JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The Jacksonville Naval Museum could soon be a reality after City Council voted 17-0 to approve a plan Tuesday night to bring the former USS Orleck to Jacksonville.
The Jacksonville Historic Naval Ship Association will now move forward with the plan to bring the Orleck Museum to Jacksonville to create the Jacksonville Naval Museum.
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The Orleck museum ship will be dry-docked at Port Arthur, Texas, where its hull will be inspected to make sure it can make the trip to Florida and continue to serve as a museum ship.
If it’s fit to continue and doesn’t need to be scrapped, the Orleck will get three to six weeks of hull repairs and be repainted before making the 10-day tow from Texas to Florida.
The ship will be moored stern in, starboard side to the 600-foot long “Pier 1” next to the Berkman Marina along East Bay Street in the old Shipyards area of the Sports and Entertainment District in downtown Jacksonville.
The goal is to get the ship to Jacksonville the week of Veterans Day, but that depends on weather and how much work the ship needs in dry dock.
Once moored, the JHNSA will continue preparing the museum ship for opening as the Jacksonville Naval Museum. The “pier-side” prep work is expected to take two to four weeks but could be extended.
The pier will be prepped before the ship’s arrival.
The Jacksonville Naval Museum will feature the “US Navy Cold War Experience,” which is represented by the ex-USS Orleck. The Orleck, a WWII-era Gearing Class destroyer, was heavily modified under the Fleet Rehabilitation and Maintenance (FRAM II) program in the early 1960s. The Orleck embodies the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Cold War periods in US Navy history having served in all three. The steam-powered, twin-propeller, 4 boiler Orleck is much smaller than today’s modern-day gas turbine-powered destroyers with a length of only 390 feet, 41 foot wide beam, an “air draft” of 109 foot at the topmast with a current empty displacement of approximately 2,350 tons.