More About Ships

As I was just saying, I like ships. I happened to have another opportunity the other day to be on a ship and see a documentary about a ship at the same time. PBS has a new documentary starting tonight called Carrier and they hosted a preview of the first hour on the Battleship New Jersey (US Navy - Retired) over in Camden. The New Jersey has been sitting over there for over ten years now, but I never really thought of going. But since Mom had free tickets and I wanted to see the doc it was a perfect opportunity.

The first thing that you notice about the ship is its' huge guns- they dominate almost everything else on board. They are kind of intimidating all by themselves, but imagine them firing shells up to 23 miles away every thirty seconds. We just had a few minutes to check out the ship - going below deck we got to check out the crew's quarters- basically a big room filled with very small bunks (or racks) stacked on top of each other. The bed part lifts up and there is storage underneath- but not much storage- good thing everyone on board wears the same thing everyday. Another thing that struck me right away was that a good portion of the deck was made of wood. Just long wooden planks not even painted at present. The New Jersey was built back in the 1930's, but it was in use up through the 1990's you'd have thought they would have changed that over the years.

We got to watch the film in a big tent they had erected on the fan tail of the ship- that's near the "stern" or the "back" of the ship for you non nautical types. I love shows about ships like this- I've seen several about building different ships and subs and some about the behind the scenes life on an aircraft carrier. But this one is different- firstly its about ten hours long (they shot 1600 hours of footage over six months on the USS Nimitz) and they concentrate more on personalities than on the equipment and the mission. There are over 5000 people on an aircraft carrier- some cruise ships actually carry this many now too. The filmmakers have done a great job of picking some very interesting and honest people to follow. This is a very behind the scenes look at things- you'll be surprised what the Navy allowed them to shoot. Most of the people they follow are enlisted men, from what I saw there isn't too much Navy PR talk from officers. They also let the crew's natural humor come out- I guess living in cramped quarters doing the same thing every day for 6 months makes you funny.

Check it out over the next week on your local PBS stations- my TIVO will be busy making sure I don't miss it.