Sara Sails The Seas

Sara and some colleagues at Los Angeles Air Force Base recently were invited by the Navy to tour and cruise on the USS Bunker Hill in San Diego. A Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser, Bunker Hill, commissioned in 1986, is 567 feet long, speed in excess of 30 knots, and has nearly 400 crew.

Her mission is to conduct sustained combat operations at sea. Here she is firing missiles during Operation Desert Storm near Iraq in 1991.


Bunker Hill also fired the first Tomahawk missile in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

Sara's brief tour of duty was a bit less eventful. Bunker Hill sailed from San Diego to Los Angeles. Here she passes under Coronado Bay Bridge off San Diego.



The San Diego skyline can be seen from the harbor.



The navigator plots the course to LA.


Bob, Sara and Brian looking forward to the day's cruise.


Sara looks on while Bob checks his GPS device for the ship's course and speed.


The Bunker Hill crew prepared a great barbecue lunch for their guests on deck.

Bunker Hill employs state of the art technology. She has a phased array radar. Unlike conventional systems which track objects once every 360 degree sweep of the radar, this ship sends electromagnetic energy in all directions, to detect and track hundreds of air and surface contacts while maintaining continuous surveillance from wave top to zenith.

At the end of the afternoon, the guests were to disembark and be ferried to shore. The waves were so high, however, they could not make the transfers.

Sara and all of her collegaues were forced to spend another six hours aboard before they were able to get to shore. Still and all, it was a valuable and enjoyable experience.


(Thanks to James Lee for sharing his pictures of the USS Bunker Hill.)