Eighteen months after her trip down the Houston Ship Channel drew a global audience of military history fans – along with thousands of Texans who spent field trips pretending to fire her guns – the battleship has some new metal on her hull and a color scheme mimicking how she looked on her way back from World War II. It is a noticeable change in appearance from August 2022 when all 27,000 tons of her was lifted into a floating drydock.
The move, set for early March, is its own balancing act. Officials have been planning it for months and had hoped to get into the water in late February at one point, but they have since pushed back the timing slightly. “It really just depends on the weather and the tide,” said Matt Pham, vice president for the development of the Battleship Texas Foundation. “The drydock has to sink, so we want as much water as possible.”
When you’re trying to ease a 573-foot-long battleship into the brackish Galveston waters, you want as much water as possible helping you stay afloat. It is the same dance officials coordinated to get Texas to Galveston in 2022 – when an army of staff and volunteers prepped her for a tugboat trip down the Houston Ship Channel to Gulf Copper, which rehabs ships and oil platforms at its docks along Pelican Island.
