Spider Michaels

On my quest to tour and photograph most of the museums in Houston, I came across the Houston Maritime Museum.

It’s not in the museum district, but worth going to.  It’s in an old house that I think is about 75 years old.

The admission is $5.00, which is quite reasonable to see all of the cool things they have inside.

The first model I came across was this one and I knew I was going to see some pretty cool stuff this day.

There were several military ships on display.

This one had the water in waves on the side of this ship.  It made it look that much better.

Here’s another with the water.

They even had a U – Boat.  Most say submarine.

This photo came out good.  Some of my others didn’t because of reflections on the glass cases the ships and boats were in.

Their attention to detail was superb.

I wonder how many hours to create something like this boat.  I like the colors with the white.

I saw several ships like this one below.  Some like this are called Caravels.

Seeing this Riverboat that was operated by steam was very cool indeed.  Lots of fun was had on these boats back in the day.

This model had some very large sails on it.  It’s small with large sails so I bet it was very fast in the water.

Here’s a model of a working vessel.  Notice the Heli – Pad in the rear.

Here’s another boat with lots of color.  Very nice.

These next four photos are of models of offshore oil rigs.  I was really impressed with them.

This ship was huge.  It dominated the room, with it being in the center and so large.

This was beautiful to see up close and in person.  The photos are good but not nearly as good as being there.

Pirates believed that having women on board their ship was bad luck. They also believed that whistling on a ship would cause the weather to turn stormy; as in ‘to whistle up a storm’.

Almost all pirates stole their ships because they couldn’t buy ships in case they got caught and sent to jail.

Once they had taken over a ship they had to convert it for pirate life, this usually meant making more room for sailors to live on board and strengthening the decks to hold the weight of the heavy cannons.

Although pirates have been around since the 15th century, most pirating happened between 1690 and 1720.

This model has the actual helicopter on the back.  It’s yellow.

Here is a Steam Liner that was used to make ocean voyages.  The Titanic was similar.

I hope you have enjoyed this look at the Houston Maritime Museum.  There are many more models of ships and boats to see other than the ones in this blog article.

I’d like to thank the Docent, Eric Young for walking around with me for a while and taking the photo below for me.  He’s very nice and very knowledgeable.

I enjoyed my trip to this museum and writing this article for you to see some of the very cool models on display.

Spider Michaels

https://SpiderMichaels.com