By The Associated Press
and Peninsula Daily News
EDITOR’S NOTE You can track the USS Ranger’s last voyage by clicking on https://www.marinetraffic.com.
Towed by a tug, the carrier is moving slowly and, at 2:15 p.m. today, it was south of Bainbridge Island.
(The tugs could be seen at: https://www.marinetraffic.com/ee/ais/home/mmsi:367441370/centerx:-122.5169/centery:47.55785/zoom:10 ).
To track the Ranger today, go to https://www.marinetraffic.com/, zero in on Puget Sound (you can go directly there by clicking: https://www.marinetraffic.com/ee/ais/home/mmsi ) and look for the Crosby Leader, the tug which is pulling the Ranger. It is currently backed up by a few other local tugs, including the Pacific Knight out of Bremerton.
As they are only making only 4 knots, it is unlikely they will pass Fort Flagler State Park on Marrowstone Island before dark; the vessels might even wait until morning to schedule their transit into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
BREMERTON — After leaving Bremerton at about 9 a.m. today, the mothballed aircraft carrier USS Ranger was being towed slowly through Puget Sound today on its way to be scrapped in Texas.
The carrier served from 1957 to 1993, when it entered Puget Sound Naval Shipyard’s Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility alongside state Highway 304.
The Navy announced a deal Dec. 22 to pay International Shipbreaking of Brownsville, Texas, a penny and the value of the ship’s scrap metal to take it away.
Ranger must make a five-month, 16,000-mile trip around South America because it can’t fit through the Panama Canal.
Crosby Tugs of Golden Meadow, La., has been contracted to tow it.
The carrier USS Constellation left on the same trip last August, arriving in Texas in January.
Ranger’s departure will leave just two carriers in the Bremerton mothball fleet — USS Independence and USS Kitty Hawk.
Independence is scheduled to follow Ranger to Texas later this year.
The Navy is holding Kitty Hawk in reserve until the new USS Gerald R. Ford is ready. Ford is scheduled to join the fleet in March 2016, with its first deployment in 2019.
Ranger made 22 Western Pacific deployments, was active in the Vietnam War and was the only West Coast carrier to deploy in support of Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91.
It made cameo appearances in “Top Gun” and other 1980s blockbusters like “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.”
Efforts to raise funds to turn it into a museum failed.
Piece of my soul
Robert Johnson always saw more than a relic of gray steel and worn rivets whenever he viewed the Ranger while it was mothballed in Bremerton.
He saw home.
“It gave me a piece of my soul, I think,” the Navy Vietnam veteran told KOMO-TV in an interview this week.
“A lot of people served on it. A lot of people worked on it, played on it and many died on it.’
Johnson served on the Ranger for nearly three years, sometimes going two months without seeing land.
He worked in electronics, making sure bombing raids went without a hitch from the South China Sea.
“It’s sacred ground right down until they rip the last bolt out,” he said.
