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 (about 4 knots) and, at 8 a.m. today, it was east of Clallam Bay/Sekiu.
To track the Ranger today, go to https://www.marinetraffic.com/, zero in on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Peninsula coastline (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 (there are also escort tugs).
BREMERTON — The mothballed aircraft carrier USS Ranger was being towed slowly through the Strait of Juan de Fuca this morning as it begins Day 2 of a five-month, 16,000-mile trip to a scrap yard in Texas.
It passed the Coast Guard station on Ediz Hook in Port Angeles at 12:01 a.m. today.
The Ranger left Bremerton at about 9 a.m. Thursday.
Onlookers bid her goodbye.
“It’s sad. It’s the end of an era,” said Walter Moller, a signalman aboard the Ranger in the late 1970s, who watched it leave from Bachmann Park in Manette. “It’s time to say goodbye to the old ship.”
“Everyone bemoans the fact they’re getting scrapped,” said Dan Wierman, a retired Puget Sound Naval Shipyard engineering technician, as he waited for the vessel to pass Bachmann Park.
“But they all have a finite life. It has served its purpose.”
Donna Cosey, who used to work for the company that maintained the mothball fleet, felt it surreal watching the Ranger sail out of Bremerton.
She saw it during its empty, dark retirement and felt a paranormal presence on board at times.
“It was eerie,” she said. “I think it was haunted.”
Glade Holyoak, who served as the Ranger’s chief engineer in the late 1980s, too, had to see her off one last time.
“It’s a piece of your life,” he said. “You put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears.”
Retired in 1993
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 the lengthy voyage around South America because it can’t fit through the Panama Canal.
Crosby Tugs of Golden Meadow, La., was contracted to tow it.
The carrier USS Constellation left on the same five-month, 16,000-mile 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.
