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If we hadn't dived to ninety feet we'd all be waving yet
My niece loved the USS Albacore. The decommissioned research submarine was a regular feature of my childhood from the first week she opened to the public as a museum ship: I loved her dials and cables and switches and hatches and hand wheels and brass fittings and the typewriters in the radio room and the yeoman's office which visitors were not allowed to try, though we were encouraged everywhere else to climb into the bunks and sit at the mess tables and take turns at the periscope and the controls which looked like the mid-century fusion of a space capsule and the cockpit of a commercial jetliner. She was crowded at every narrow turn with instrumentation and equipment and industrially painted bolts and pipes. Even through my masks, the smell of engine grease and skin oils hadn't changed in thirty years. We were handing off my niece to her father, so my mother rested her knee by the weathering display of the propellers and the other three of us went through the micro-Pullman corridor of the sub which was exactly as I had remembered it except for a mysterious shrinkage of its size around me, which did not prevent me from eeling up onto a top bunk when my niece confidently declared that I wouldn't be able to. Her father who is considerably less built for the close quarters of a submarine heroically joined her in every tight spot she demanded and at one point during their simulation of a crash dive informed her that she had blown all the vents and flooded the boat. I took a picture for my father of the Sperry Mk 19 Mod 3A gyrocompass. I took pictures of schematics and prop shafts and my niece peering over the edge of more than one bunk in her most catlike manner. Afterward there were fried oysters and clams from Bob's Clam Hut and a slight instance of getting lost in New Castle, which provided plenty of salt marsh and coastline. If we are going to keep using Portsmouth as a transition point, I want to take my niece to Strawbery Banke.
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Her father explained the workings of the submarine to her as she went. She was interested. It made me so happy. I suspect it made him happy, too: he also hadn't visited in decades. The submarine was itself, but the grounds had changed. The visitor center is expanding as we speak! (We weren't sure we even remembered a visitor center per se.)
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https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1852423.html
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I can see that requiring some assurance of historical orthography.
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It was in my head for most of the visit along with, for some reason, Peter Bellamy doing "On Board a Ninety-Eight." My repertoire of submarine songs is limited and "Chicken on a Raft" seemed tonally inappropriate considering how much fun my niece was having.
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What a great day out! And on the Albacore you can climb into the bunks and sit at the desks and so on? Very cool.
I love visiting submarines (I guess Ice Station Zebra imprinted on me very strongly when I was a teenager) but on every one I've ever been on, the living quarters were sectioned off with chains or glass panels to prevent visitors getting too close.
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Yes! The radio room was off-limits and a couple of the more fragile instrument panels are glassed off (and visitors are no longer allowed to climb down into the lower decks where the batteries and the engine room and the two smaller auxiliary machine spaces were located, although I have a vivid memory of doing so as a small child and my father confirms that it was permitted on our earliest visit) but just about everything else is up for interaction. My niece flipped a whole lot of switches and climbed into nearly every bunk in the place, occasionally having to compete for space/hotbunk with the other children who were also running through at the same time. It's very hands-on and the museum has managed to keep a remarkable amount of it from getting broken over nearly forty years.
I love visiting submarines (I guess Ice Station Zebra imprinted on me very strongly when I was a teenager) but on every one I've ever been on, the living quarters were sectioned off with chains or glass panels to prevent visitors getting too close.
Should you ever find yourself in New England, come to the Albacore! What other submarines have you visited?
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It's a memorable and seventeenth-century name and it had somehow escaped my notice until this summer.
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Thank you! It came from the internet and originated as this fanart.
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It was! I got up on three hours of sleep, but it was worth it. (And I actually slept a normal human amount last night, thanks to the total absence of the possibility of construction.)
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They are mid-century durable! My niece asked her father at one point if the boat could still be made to run and his answer was basically yes. Especially after adventures earlier this year with the WWII-era flux gate compass, I agree.