Maritime Museum San Diego

 February 2025 - San Diego CA

On impulse we visited the Maritime Museum $18 and an addon $10 boat cruise. Best tour money spent, and hardly anyone else visiting.

The Maritime Museum of San Diego enjoys a worldwide reputation for excellence in restoring, maintaining and operating historic vessels. The museum has one of the world’s finest collections of historic ships, including the world’s oldest active ship Star of India. Our collection of ships and exhibits are available for public tours. Named one of the worldwide top three Maritime Museums, this needs to be on your bucket list!

We started with the 1:45 tour conducted by Kiki who was excellent.

Enjoy a narrated bay cruise aboard the oldest active pilot boat in the country! Launched in 1914 to her removal from regular service in 1996, Pilot enjoyed an active career as San Diego’s chief pilot craft – assisting almost every one of the thousands of major commercial ships to enter or leave the bay during that time.

She pointed out all the military bases in the harbour.

Naval Base San Diego and Naval Base Coronado are military bases in San Diego, California that are located near the harbor. 

Naval Base San Diego 

The world's second largest surface ship naval base

The homeport of the United States Pacific Fleet

Located on 1,600 acres of land and 326 acres of water

Has over 24,000 military personnel and over 10,000 civilians on base

Naval Base Coronado

A consolidated Navy installation that includes eight military facilities 

Includes the La Posta Mountain Warfare Training Facility, located 60 miles east of San Diego 

Has a Visitor Control Center that issues access cards and fingerprints 

Other military bases in San Diego include: Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, Naval Base Point Loma, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, U.S. Coast Guard Sector San Diego, and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton

Star of India

The world’s oldest active sailing ship. She began her life on the stocks at Ramsey Shipyard in the Isle of Man in 1863. Iron ships were experiments of sorts then, with most vessels still being built of wood. Within five months of laying her keel, the ship was launched into her element. She bore the name Euterpe, after the Greek muse of music and poetry.

Euterpe was a full-rigged ship and would remain so until 1901, when the Alaska Packers Association rigged her down to a barque, her present rig. She began her sailing life with two near-disastrous voyages to India. On her first trip she suffered a collision and a mutiny. On her second trip, a cyclone caught Euterpe in the Bay of Bengal, and with her topmasts cut away, she barely made port. Shortly afterward, her first captain died on board and was buried at sea.

After such a hard luck beginning, Euterpe settled down and made four more voyages to India as a cargo ship. In 1871 she was purchased by the Shaw Savill line of London and embarked on a quarter century of hauling emigrants to New Zealand, sometimes also touching Australia, California and Chile. She made 21 circumnavigations in this service, some of them lasting up to a year. It was rugged voyaging, with the little iron ship battling through terrific gales, “laboring and rolling in a most distressing manner,” according to her log.

The life aboard was especially hard on the emigrants cooped up in her ‘tween deck, fed a diet of hardtack and salt junk, subject to mal-de-mer and a host of other ills. It is astonishing that their death rate was so low. They were a tough lot, however, drawn from the working classes of England, Ireland and Scotland, and most went on to prosper in New Zealand.

The ship now known as HMS Surprise began life in 1970 as a replica of the 18th century Royal Navy frigate Rose. During the next 30 years Rose sailed thousands of miles as an attraction vessel and sail training ship prior to her conversion to HMS Surprise. For the academy award winning film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the filmmakers made a painstaking effort to recreate a 24 gun frigate specific to Great Britain’s Nelson era Royal Navy. The result is a replica vessel unmatched in its authenticity and attention to detail.

555 USS Dolphin

The deepest diving submarine in the world, Dolphin is responsible for many “firsts”, but is not primarily associated with any specific historic event or time frame during her nearly forty years of service. Rather, it is her unique, extreme deep-diving capability that sets her apart and has continually placed the vessel at the forefront of undersea naval research during her entire career.

In November 1968, she set a depth record for operating submarines that still stands. In August 1969, she launched a torpedo from the deepest depth that one has ever been fired. Employed by both Navy and civilian researchers, the submarine is equipped with an extensive and impressive instrumentation suite that can support multiple missions. Since the boat’s commissioning in 1968, it has amassed a startling record of scientific and military accomplishments.

The boat was designed to be easily modified both internally and externally to allow the installation of special military and civilian research and test equipment. A recent example of this modification for research and development was Dolphin’s test run of the Navy’s newest sonar system. She is presently configured to conduct extensively deep water acoustic research, oceanic survey work, sensor trials, and engineering evaluations.