A Present for the Battleship Iowa

While I was there today running one of the HF stations for JOTA, I happened to notice numerous pallets of "dummy" shells down by the outdoor crew break area.

I'd read in out crew newsletter that these were being delivered, but hadn't seen them yet.

Each pallet had a tag stating that it weighed 4250 lbs, and we have STACKS of them:

These were freebies from the Navy, we just had to pay the freight.

And I don't even think about how much it cost to ship them from Indiana to SoCal!

Next time I'm there I'll have my Nikon with me, so I'll get some close ups of the individual shells.

And as soon as I get some pix of the JOTA event, I'll post them here.

Suffice to say we ran 130 Scouts, in four groups, through the 4 stations we had running, and got them all signed off for the "On-The-Air" portion of their Radio Merit Badge class.

We even worked W7BSA, and K2BSA, which made some of our Scouts really happy.

And they ALL had a great time exploring the Iowa!