Posted on 03/23/2016 1:25:55 PM PDT by NRx
The USS Conestoga left the Navy yard at Mare Island, Calif., on Good Friday, 1921, bound for Pearl Harbor, with a complement of 56 sailors.
It cleared the Golden Gate at 3:25 p.m. and steamed into the Gulf of the Farallones in heavy seas. Conestoga was a rugged oceangoing tug that had once hauled coal barges for a Pennsylvania railroad.
But 17 years after its launch in Baltimore, it had undergone hard use and had a reputation as a wet boat, one that shipped water easily.
At 4 p.m. that day, as the San Francisco light ship recorded big waves and gale-force winds, Conestoga passed Point Bonita and was not heard from again.
Wednesday, 95 years later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Navy announced that the wreck has been found a few miles from Southeast Farallon Island, just off the California coast.
The announcement came at a morning ceremony at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, attended by relatives of the lost sailors.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Yeah, and the good ship and crew was in peril...also.
There is a video out there of a killer whale mom with a calf at the Farralons.
A great white shark moves in to get the calf but the mom bites and kills the shark.
When I’d ride my bike to the top of Pacifica it was possible to see those islets, 26 miles away on a clear day. There was a marker up there that pointed to them, right by the old Nike Missile site.
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Thanks for sharing...great story.
Oh that makes sense, in case the big boys get disabled.
Thanks for the clarification and lesson Okie. :)
This reminds me of the U-Boat off of New Jersey that took a long time to learn the name. Germans thought it went down off of Gibraltar rather than NJ. Was the subject of a book called, “The Last Dive” where a father and son died. John Chatterton finally unlocked the secret and visited a sister in NJ of one of the lost sailors. She cried when she learned he was lost only a short distance from her home.
The famous Potato(e) Patch, (Six Fathom Bank) is located just east of the “Gate”, not out to the Faralones.
The Bank is formed from sediments dropping out of suspension after being flushed from the bay by the tide. It mainly formed during the California Gold Rush when hydraulic mining was clogging streams, rivers and San Francisco Bay with tons of sediments.
Now THERE'S a proud American right there. Good man.
>>Buncha youths on the upper deck.
Most of us looked like that in the early days of a Navy career.
in a sense some black agitators are correct in that blacks did indeed participate in many careers for the last century and a half..
..we don't learn about them....
instead, black history focuses on how horrible and how terrible life is and why they're owed so much...
this pic shows that there was opportunity....always has been...
>>Soooo, the USS Indianapolis’ demise wasn’t unique.
In 1921, it wouldn’t have been so unique. By 1945, ships carried a lot more communications gear so it was more unique.
Not sure my memory goes back that far.
yes i have noticed that as well.
Thanks for the info though
>>I see two black guys...I thought Americans were racist and didn’t allow blacks to do anything....
They were stewards. They cleaned up after the officers and shined their shoes. In 1921, America was pretty racist. But, we moved past that and the black victimization movement dragged us back into it after 2009.
>>Not sure my memory goes back that far.
I have photos of me.
Thank you i should have tried that.
Yes, I'm thinking that was the area where the tour boat witnessed the confrontation between a great white shark and a killer whale (orca). Interesting show.
How did they find the shipwreck?
Thanks. You beat me to it. There were a lot of things that were better back then but race relations weren’t one of them. The Navy was segregated and blacks and Filipinos were basically restricted to being uniformed servants.
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