Friday, April 19, 2013

Two Harbors: The Sinking of the S.N. Castle (Catalina)

This is what I was here to see. The area used to portray the Battle of Tripoli Harbor in a 1926 silent film called Old Ironsides. In that movie, the ship used to portray the U.S.S. Constitution comes around the corner. Where I was standing at Catalina Harbor Overlook was supposed to be the port of Tripoli. I zoomed in a little for this picture:
The thing that is great about this is the U.S.S. Constitution sinks a pirate ship that in the real world was called the S.N. Castle. It was built in 1886, and you can read more about it in the link I will provide below. What they did was set it on fire, and you see it sink below the water in the movie. The remains are still out there, and if you know how to scuba dive you can see them. My picture was where it was sunk which is probably just beyond those two boats in the middle, and the movie picture is the ship as it starts to take some major damage.
Two Harbors: Ships and Movies (Youtube Version)

Two Harbors: Ships and Movies (Vimeo Version)

I’m going to let this blog wrap up this part of my day at Two Harbors. I did go on to walk to the other side of Catalina Harbor and then went on to hike the area I mentioned in the first blog. At some point I will probably show something from that and eventually my time last year at Avalon on a different day which was a lot of fun too.

http://www.cawreckdivers.org/Wrecks/SNCastle.htm

The following tracks were sampled from Incompetech.com for the video:

At the Shore, Reggae Sketch, Creeping To Ship, Evil Plan FX, Evil March, Trouble