General

Submarine Sail At Kings Bay

On a visit to Saint Marys, Georgia (USA) which is along the coast of that state, we rode by the entrance to the Naval Submarine Base at Kings Bay.

It looked as though an old submarine had been submerged in the soil with only the very top of the vessel above ground.

The reality was a gunite structure made to look like a submarine with a real submarine tower on top. Those towers are called Sails.

Submarine sails once housed the command and communications centers but now contain the periscope, radar and communications masts.

The sails sit high enough when the submarine has surfaced to serve as an observation platform and an entrance and exit point since it has enough freeboard to prevent the ocean from swamping the vessel.

When the vessel is submerged under water the sail acts as a vertical stabilizer.

This particular sail at Kings Bay had originally been part of the USS George Bancroft submarine.  The submarine had been named after George Bancroft (1800-1891) a historian, author (The History of the United States) and politician. He was appointed Secretary of the Navy in 1845 and founded the Naval Academy.

The USS George Bancroft was a Benjamin Franklin class of nuclear powered submarines with ballistic missiles and was in service for over 27 years. The sub had two full crews, the Gold Crew and the Blue Crew. There were 246 crew members registered for her.

The Bancroft was built by the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics Corporation in Groton, Connecticut (USA). Her keel was laid down in August of 1963, she was launched in March of 1965, commissioned on January 22, 1966 and decommissioned on September 21, 1993.

The day the USS George Bancroft was decommissioned she was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register. The submarine was then scrapped by the Nuclear-Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program at Bremerton, Washington (USA). That was completed in March 1998.

Before the entire submarine could be scrapped and recycled a grassroots effort was started by a local submarine veteran’s group. They were successful in obtaining the sail of the submarine to be used as an exhibit at the Naval Submarine Base at Kings Bay, Georgia.  Local community members stepped up and constructed an earthen hull covered by gunite (a concrete mixture) for the sail to set on.  The exhibit was dedicated on April 7, 2000, the same year that the 100 Anniversary of the U.S. Navy Submarine Forces was celebrated.

The USS George Bancroft Submarine Sail at Kings Bay provides an interesting entrance to the submarine base as well as an opportunity for photography. Be sure to stop and visit this site when you are in the area.

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