Here is an article I saw yesterday in the local paper. It's our loss but someone's gain. It looks like it may even end up near you, M1 (relatively, anyway.)
WWII landing craft may hit road again
Four years ago, the ship was moved to Camp Lejeune's Mile Hammock Bay from Omaha, Neb., with great fanfare.
Crews balanced Landing Ship Medium-45, welded portholes and hellholes, removed part of the 40-foot steel mast and painted the 203-foot-long, 35-foot-wide ship with 50 gallons of battleship-gray paint. Then it was moved by tug boat down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers through New Orleans, around the Florida Keys and up the Intracoastal Waterway.
The World War II-era landing craft was intended to be part of the Museum of the Marine, then known as the Marine Corps Museum of the Carolinas.
"She'll be more at home here than anywhere else," then-museum director Joe Houle told The Daily News in 2004.
But when plans for a Jacksonville hotel and conference center dissolved, leaving the museum without the waterfront lot it originally planned on, the ship was left high and dry.
"The ship can't be taken out of the water," Bill Ayers, interim executive director of the Museum of the Marine told The Daily News on Wednesday. "It just can't be done."
Now, the museum - which plans to build on a landlocked piece of property near the Beirut Memorial - is in preliminary discussions with a military group called The Last Patrol to transfer the ship to a museum on Lake Erie.
Representatives from The Last Patrol traveled to Jacksonville this week to check out the ship and determine if it can be tugged to a new location. But this is just the beginning of a long process, Ayers said.
For the ship to be transferred from the Museum of the Marine to a different museum, Ayers said, local museum officials must have assurances in writing that the new location has a place to moor the ship, has a contract with a towing company and other stipulations.
"It isn't like you go to a used car lot and pay cash for something," he said.
The Department of State also must approve the transfer, Ayers said.
The donors of the ship and another veteran organization donated at least $36,000 for the ship's upkeep, and Ayers said the Museum of the Marine has maintained it "as best we could."
"I don't think it's deteriorated at all," he said. "We take very good care of it ... but we are very limited on any restorative work that we can do."
When the ship first arrived, museum officials were required to remove most of the asbestos from the ship, which was extremely expensive, Ayers said. Some maintenance funds remain, though Ayers said he could not discuss the amount of money remaining. Any money left over when the ship is transferred will go with the ship, he said.
LSM-45 is the last remaining ship of its kind in the United States still configured for its original purpose. The ship is not open to the public, but the museum schedules two days per month for people to tour or look at the ship by appointment, Ayers said,
The Museum of the Marine contacted roughly 50 ship museums nationally to find a new home for the landing craft, but The Last Patrol was the only group that showed any interest, Ayers said.
This WWII-era landing craft was moved to Mile Hammock Bay at Camp Lejeune four years ago, from where it would be moved to a waterfront museum site in Jacksonville.
Four years ago, crews balanced Landing Ship Medium-45, welded portholes and hellholes, removed part of the 40-foot steel mast and painted the 203-foot-long, 35-foot-wide ship with 50 gallons of battleship-gray paint.
