The Museum of the USCGC Taney in Baltimore, Maryland
The city of Baltimore is filled with museums, and due to the shipping industry, and the ship building industry that has supported this city for hundreds of years, many of those museums are located on, you guessed it…ships. One such museum is located on the USCGC Taney, a ship that was originally built in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in 1930. The end of this vessels career came in 1986, after fifty plus years of continued services. Her last missions took place during the years between 1977 through 1986, when she carried out search and rescue missions as well as patrolling the waters of the Caribbean for drug runners, as well as training missions for the United States Coast Guard. The largest drug bust in American history happened in 1985, when the crew of the Taney seized one hundred and sixty tons of marijuana. Just one year following the ship was decommissioned in Virginia and donated to Baltimore in order to serve as a memorial to the maritime history and as a museum.
Many people choose a lunch time adventure at a Baltimore restaurant before heading out to the museum of the Taney and what better way to experience the ship, her historical duties and the city itself than to have some steamed crabs, and then head to the docks where those crabs are unloaded. The Taney was first ported off the Hawaiian island of Honolulu. Until the years of WWII the crew took her out in search of opium runners and on various search and rescue missions. Often times the ship was used to run food and supplies to the American colonies living on the Line Islands. Once the war started, the ship was fitted with guns and sonar equipment in order to locate enemy submarines. The Taney fired at the attacking Japanese planes on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, and when the bombing subsided, took to patrolling the ocean waters for submarines. The crews and the ship have had many years, many stories, and what may not be covered in the tour of the museum, you will definitely sense just by standing on the decks of this incredible vessel.
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