Goodbye Flip

While I was growing up, we lived in a small Texas town so remote that we had cable radio…Well, almost.  We certainly didn’t have a local newspaper, so I grew up reading the Fort Worth Star-Telegram—the paper from the mighty metropolis to the east of us and a good newspaper that I still occasionally read.  But as good as the paper is (and was), the paper I first loved was the Weekly Reader.

If you’re reading this, you probably know all about the Weekly Reader, since it started weekly publication in 1928, providing age-appropriate news and public interest stories for school children across America.  I can’t remember exactly but I think it cost about a dollar a year, which cost was probably partially subsidized by the school.  Since my family didn’t have a television yet and about the only thing that I remember hearing on the radio back then was the farm report or Porter Wagoner, the Weekly Reader was a major source of news for me.  

For a poor, dumb ol’ country boy, the stories in the Weekly Reader were real eye openers—particularly the frequent stories about science, NASA, and exploration.  I can still remember some of those news stories practically verbatim, such as the article about Sealab and the aquanauts exploring the ocean floor.  Another one of those stories was about an amazing “ship” that was designed to partially sink on purpose.  Called the Flip Ship, the aft 300 feet of the vessel would flood with water and sink, flipping the forward 55 feet upward and aft 90°, creating a research laboratory.

Technically, Flip wasn’t actually a ship at all, since the vessel had no propulsion and it had to be towed to its destination, so it was a FLoating Instrument Platform, but probably no one referred to the vessel as such except for the U.S. Navy, who owned the platform.  The Scripps Institute of Oceanography, a part of the University of California system, used the unique platform as a research laboratory, for over 1000 experiments, because the deep vertical ballast made the portion of the platform above the water extremely stable and almost immune to wave action.  When the experiments were finished, compressed air would be pumped into the vessel, expelling the seawater, and returning it back to its horizontal floating position, ready to be towed to the next research location.  

The inspiration for such a novel vessel came from an unusual source:  A scientist was conducting experiments on sonar improvements while aboard a US Navy submarine, but found that while the sub was surfaced, the natural wave action of the ocean rocked the ship, interfering with his experiments.  One day, while the sub was in port, his eye was caught by an ordinary mop floating next to the pier.  He observed that the mop floated with the mop head below the surface and with just the top foot of the handle sticking straight up out of the water.  More important, he noticed that the mop stayed stationary as the waves hit, neither rising nor sinking as the waves passed, and he reasoned that a vertically oriented, partially submerged ship might behave the same way and be similarly unaffected by wave action.  In 1962, the Flip Ship, technically the RP FLIP, was launched in Portland, Oregon.

With a crew of five, whose jobs were mainly to care for the generators, compressors, and water purification system, the vessel would be towed into position, then the forward ballast tanks would be flooded with 600 tons of seawater to rotate it.  The process that took thirty minutes, with the last two minutes said to be the most exciting for the eleven scientists on board.  Once in place, the extremely stable platform could remain in position for up to a month.  

As you have probably guessed, the interior of the Flip was a special design with some fixtures meant to be rotated, while others had to be duplicated on either the wall/floor or the wall/ceiling.  All of the counters and kitchen appliances in the galley were mounted on gimbals.  The main living area was located in the "cradle" end of the vessel, and included a galley, a mess hall, a lounge, and a recreation room. The crew's quarters were in the "handle" end, with some as much as 150 feet underwater, and they included individual cabins, a shower room, and a laundry room.  Overall, those working on Flip said it was an enjoyable duty, but after days of living in horizontal rooms, it took several days for the crew to become accustomed to living in the ‘new’ vertical rooms.

Flip, unfortunately, has become a casualty of COVID.  After fifty years of scientific service, the research platform was to be partially dismantled and added to a museum collection, but after it sat idle during the Pandemic, the Scripps officials decided it would cost too much to prepare the vessel for display and sent the platform to a breaker for dismantling.  As I write this, Skip is being towed to her final destination.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the latest news about Skip from the Weekly Reader, though I would be happy to have a subscription.  (For my grandchildren, of course.). The Weekly Reader—like so  many other newspapers and magazines—was killed off by the internet and ceased publication in 2012.