Battleship Cove

This is very much a work in progress, and unfortunately my site host doesn’t allow for subcategories within each album. So, here’s a pile of pictures that I’ve thrown together of what I’ve been working on at Battleship Cove, the largest collection of naval vessels in the world. The bulk of them are in the USS Massachusetts which is where I’ve been working for a bit. I’ll start shooting on the USS Lionfish soon and at that point may break this collection into groups by ship as there are five-plus ships at Battleship Cove. So in the meantime I’ve labeled all the images with their ship and location, it’s a little clunky but it basically works for now. Ultimately, I’d like to do a coffee table book on the submarine museums in the US and am thinking about this constantly.

I’ve been obsessed with submarines and ships since I was a kid and I love all kinds, whatever their purpose. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was my favorite TV show during the mid-sixties days of the Cold War, and when we moved to Germany in ’69 for a year we went by ship in the twilight of transoceanic passenger ship travel. The Swedish American Line’s MS Kungsholm took us there and back and I explored every inch of that ship. Seeing the diesel powered engine room left a big impression, watching the spinning propellor shafts, as well as the clock like system of the gyro-stabilizers was mind boggling, and the trip to the bridge was very informative thanks to a charismatic captain who put up with my incessant and probably annoying questions. Being in the middle of the Atlantic with nothing on the horizon was powerful, and to top it off, somewhere around coastal Denmark we saw a surfaced submarine, I nearly jumped out of my skin! My Dad, who was a really great photographer and introduced me to cameras got pictures of it and I’ve got to look through his millions of slides for them. To this day there’s nothing in the engineered world that gets my attention more than ships, and particularly subs.