This one’s a little strange: San Diego’s Maritime Museum is just a collection of various old ships and submarines you can wander around. I walked up to the ticket counter on shore just outside the Star of India ship and showed the guy the QR code for my ticket on my phone, and he didn’t really look at it before stamping my hand. So it’s a pretty low-key operation.
Boarding the Star of India is interesting and unexpected. It’s an old sailing ship but strangely not that old. It’s from the 19th century and the hull is made of iron! Yes, it looks like an old wooden sailing ship but it’s not — yet it really did sail the world under wind power.
As it turns out I was doing this museum kind of backward, but that’s okay, it’s a quirky museum of old ships and the order you visit barely matters. That said the Star of India is the only ship in the museum with its own entrance on the waterfront. This particular ship is a state landmark.
For the most part these old ships are more interesting below deck where you can see how the sailors lived in cramped quarters. One unusual feature of the Star of India is what appears to be some kind of jukebox thing on the deck turns out to be a well decorated skylight from the deck below.
The museum includes so many ships I’m not going to include them all.
I intentionally skipped a Soviet submarine that’s supposedly fascinating but a pain to crawl through. It was pretty odd to see a Soviet flag flying in San Diego, if for no other reason that it makes me feel old.
Unlike kids today I remember the end of the Cold War with the USSR. Back in the day the Republican party was all about tearing down a border wall instead of building a new one. How times have changed.
The other ship at the museum that interested me was the HMS Surprise, a replica wooden ship built for tourists back in 1970. Since then it’s been used for various purposes, but was most notably featured in the 2003 film Master and Commander.
Is it a historic ship? That’s hard to say. It was initially built as a replica of the 18th century HMS Rose, but was modified to fit Hollywood films in more recent decades.
I couldn’t help laughing at the (oversized) cannons pointed at a cruise ship, wondering what it would take to blow a cruise ship out of the water with an old wood galley ship. “FIRE”, I imagined ordering the gun deck as we swung around the unarmored cruise ship.
The number of tourists at the Maritime Museum was pretty light, especially compared to the USS Midway Museum. Here and there a bunch of children were running around, but for the most part visitors were surprisingly sparse. It’s a large museum, one that can make people seasick and turn off visitors afraid of climbing or heights.
My recommendation: Overall it’s a weird museum, and as such I’m not sure who to recommend it to. Personally I loved it, and if you read this blog you probably will too. A lot of children seem to like it as well. That said if you have trouble with stairs and ladders it’s not for you.