USS Recruit, San Diego CA | Nearby Businesses

USS Recruit was a landlocked "dummy" training ship of the United States Navy, located at the Naval Training Center in the Point Loma area of San Diego. She was built to scale, two-thirds the size of a destroyer escort, and was commissioned on July 27, 1949. Recruit was commissioned for 18 years, for much of that period the only landlocked ship to hold that status in the U.S. Navy."Sailing" on a sea of concrete at the Naval Training Center, she assisted with the training of over 50,000 new recruits per year, providing an education in the fundamentals of shipboard drills and procedures, using standard deck and bridge gear like that found on all naval vessels, including lifelines, accommodation ladders, signal halyards, searchlights, the engine order telegraph and the helm. However, due to her landlocked status, Recruit lacked an engine or screw, and therefore was affectionately nicknamed the "USS Neversail." Reflecting her dual identity as both a ship and a building, she was also known as Building 430, located on Geary Drive between Evans and Chauncey roads.Recruit was decommissioned in March 1967, due to the inability to classify the unique ship in a computerized registry of Navy vessels. However she was later recommissioned in 1982, and refurbished to look like an Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate. Commissioned or otherwise, she served continuously as a training facility from her construction in 1949 until the base was closed by the BRAC commission in 1997.