What I Did Yesterday!

Did the spring bay cruise on the SS American Victory.  This is my second trip, the first trip can be found here.

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

Where I spent most of my time.

The upper aft forward hold has been converted into a gift shop display area.  The wood floor is really a hatch leading down to the mid aft forward hold.  There are three levels of hold.  When she was an active ship they'd remove this decking to open the hatch, load using her own deck davits and then when the lower level was full, replace the decking and load the next level.

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A panorama of the display area.  The kites on the right are the exhibit I was on board assisting with.  They're gunnery training tools.

The hold is unairconditioned and the outside temperatures were in the low 80's.  That makes the hold in the low 90's.

But that is nothing compared to how warm and toasty the (SQUEEEEE) engine room is!  Despite the guided tour, I have little to no clue what nearly all of what you're looking at does.  Plus I missed taking a lot of the pictures I should because I was listening to my guide!

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

Port boiler witness holes.  The two boilers feed two steam turbines (high and low pressure) to run the shaft and a similar high/low combination operate the ship's DC generators.

Water pump for the boilers.  An interesting fact about the engine room is there's almost nothing made out of any material that's useful for aircraft production.  No aluminum, no magnesium, no manganese.

Shaft alley facing forward.  Max rpm is about 110.  Here it was spinning about 70.  The water line is about five feet above my head here.

Marv added some vids he shot.

The temperature in the engine room was well above 100˚ in most places.  Every space that needed to be constantly manned has a duct blasting the crewman with outside air.  So the area between the boilers was tolerable, but if you moved out of the wind, sauna.