The Cobia’s Voyage of Renewal

A Great War Submarine Takes to the Great Fifth Sea Once More

Recorded for the Aligned Ledger of the Order of the Great Fifth Sea

On the morning of her departure, Manitowoc’s steel leviathan — the USS Cobia — cast off from her customary moorings at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum. No longer bound for war patrols in the Pacific, she set her prow north toward Sturgeon Bay, there to undergo a season of restorative care.

It is a curious sight to behold: a war-forged submarine of 312 feet, born in the fevered shipyards of 1943, now gliding the placid waters of Lake Michigan. She moves not under her own power but shepherded by tug and towline, escorted as though a monarch being carried to her coronation. What awaits her in Sturgeon Bay is not glory but maintenance: the scraping of hull, the renewal of coatings, the careful stitching-up of steel seams against time’s relentless gnawing.

And yet, there is ceremony in this, too. The Cobia is not merely iron and rivet, but memory incarnate — one of the few surviving emissaries of the 28 submarines launched from Manitowoc. Each was once eased down the slip into these very waters, then sent by barge to the salt sea beyond. To keep the Cobia intact is to keep that improbable tale alive: that submarines of the Pacific once drew their first breath in a Great Lake.

Members of the Order could not help but quip that the Cobia, though formidable, has something in common with our own modest conveyance, the Little Concord. Both require diligent upkeep; both depend on communities of caretakers; both look faintly out of place when set against the serene backdrop of Lake Michigan. The difference, of course, is one of scale: the Cobia has depth charges in her pedigree, while the Little Concord has picnic baskets.

Still, in their own ways, each vessel embodies the same principle: that craft and story are inseparable, and that preservation is itself a voyage.

So let the tugs pull her northward, let the shipwrights ply their trade, and let the record show: the Cobia sails once more — not toward battle, but toward renewal. And when she returns, gleaming, she will continue her duty as keeper of memory, reminding all who step aboard that the Great Fifth Sea still carries the weight of oceans past.