At Least Someone In Marketing Had The Good Sense To Cancel The “Mission Accomplished” Banner Before Things Really Got Embarrassing

The Intrepid is not going anywhere:

If elaborate fanfare were all it took to propel an old aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Intrepid would be across the Hudson River in New Jersey by now. Despite a sendoff yesterday that involved two senators, two former mayors and a few admirals, however, a team of powerful tugboats failed to pull the old ship out of the mud off Manhattan.

The Intrepid, which has housed a military museum on the West Side for almost 25 years, was to be towed to Bayonne, N.J., to begin an overhaul that would take up to two years. But after more than an hour of heaving and straining, six big tugs with a total of nearly 30,000 horsepower had moved the ship no more than 15 feet in a few lurches that left it wedged in the river bottom.

The tugboat operators scrubbed the mission at 10:30 a.m., sending the museum’s managers scrambling to draw up Plan B. Bill White, the president of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, said he had called the Navy and the Pentagon for help and ordered a team of divers to take a close look at what was gripping the four propellers of the 920-foot ship. Jeffrey McAllister, the senior docking pilot for McAllister Towing, the tugboat operator, said: “There’s a buildup of mud underneath the vessel. We were trying to get it to wiggle.” But the ship “came to a fix,” he said, and now “it just is solidly held.”

. . .

[A]t 9:20, at the crest of the high tide that followed the full moon, the Christine McAllister, a tug with 6,140 horsepower, pulled taut a cable hooked to a chain attached to the ship’s stern and revved its mighty engines. Four other tugs stood by to help guide the Intrepid downriver.

But soon they, too, were spewing black smoke as they churned up foam in the brown water of the Hudson, trying to separate the Intrepid from the pier.

After five minutes, the retired crewmen lining the ship’s rails and the few hundred onlookers gathered on Pier 84 began to realize something was amiss. The hulking Intrepid, which survived five kamikaze attacks in World War II, looked like a mule resisting the force of several farmhands.

At 9:50, Matt Woods, the Intrepid’s vice president of operations, stood on the flight deck and reported that the ship had moved just 10 feet. “I didn’t think it was going to come out easy,” he said. Referring to the propellers, he added, “The screws are in the mud.”

Tom Cerniglia, 68, of Tappan, N.Y., who was a petty officer on the Intrepid from 1958 to 1960, was unimpressed.

“Ten feet. For a ship like this, that’s nothing,” said Mr. Cerniglia, who now performs at birthday parties as a clown named Tic-Toc.