HawkeyeKane
1081 posts
Jul 20, 2012
3:44 PM
|
I went on a weekend gig tour roadtrip this past weekend. A first for me, but what a blast! We stayed in a really nice cabin on the Mississippi River that's situated on the grounds of the old Warsaw Brewing Company in Warsaw, IL.
My bandleader's brother lives just downriver on the Missouri side, and he cruised his boat up to take us all on a short jaunt up Ole' Muddy to the Keokuk Lock & Dam and back. (Luckily we had no encounters with any silver carp jumping out of the water and impacting our faces.) On the ride, our guitarist and I got to talking about what our ideal boats would be if we had the means for our pick at the litter.
I had to be honest, and I told him mine would be a decommissioned US Navy PT Boat. Huge by civilian standards, high-powered, built from wood, and all around COOL! All the great nostalgic movies and shows...PT-109, McHale's Navy, They Were Expendable...the list goes on. Unfortunately, the American PT's are all but extinct these days. Wooden hulls finally faded from the design manifests of the Defense Department, and the majority of them were sold off, broken up, chop-jobbed, or burned after the war.
Well, I got an email from our bassist this morning. He tracks down the coolest and most obscure things around on his downtime. Turns out there are about 13 survivors left in the States, most of which are of the Elco or Higgins lines of PT's. The only surviving specimen of the Vosper line, the PT-728, is still in highly functional shape. Still has all her Brownings, her Oerlikon, torpedo tubes, and depth charge launchers, albethem deactivated, and her powerplant has been overhauled to carry a pair of turbocharged diesel engines to deliver 1,100 fuel efficient HP, in place of the stock trio of carbuerated Packard V12's which ran on leaded 100 octane gasoline with 3,600 HP.
And....yes....it was until recently up for sale for one million US.
PT 728, World War II Patrol Torpedo Boat, for Sale in Hammacher Schlemmer Catalog
Would anyone have thrown in with me? We coulda rechristened her something like "Sonny Boy's Overblow"... ;-)
----------
Hawkeye Kane
Last Edited by on Jul 20, 2012 3:55 PM
|
