On Thursday the seventeenth, we drove into Corpus Christi to tour the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, CV-16. Lex is moored in Corpus Christi Bay, across the shipping channel from downtown, in the area known as North Beach.
Lexington was commissioned in 1943, and served in the Pacific Theater during World War 2. She was damaged twice, once by a bomb, and the second time by a Kamikaze. After the kamakazi hit, she was able to resume full flight operations in 45 minutes, and remained with the fleet for 2 weeks before retiring for repairs.
After a nearly a half a century of active service, Lexington was decommissioned in 1991, and brought to her present location in 1992, where she has served as a floating museum of Naval Air Power. As I’m a Navy Veteran, and served in the far east on a cruiser escorting a carrier, these tours always mean a lot to me. While I’ve toured several battleships, this is the first carrier. These things are HUGE! The hanger deck, where the planes are stored and serviced, is giant, just a huge open space inside this great ship. After touring the hanger deck and forward spaces, we went up on the flightdeck, it was so big we may as well have been ashore. It’s hard to imagine a man made floating object this size. Parked on the flight deck is a collection of Naval Aircraft, including an F/A 18 used by the Blue Angels, an F14 fighter, A4 and A6 attack aircraft, and a scattering of older flying machines. Notably missing but hopefully on their way was an F4 Phantom and F6F Hellcat. Both were in the hanger deck being restored. We also went up to the bridge, and saw the ship’s wheel and engine order telegraph, as well as the plotting room where the quartermasters kept track of where the ship was.
Next was below decks. We basically ran through this, as it was getting late, and they kept announcing it was getting close to closing time. This floating city had it’s own Post Office, Hospital, Dentist office, barber shop, even a church. Everything you would expect to exist in a small town, or actually a large town was there. The crew numbered over 3000, plus another 2 thousand for the Air Wing! One really cool “added for display” room displayed hundreds of models. There must have been 2 each of every airplane ever, as well as a good number of ships and submarines, all in giant glass cases. Hurrying to get to the gift shop before closing, we finally found our way out of the ship and back into the sun. Of five tours, we did 2 1/2 that afternoon. I can’t really count the below decks tours, as we ran through most of it.
Once we made it back to solid ground, we went next door to Pier 99 for dinner. I’m betting this is a really hopping place in the summer, with a huge restaurant, giant outdoor bar, and huge patio. We sat outside with a great view of Lady Lex as well as the shipping channel. Lots of traffic in the shipping channel all day long, empty tankers coming in, loaded tankers coming out. American Oil heading off to anywhere. I had jalenpno stuffed shrimp and a burger. They made Carol a great Gluten Free chicken dinner.
Hopefully while we’re here for not quite 2 more weeks, we’ll get to go finish the tours.
