Waiting for Mathew.
 

It's Saturday and we are still happy to be in Baltimore. It looks like we are in a great place until this storm passes. Nobody is sure yet if we will get any storm sure so we will have to watch what happens tonight and tomorrow. We have been escorted around the city by our new friends from Cape Cod, Jack and Diane, yep just like the song! Thursday we went for a 8 mile walk to go and buy some charts. We walked by Bill Cosby's apartment building. I waved up to him but I guess he didn't see me.

So Here's Interesting Tidbits!  (SHIT for short.

This weekend is called Fleet Week. Last night we saw the USS Zumwalt enter the harbor.

The Port of Baltimore will be the site of the Commissioning Ceremony for the most technologically advanced United States Destroyer in history. The Naval commissioning ceremony has been a tradition of all navies for centuries. The commissioning is the final act that marks entrance of a man-of-war into the naval forces of her nation.  When her commissioning pennant breaks to fly from the mast, USS ZUMWALT DDG 1000 becomes a proud ship of the line. We watched it come in last night. We could only see the wheel house but I hope to get some close up pictures when we leave the harbor. As we walked around down town we see Baltimore have a few ships permanently docked.

USS Constitution

USS Constellation, constructed in 1854, is a sloop-of-war/ corvette  and the second United States Navy ship to carry the name. According to the U.S. Navel Registry the original frigate was disassembled on 25 June 1853 in Goseport Navel Yard in Portsmouth V.A., and the sloop-of-war/corvette was constructed in the same yard using material salvaged from the earlier ship. Constellation is the last sail-only warship designed and built by the Navy. Despite being a single-gundeck "sloop," she is actually larger than her frigate namesake, and more powerfully armed with fewer but much more potent shell-firing guns.
The sloop was launched on 26 August 1854 and commissioned on 28 July 1855 with Captain Charles H. Bell in command. She remained in service for close to a century before finally being retired in 1954, and preserved as a museum ship in Baltimore, Maryland, where she remains today.

USS Torsk

USS Torsk (SS-423) is part of the historic fleet of historic ships in Baltimore  and is one of two Trench Class submarine still located inside the United States. In 1945, Torsk made two war patrols off Japan, sinking one cargo vessel and two coastal defense frigates. The latter of these, torpedoed on 14 August 1945, was the last enemy ship sunk by the U.S. Navy in world war II.

USCGC Taney

USCGC Taney (WPG/WAGC/WHEC-37) is a U.S. Coast Guard high endurance cutter, notable as the last ship floating that fought in the attack on Pearl Harbor although Taney was actually moored in nearby Honolulu Harbor not Pearl Harbor itself. She was named for Roger B. Taney (1777–1864).
She is also one of two Treasury Class (out of seven total) Coast Guard Cutters still afloat. Serving her country for 50 years, the Taney saw action in both theaters of combat in world war II, serving as command ship at the battle of Okinawa, and as part of fleet escort in the Atlantic and Mediterranean She also served in the Vietnam war, Taney also patrolled the seas working in drug interdiction and fisheries protection and participated in the search for Amelia Earhart.

U.S. Lightship Chesapeake

United States lightship Chesapeake is owned by the National Park Service and on a 25-year loan to Baltimore City, and is operated by Historic Ships in Baltimore. Since 1820, several Lightships have served at the Chesapeake lightship station and have been called Chesapeake. It was common for a lightship to be reassigned from one Lightship Station to another and thus "renamed" and identified by its new station name. Even though the "name" changed during a Lightship's service life, the hull number never changed. The U.S. Coast Guard assigned new hull numbers to all lightships still in service in April 1950. After that date, Light Ship / Light Vessel 116 was then known by the new Coast Guard Hull number: WAL-538. In January 1965 the Coast Guard further modified all lightship hull designations from WAL to WLV, so Chesapeake became WLV-538.

I DID NOT KNOW THAT!