A Ship on the Ohio

On Tuesday, some of us went downtown to have a look at the LST 325 tank landing ship. It is regularly docked in Evansville, Indiana, and has a tourist season during which the crew sails to various locations, using the ticket fees and private donations to help maintain the ship. One sign told us the ship is 99% original parts, and you can read more about it here. I took a lot of pictures, some of which are pretty good and some of which were hurried and not so great. Here they are with a few captions; it's really better to let the people running the thing tell the story behind it.

The ship was docked just a block from Great American Ball Park. Cincinnati has only a few tall buildings, but they form a lovely skyline along with all the bridges and the large old homes on the Newport, KY side of the river. 

There was a very long line to tour the ship, but because it's so large, the line moved swiftly, and we were able to spend about an hour looking around. They suggest it will take 45 minutes, but one of us reads and reads and examines, and gets caught up in things, and it was easy to do that here.

I liked that two of the uniforms are accompanied by information about the men who wore them.

If I were on a ship back in those days, I'd want to work on the radar or radio, for sure. 

Or navigation.

This was a food storage area. We could smell lunch in the galley just above it. They were having Sloppy Joes.

Next we toured the top deck. Gun deck? It's been awhile since I paid some small amount of attention to areas of a Navy ship...but anyway, there are signs in Greek here and there. This ship was used by the Greek navy for a few decades and then it was given to the restoration group here. They left some of the evidence of Greek use as an homage to their own efforts.

The pilot room looked functionally elegant to me.

Here I imagined the main deck all cleared away and sailors breaking into a coordinated dance led by Gene Kelly...

We amused ourselves wondering what was inside here on the way to the officers' quarters. My vote was for whiskey.

Artistic vision...

As we left the ship, we went through crew quarters. Theron and I agreed one down from the top seemed least awful. 

The rest of the pictures are just views from the ship that I liked. These are smaller images than the originals; I might take those and crop them for interest on my old computer; this one doesn't have the software.