A new entry every day, spanning the history of human seamanship — from the reed boats of the Tigris to the combat systems sailing out of San Diego today. Edited and published from aboard JADA, the 1938 Sailing Yacht.
On May 11, 1932 the Navy's giant airship USS Akron tried to land at Camp Kearny on the mesa above San Diego. Lightened by the sun and spent fuel, she rose with sailors from the training station still holding the lines. Two fell to their deaths; a third hung on for an hour before he was hauled aboard.
In 1769 two Spanish supply ships reached San Diego Bay, the San Antonio on April 11 and the San Carlos on April 29 after 110 days. Scurvy had wrecked both crews; the San Carlos lost nearly all of her sailors. The survivors' sailcloth hospital on the beach became the start of a city.
The Navy began studying dolphins in 1960 and moved the program to Point Loma in 1967. Its dolphins guarded harbors in Vietnam and Bahrain, and in 2003 dolphins from San Diego hunted mines at Umm Qasr. Dolphins and sea lions still train off Point Loma today.
In 1903 the commodore of San Diego's Corinthian Yacht Club wrote to Sir Thomas Lipton asking for a trophy. The silver cup arrived that July. The yacht Detroit won the first race in 1904, and Southern California clubs are still racing for it.
Kitty Hawk came around Cape Horn in 1961 and entered San Diego through a channel dredged to 42 feet for her, with a band playing 'California, Here I Come.' She sailed from North Island for the last time in 1998 to become the Navy's carrier in Japan.
From 1901 the Navy recruited Filipinos, and for decades it allowed them to serve only as stewards. The rule ended in 1971. Many who served settled near the 32nd Street base, and San Diego County became home to one of the largest Filipino American communities in the country.
Scripps oceanographers Walter Munk and Harald Sverdrup built the first practical method for forecasting surf, first for the North Africa landings in 1942. The weather officers they trained in La Jolla called Normandy's surf 'high but manageable.' Munk was born on this day in 1917.
The retired destroyer escort was bought by the San Diego Oceans Foundation to become an artificial reef. She was meant to go down in front of a spectator fleet on July 15, 2000. A swell flooded her the day before, and she now lies on her side in about 100 feet of water in Wreck Alley.
In February 1942 about 600 San Diego fishermen volunteered their boats and themselves. Roughly fifty clippers were painted gray and turned into Navy patrol and supply craft. They ran aviation gas to Midway and Christmas turkey to Guadalcanal.
Built on the Clyde in 1904 for a Scottish landowner, Medea hunted submarines for the French Navy in World War I and served the Royal Navy and Norwegian sailors in World War II. She came to the Maritime Museum of San Diego in 1973 and still steams on the bay.
After USS Thresher was lost in 1963, the Navy built two deep submergence rescue vehicles that could mate to a stricken submarine's hatch and bring up 24 people at a time. Both were based at North Island. Mystic was never needed for a real rescue.
Elected in 1912, 'Brother Bill' Kettner spent four terms winning the Navy and Marine installations San Diego still lives with: the training station, the naval hospital, the Marine base, the North Island air station. He was known as the Million Dollar Congressman.
The 20-gun Rose hounded Rhode Island's smugglers until the colony asked Congress for a navy. On October 13, 1775, Congress voted for its first armed ships. Her 1970 replica became HMS Surprise in Master and Commander and has been at the Maritime Museum of San Diego since 2004.
In 1995, off San Diego, America3 fielded the first all-women team in America's Cup history. In the deciding race of the defender trials, Mighty Mary led Dennis Conner by about four minutes at the start of the last leg. She lost by 52 seconds.
In 1774 the frigate Santiago put in at San Diego for about 25 days, landed Fray Junípero Serra, then sailed north on Spain's first voyage to the Pacific Northwest. Pérez met the Haida off what is now British Columbia before scurvy turned him back.
Japanese immigrants brought pole fishing and long-range boats to San Diego; by 1918 they made up about half the city's fishing crews. After Pearl Harbor community leaders were arrested and boats like the clipper Prospect were seized, and on April 7, 1942 about 1,150 San Diegans of Japanese descent were put on a train to Santa Anita.
Built in San Diego in 1914, Pilot carried harbor pilots out to incoming ships until 1996. She served the Coast Guard in World War II and still takes passengers around the bay from the Maritime Museum.
Saratoga sailed from San Diego in January 1929 and, with a single cruiser for company, launched a mock air strike on the Panama Canal. In 1938 she 'attacked' Pearl Harbor from 100 miles out. She was entering San Diego on December 7, 1941.
From August to October 1965, three teams of aquanauts lived 205 feet down on a canyon ledge off La Jolla. Former astronaut Scott Carpenter stayed 30 days. A bottlenose dolphin named Tuffy carried mail and tools down from the surface.
In March 1803 the Boston brig Lelia Byrd was caught smuggling sea otter pelts in San Diego Bay. Her crew locked up the Spanish guards and ran for the harbor mouth under the guns of Ballast Point. The fort fired; the brig fired back. Nobody died, and she got away.
The fastest ship in the Atlantic was being converted to a troopship when a welder's torch ignited a bale of kapok life preservers on February 9, 1942. She capsized in New York Harbor from the weight of firefighting water. The Navy had spent four months converting her.
Converted from a minesweeper in 1950, Calypso became the most famous research ship in history, filming the ocean for 40 years. Cousteau made the sea something a generation that had never been underwater could reach.
June 1905: the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin mutinied over rotten meat, sailed to Odessa, and triggered a civilian uprising. Eisenstein's 1925 film is still studied in every film school — and the Odessa Steps sequence never happened quite that way.
Between 1803 and 1805, Edward Preble led six vessels against the Barbary Coast, bombarded Tripoli six times, and negotiated peace at gunpoint. The Navy learned what it was in the process.
Between 1895 and 1898, Joshua Slocum sailed a 36-foot sloop alone around the world. He was 51 years old. He rebuilt the boat himself from a rotting hull. He is the reason single-handed offshore sailing exists as a sport.
May 4, 1982: an Argentine Exocet missile hit HMS Sheffield and she burned for six days before sinking. She was the first Royal Navy warship sunk in combat since WWII and the first ever lost to a sea-skimming missile.
October 25, 1944: during the Battle off Samar, the tiny destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts attacked a Japanese fleet that included the largest battleship ever built. She was sunk, but she turned the battle.
From the 1880s to the 1920s, two-masted steam schooners ran the California coast carrying redwood from the northern mills to the growing cities of the south. San Diego was their southern terminus.
January 23, 1960: Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh descended 35,787 feet to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. The Navy's bathyscaph Trieste, based in San Diego, made the only crewed descent to the deepest point on earth.
Merchant mariners died at a higher rate than any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces in WWII. They weren't recognized as veterans until 1988, forty-three years after the war ended.
February 28, 1942: two Allied cruisers ran out of ammunition fighting a Japanese invasion fleet in the Sunda Strait. Both ships went to the bottom. Their crews were among the worst-treated POWs of the war.
Kaiser Shipbuilding broke shipbuilding into 250,000 prefabricated pieces and welded them together instead of riveting. The fastest build was 4 days, 15 hours. The fleet they built outlasted the war by decades.
March 1967: the supertanker Torrey Canyon grounded on the Scilly Isles and spilled 36 million gallons of crude oil. Britain bombed her with napalm to burn the oil. It didn't work. The law changed.
German U-boats sank 3,500 Allied ships and killed 72,000 men. Winning it required cracking Enigma, building escort carriers, and flying patrols around the clock for six years — because lose the Atlantic and the war is lost.
Found under full sail off Cape Hatteras in 1921, perfectly intact, fires lit, food cooking, crew gone. Five separate federal agencies investigated. The case was never solved.
Built in 1855 on the highest point of the peninsula, it was too high — fog hid it every other night. They abandoned it after 36 years and built a new one 462 feet lower.
Shackleton's ship was trapped in Antarctic ice for ten months, then destroyed it. He then sailed 800 miles in a lifeboat and rescued every single man.
For over a century San Diego's Portuguese community has crowned a queen, paraded to the water, and blessed the boats. The tuna fleet is mostly gone; the festa never missed a year.
Portuguese and Italian families built the largest tuna fleet on earth out of Point Loma. Three-pole men hauled hundred-pound bluefin over the rail by hand. The canneries ran day and night where the Convention Center stands now.
The fourth ship to carry the city's name is an amphibious transport dock homeported in her own city — one of the few warships that can see her namesake skyline from the pier.
The yacht that beat the Royal Squadron in 1851 gave her name to sport's oldest trophy. A replica called San Diego home for years — and the Cup itself came to the bay in 1988 and 1992.
San Diego's one-design Star fleet turned bay chop into world championships and Olympic medals. The club that started in a bait barge became one of the most decorated in world sailing.
In 1780 the frigate Hermione crossed the Atlantic in thirty-eight days carrying Lafayette and word that French troops were coming. A war turned on one fast passage.
In thirty-five minutes of August 1812, the American frigate dismasted a Royal Navy veteran and watched British shot bounce off her live-oak hull. A sailor shouted that her sides were made of iron. They weren't. They were better.
Canadian schooners anchored beyond the three-mile limit with holds full of whisky while fast launches ran the gauntlet into Mission Bay at night. The Coast Guard's San Diego flotilla fought a shooting war most cities never heard about.
Through the 1880s Chinese-built junks worked abalone and fish camps from Ballast Point to the Coronado Islands, until exclusion laws beached the fleet. Their redwood junks were the first commercial fishing boats this bay ever had.
The first nuclear submarine transited the North Pole submerged in August 1958, rewriting every map of naval geography. Her signal — Nautilus 90 North — reached a world that suddenly felt smaller.
She was ninety feet of breadfruit transport with a crew pushed past its limit. The launch voyage that followed — 3,600 miles in an open boat — remains the greatest feat of small-boat seamanship ever recorded.
San Diego won the destroyer base in 1922 and mothballed a hundred four-stackers along the fence line. The fleet that fought two oceans learned its trade in the channel you sail today.
British blockades cut Germany's potash, and America's answer was Macocha — giant harvester barges mowing the kelp beds off Point Loma. The plant at Chula Vista turned kelp into cordite ingredients for three armies.
Yankee whalemen worked the gray whale migration from a try-works station where the submarine base sits today. For twenty years whale oil was the port's biggest export.
Consolidated Aircraft turned San Diego Bay into a runway. PBYs assembled on Pacific Highway found the Bismarck, spotted the fleet at Midway, and pulled thousands of downed airmen out of the sea.
She anchored three miles off Coronado with roulette, craps, and no law aboard. On New Year's Day 1937 a storm snapped her cables and threw her onto the beach, where her bones still surface at low tide.
In April 1908 Roosevelt's white-hulled fleet anchored off Coronado and San Diego threw the biggest party in its history. City leaders used the visit to argue for a naval harbor. Washington listened.
A boiler explosion aboard the gunboat Bennington killed sixty-six sailors at anchor off H Street on July 21, 1905. The city closed and buried them on Point Loma under a granite obelisk that still watches the harbor.
Glenn Curtiss taught the Navy's first aviator to fly off North Island in 1911. Every carrier pilot in the Pacific traces a line back to that strip of Coronado sand.
Launched as Euterpe at the Isle of Man in 1863, she survived a mutiny, a cyclone, and twenty-one circumnavigations before finding her berth on the Embarcadero. She still sails the bay at least once a year.
Found under sail and in order between the Azores and Portugal in 1872, cargo intact, boat gone, crew never seen again. A century and a half of theories have not closed the case.
The armored cruiser San Diego struck a mine laid by U-156 off Fire Island in July 1918 and sank in 28 minutes. Six men died of a crew of over a thousand. She lies there still, upside down in 110 feet of water.
Cabrillo's flagship was built on a Guatemalan beach from local hardwood and Spanish iron. In 1542 she carried him into a harbor he called San Miguel. The replica sails from the Maritime Museum today.
She carried 765,000 troops during WWII, sometimes with 16,000 soldiers aboard in a single crossing. She was too fast for U-boats. She's now a hotel in Long Beach.
Dudley Morton took command of USS Wahoo in late 1942 and spent the next year rewriting the rules of submarine warfare. He sank 27 ships. He was killed on his seventh patrol.
Before gold, California's economy was cattle hides. Boston merchants sent ships around Cape Horn, traded manufactured goods for hides, and carried them home. San Diego was the largest hide port in California.
Langley was converted. Lexington and Saratoga were converted. Ranger was the first purpose-built American carrier, commissioned in 1934. She operated in the Atlantic through WWII.
October 1520: Magellan's expedition entered an unknown strait at the southern tip of South America. Thirty-eight days to cross it. One ship deserted and went home. He emerged into a sea so calm he named it Pacific.
Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd was the first American flag officer killed in WWII. They named a Fletcher-class destroyer after him. She earned seven battle stars.
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo entered the bay on September 28, 1542. He called it San Miguel. The name changed. The Navy came 350 years later and never left.
1850s: the clipper ships raced from China to London with the new tea harvest. The first to arrive got the best price. Speed was money. Cutty Sark and Thermopylae were the measure of it.
U.S. submarines were 2% of the Navy's strength and sank 55% of all Japanese shipping. They ran completely under radio silence. They are called the Silent Service to this day. San Diego was a primary submarine base.
1905: the Russian Baltic Fleet sailed from St. Petersburg, around Africa, across the Indian Ocean, and into the Tsushima Strait — where the Japanese Navy was waiting. It took 40 minutes.
Longitude was unsolvable. Latitude was easy. For 200 years, every ocean crossing relied on knowing north and guessing east-west. The error accumulated. Ships ran aground.
CV-43 commissioned in 1947, served in Korea and Vietnam, and was home-ported in San Diego from 1983 until decommissioning in 1990. She flew more combat missions from San Diego than any other carrier.
1915: the plan was to force the Dardanelles with warships and take Constantinople. The warships hit mines. Then the infantry landed on the wrong beaches.
James Cook made three circumnavigations between 1768 and 1779. He mapped New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, and Tahiti, made the first transit of the Antarctic Circle, and was killed in a misunderstanding on his third.
The Underwater Demolition Teams were created in 1943 to clear beach obstacles before amphibious landings. They were the first special operations forces in American military history. BUD/S has been in Coronado since 1943.
The Japanese attack disabled the battle fleet, but missed the carriers. The aircraft carriers were at sea. December 7 was designed to end the Pacific War in one morning. It prolonged it by four years.
Hamilton founded it in 1790 to stop smugglers. Today it runs search and rescue, drug interdiction, port security, and the world's largest fleet of icebreakers. San Diego Sector is one of its largest.
September 1813: Oliver Hazard Perry fought the British fleet on Lake Erie with ships built from green lumber in 90 days. He won. The entire Northwest Territory changed hands.
NASA's Solid Rocket Booster recovery ships were purpose-built for the job. The recovered casings were shipped to Utah via San Diego.
At the Battle of the Chesapeake, September 1781, the French fleet fought the British to a draw, then held position long enough for Cornwallis to run out of options at Yorktown.
She was legally compliant. The Board of Trade's regulations called for lifeboats sufficient to launch in case of sinking. Nobody had updated the formula since 1894.
1849: 40,000 men came by sea to California. They came around Cape Horn, across the Isthmus of Panama, up from Mexico. San Diego was the first harbor they reached.
CL-53 was the most decorated U.S. ship of World War II. Eighteen battle stars. She was called "The Little Bitch" by her crew, affectionately. She came through the entire war without losing a man to enemy fire.
Between 1000 BC and 1200 AD, the Polynesians colonized the largest ocean on earth using stars, swells, birds, and the color of the water. No other people in history traveled as far with as little.
March 8, 1862: CSS Virginia spent one day destroying the wooden Union fleet. March 9: the Monitor arrived. The battle was a draw. Every wooden warship in the world was obsolete.
For thirty years, GPS replaced the sextant. Then a Navy war game showed what happened if GPS went down in combat. They started teaching celestial navigation again.
1914: submarines were considered a secondary weapon. By 1917, German U-boats were sinking 900,000 tons of Allied shipping per month. The whole system of war had to change.
Every ocean culture has a version of the mermaid. Sailors reporting them had usually been at sea for months. Some were probably seeing manatees. Some were seeing things that weren't there.
It started with a pilot landing on a moving ship for a bet. It ended with 100,000-ton nuclear vessels that project power anywhere on earth. San Diego is where a lot of that history happened.
John Paul Jones had one small frigate, three French prizes, and a crew of sailors who hadn't been paid. He took them into British home waters and won.
She fought thirty-three engagements in the War of 1812 and the quasi-war. Her last battle was with HMS Cyane and HMS Levant on February 20, 1815.
Henry the Navigator's engineers designed a hull that could beat against the wind. With it, Portugal explored the coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and connected two hemispheres.
The three squadrons of Dauntlesses that found the Japanese carriers at Midway came from different directions and arrived at almost exactly the same moment. Four of them turned the war.
CVN-68 was the first of the nuclear-powered Nimitz class. She entered service in 1975 and is still deployed. She was home-ported in Bremerton, then San Diego.
Sir John Franklin led 128 men into the Canadian Arctic in 1845. They found the passage. None of them survived. The ships weren't found for 168 years.
His real name was probably Edward Teach. He lit slow matches in his beard before boarding, so smoke rose from his face in battle. He died in hand-to-hand combat at 39.
Norfolk and San Diego between them park the United States surface fleet. What gets built in Norfolk's yards eventually sails into San Diego Bay.
August 1942: the Marines landed on Guadalcanal. The Navy lost five cruisers in the first surface engagement. Six months later, the island was won, and the Navy knew what it was doing.
She delivered the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, then sank. Four days in shark-infested water. 316 survivors from 1,195.
Captain Bligh spent five months in Tahiti loading breadfruit plants. His crew spent five months in Tahiti. The plants didn't make it home. The crew didn't either.
Before Panama, there was no other way. Ten thousand ships have rounded Cape Horn. The number that didn't make it has never been counted.
The Arizona was hit by a 1,760-pound bomb that detonated her forward magazines. She sank in nine minutes. Eleven hundred and seventy-seven of her crew are still entombed in her hull.
May 7, 1915: a German submarine sank the Lusitania in 18 minutes. A German newspaper had published a warning the morning of her sailing.
31 BC: Octavian's fleet met Antony and Cleopatra's at Actium. When Cleopatra's ships broke for Egypt, the battle was over. So was the Roman Republic.
1851: the schooner America sailed from New York, won a race around the Isle of Wight, and started the oldest trophy in international sport. San Diego has hosted it twice.
She launched from the Brooklyn yards in 1945, served 47 years and four wars, and retired to San Diego Bay in 1992. She is now the most-visited naval museum ship in the United States.
May 1942: the opposing fleets were never within visual range. The war at sea had changed, and the admirals were just beginning to understand it.
May 1941: the most feared battleship in the world broke into the Atlantic. The Royal Navy spent eight days and most of its available fleet finding her.
1947: Thor Heyerdahl built a balsa raft using pre-Columbian methods and sailed 4,300 miles from Peru to Polynesia to prove ancient humans could have done the same thing.
Magellan died in the Philippines. Drake completed his circumnavigation, raided Spanish ports, and came home rich. Queen Elizabeth knighted him on his own deck.
Columbus's flagship ran aground on Christmas Day 1492. Her timber built the first European settlement in the Americas.
480 BC: Persia sent a thousand ships to Greece. Themistocles tricked them into a narrow channel and let the sea do the fighting.
She didn't sink because she hit an iceberg. She sank because the people who built her couldn't imagine an iceberg mattering.
October 1944: Japan committed its entire remaining fleet. The Americans committed theirs. Over four days and four separate engagements, the Imperial Japanese Navy ceased to exist.
A century before Columbus, China sent fleets of four-hundred-foot ships across the Indian Ocean. Then it stopped.
Ferdinand Magellan didn't finish it. Sebastian del Cano brought the last ship home. The world had been proven round the hard way.
Nelson cut the French line in two and changed the shape of the world. He did not live to see it.
She was built to fight Barbary pirates. She ended up defining the country's idea of itself.
Japan built the largest warship in history. Six months later, the Pacific war had already decided that her kind was obsolete.
One entry every day, posted at sunrise — drawn weighted but unpredictable from the full history of seafaring. Some days you will read about Carthaginian quinqueremes or the Hanseatic League. Some days about kraken sightings and ghost ships. Some days about the propulsion plant of a Virginia-class submarine. The point is the breadth, and the through-line: every line of stone, wood, iron, steel, and silicon that humans have ever shaped to move on water. San Diego is where the modern chapters of that story are being written, and where this archive is being kept.