The News

The HMS Invincible saga looks to be over.  The Chinese bidder, who wanted to haul the ship off to China for a nightclub or other uses (maybe re-arming by the Chinese Navy),  seems to have been rejected in favor of a lower bid by a Turkish ship recycling factory.  There was a movement afoot from Barrow, where the ship was built, to turn it into something there, whether owned by the Chinese bidder or not, which also seems to come to an end.  It's off to the scrapyard for the Invincible.

They could have turned it into a memorial like so many US aircraft carriers have, like the USS Hornet Museum in Alameda, CA,  or the USS Yorktown at Patriot's Point in Charleston, SC.  And the HMS Invincible  was in the right place to do it as The Portsmouth Historic Dockyard has other memorial ships afloat already, and the Invincible would have fit right in.   There were probably a ton of ex-servicemen who would have volunteered to repair or work the ship as a tourist attraction.

The other ships in the harbor now include HMS Victory, the ship Lord Nelson died on at the Battle of Trafalgar and the oldest commissioned ship afloat.  The HMS Warrior is also there, a Victorian ship that shares steam engines and sails, and have some of the only early breech loading big Armstrong guns left.  The  Mary Rose, raised in 1982 and one of Henry VIII,s ships, is encased in a building next to the Warrior where preservation of her hull is under way.

Well that's all over now.  I guess you can't keep everything or we wouldn't have room to move around.  It's a shame to see her go, but maybe she'll be reborn into something else, though becoming another oil tanker seems a shame.