After nearly three years of construction, fine tuning, testing and crew training, the Navy’s newest ship is finally home in San Diego, California. The third ship to honor our wonderful island town, the U.S.S. Coronado, LCS-4, sailed into San Diego bay, under the Coronado Bridge, and to its mooring at 32nd Street Naval Station Monday, March 10, around 10 a.m.
The Navy’s newest littoral combat ship, LCS-4, USS Coronado makes her way home past the USS Ronald Reagan.
There were spectators along the bay from I Avenue Park to the Ferry Landing and down the path of Tidelands Park. No matter where you stood, there was a pretty good view.
LCS-4 is a littoral combat ship designed to support mine, undersea, and surface warfare missions. The trimaran hull (three bows) provides a shallow draft and combined with the thruster method of propulsion (vice propellers) allows the ship to get as shallow as just under 15 feet.
The ship is scheduled to be commissioned April 5, 2014 at North Island Naval Air Station. The commissioning is open to the public and tickets can be obtained by visiting www.coronadocommissioning.net.
LCS-4 cruises past downtown San Diego on her way home, March 10, 2014.
The keel for LCS-4 was laid in December 2009 in Mobile, Alabama, where the ship was built by Austral USA, and the ship was originally scheduled for delivery in June 2012. The U.S.S. Coronado has two crews: the Blue crew and the Gold crew. Each crew consists of 40 service members (8 officers and 32 enlisted), many of whom were in Mobile preparing the ship for its journey home for many months. The building of a ship takes what can seem like a life time if you are the family of a service member away from home.
In fact, some of the crew left Coronado for Mobile in May 2013. In the ten months since that time, the ship has finished construction, taken to sea and made its way home. Though not a “typical” sea deployment, the 10 month time period has been described as a “stateside” deployment. Members of the crew could travel west to San Diego, when approved, but on their own dime. The high speed operational tempo of preparing a new ship seldom allowed for visits home. If it did, the time was short.
So, what happens in ten months? Children grow and mature and have birthdays. Children get report cards and complete artwork and have open house to share their classrooms. Spouses have birthdays and anniversaries are spent with each spouse on the opposite end of a phone connection. Thanksgiving comes, and so does Christmas. Congress has trouble approving a budget, sequestration happens, surgery is necessary and the exterminator comes regularly. The lawn needs mowing, the computer needs upgrading so that Skype will run effectively. You call, you write, the children draw pictures to send through the mail. You Skype, though not as much as you thought you would. The connection isn’t always strong and your schedules, with the time difference, don’t always align.
Life goes on as if the service member and the family are in parallel universes. Each day the sun rises and sets, each entity of the family having different experiences, doing their best to share their worlds via email, text, phone or video. Emotional support, fortunately, comes from friends — at least the support you can’t get from a spouse who is so busy and so far away. “You almost become numb to it! You forge ahead the best you know how. Somehow, you just do it.”
One spouse of a USS Coronado crew member told me that “Coronado has become my support; it is great to be part of a community.”
When the parallel universes eventually collide with a homecoming, many things have to be adjusted. The service member’s spouse and children operate on their time, their own schedule. With the service member returning, there is now another person with a unique schedule to consider in the overall family planning. It is challenging and emotional and wonderful and frustrating. It is long overdue.
Welcome home to the crew of the USS Coronado. Your families, friends and neighbors are happy you are home. The support and friendship, the camaraderie and caring, the small town community that makes the time pass and the families feel like they have lived here forever, are just some of the reasons that the name of our town is worthy to don the side of a US Navy ship.
To follow LCS-4 on Face book, click here.
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Kellee Hearther
Staff Writer
eCoronado.com
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