EOD Marines sink former gunboat Douglas - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

EOD Marines sink former gunboat Douglas

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — You sank my … patrol gunboat?

On a mission that doesn’t come along often, explosive ordnance disposal Marines from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, N.C., got to sink a retired Navy ship April 30.

Research Vessel Lauren, formerly the patrol gunboat Douglas, now rests partially sunk on a sandbank at the Atlantic Ocean’s edge off the North Carolina coast. The 164-foot-long ship is now a sitting target for fighter pilots, thanks to 60 pounds of explosives carefully rigged by the air station team.

“It was pretty much a targeted shot,” said Gunnery Sgt. Randall Schwandt, staff noncommissioned officer in charge of the air station’s EOD unit. “Doing targeted shots, we train for it, but we don’t really have an operational target. We actually sunk a boat. You don’t get to do that a lot. It had to be coordinated correctly, and it had to be spot-on.”

To pull it off, the EOD Marines spent hours planning how much C-4 explosives would be needed — and where it needed to be placed — in order to sink a ship that needed to look intact from the air. Planning began immediately after EOD received the ship from the air station’s environmental office this spring. By that time, the ship already was stripped of potentially hazardous materials.

As the sun rose April 30, more than a dozen EOD Marines took a two-hour ride aboard the ship, pulled by tug boat to the spot that would be its final resting place. The tug nudged the ship onto a shoal next to other aerial targets and the EOD Marines hopped aboard the tug boat for a front-row view of the show, just 300 meters from the Lauren.

Their moment of truth was the push of a trigger.

“It came together quite well,” Rudd said. “It was literally a boat sitting there one second, then the next it was a cloud of smoke. You really couldn’t look at the superstructure and see that it had exploded.”

What’s left of Lauren — now just a partially sunk, hollow shell of the ship it once was when it was commissioned in February 1971 — is for fighter pilots to seek and destroy. The ship was decommissioned and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register in 1997 and transferred to a research center in Annapolis, Md.