Sea Shadow was built in 1985 by
Lockheed Martin in
Redwood City, under contract with the
U.S. Navy, for a price of $50 million. The goal was to test whether radar-evading technology proven in
fighter aircraft could also be applied to ships.
The experiment was a success. Sea Shadow proved in exercises that it could sneak up on
aircraft carriers undetected. Elements of its angular design made their way into numerous active naval vessels. But Sea Shadow herself was never reproduced and ended up in the Navy's mothball fleet near Benicia.
After trying unsuccessfully to give Sea Shadow away to a museum, the Navy decided earlier this year to sell it for its scrap value alone. It was offered with a unique submersible barge, known as HMB-1, which was originally built for a CIA mission in 1974 to retrieve a sunken Russian submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean and later became Sea Shadow's garage.
The auction requires Sea Shadow to be destroyed, but the barge can be repurposed. That is what Bay Ship & Yacht intends to do, Cameron said. The barge will provide a unique enclosed space to meet some of the environmental requirements associated with its primary business of servicing midsize ships.
