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A Canadian Naval Reserve Vessel in the Shadow of the World Trade Center
Canadian Naval Reserve Flashback to September 11th
by Bill Clearihue 2011
On September 11th, 2011 I am having a Canadian Naval Reserve flashback ... In May, 1989 the summer Naval Reserve Training season was underway. The unification of the Canadian Armed Forces was then 21 years old, but things were looking up. Distinctive Environment Uniforms were back (navy blue uniforms for the navy), 12 new Frigates were on order as were 12 new Naval Reserve-specific MCD vessels. The venerable Gate Vessels were the primary training platform for the Naval Reserve. Onboard HMCS Porte St. Louis you could still use the World Trade Center as a steering landmark when approaching New York City. By 1995 the Gate Vessels were gone and by sunset of September 11, 2001, so was the World Trade Center. The demise of the Gate vessels is of nostalgic interest to a generation of Reservists, but the demise of the World Trade Center, will be of global significance for a long time to come.
To quote from this article please cite:
Clearihue, Bill (2011) A Canadian Naval Reserve Vessel in the Shadow of the World Trade Center. Nauticapedia.ca 2011. http://nauticapedia.ca/Articles/September11.php
Site News: January 14, 2025
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,957 vessel histories (with 16,337 images and 13,935 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).
The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3998 images).
My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.
Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.
My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.
Thanks to John Spivey who is beginning his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database.