Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnought
Well given my choices, I knew she wasn't in drydock and whatever pier she was tied to appeared to be open water on the opposite side of her. Given the fact that they would not normally back her into a drydock for any reason gave me the impression that whichever pier she was tied up to she was facing bow first towards the navy yard, But I guess for all intensive purposes she could have been spun around and tied to a per say a former fitting out pier.
|
As far as I know, the Iowa class was always backed into dry dock 1. All the plans in the docking office for the ship (that I saw) were drawn that way.
The Jersey came in summer-late summer of 1981 and since it was on the west side of the pier, sunlight on the west side, it had to be early afternoon. There are no bodies around, and just hoses and staging, the ship hadn't been in long. There were no assigned sailors to the ship at that time either. Lunch ended at 12:10, but if you expected to get a crane operator to do something on a virtually dead pier before 1, you had to be dreaming, especially if you were to meet the yard photog there. (Sophia was a really sweet lady, got to know her from the shipyard bowling leagues and she never failed to say hi if she was in the area).