beach in Summertime). It blocked views of a bunch of boats, and boy were those boats mad!

The scheduled detonation of explosives was for ten am, and it actually took place around 10:20, and then everything happened so fast it was over before we knew it. It took just under two minutes after the explosions, for the Vandenberg to sink all the way under the surface of the water.

There was a lot of smoke, as you can tell by this picture. The picture was taken just seconds after the detonations began, and this was only the beginning of the smoke. After another thirty seconds, the Vandenberg was completely obscured by the smoke and we didn’t really see it sink all the way, there was such thick smoke. But it was still exciting and we were proud to be a part of Key West history.

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.