Ex - Soviet Submarine K-77

 military, submarine

K-77 was a Soviet Project-651 Class conventionally powered Attack Submarine, armed with either nuclear or conventional warhead-tipped Cruise Missiles and torpedoes. Built at the Krasnoye Sormovo shipyard in Gorky between 1963 and 1965, she commissioned into the Soviet Northern Fleet in October 1965 and began regular patrols in the North and Central Atlantic.

Eventually transferred to the Black Sea Fleet, K-77 prowled Mediterranean waters until the collapse of the Soviet Union brought on her decommissioning sometime between 1991 & 1994. Laid up in reserve, K-77 was sold by the Soviet government to Finnish businessman Jari Komulainen who converted her into a floating restaurant which operated in Helsinki Harbor from 1994 through 1998. After limited success in her new role, Komulainen leased K-77 to a tourism promoter in Tampa, FL and had her towed across the Atlantic during the summer of 1998, only to find her intended berth to be too shallow to accept the submarine. Komulainen put K-77 up for sale twice on Ebay but found no takers at the $1,000,000 opening bid price, however he did attract the attention of Hollywood filmmakers, who leased the K-77 and towed her to Halifax where she took a starring role in the 2000 film K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.

When filming completed in 2002, the K-77 was purchased by the USS Saratoga Museum Foundation and brought to her new home in Providence to serve as a museum ship to both her sailors and US Navy sailors who participated in the Cold War. After considerable restoration while pierside, K-77 regularly hosted Boy & Girl Scout programs aboard ship and gave thousands of tourists an idea of what life aboard ship was like for a Soviet Submariner.

After serving only five years in her new role, a late winter storm in April 2007 lashed the 47 year-old submarine with enough force to rupture a hatch installed during her restaurant days, allowing catastrophic flooding to sink her at her dock. After initial salvage efforts with local vendors failed to refloat her, the US Navy & US Army agreed to salvage the vessel in June 2008 as it would provide ample training for military divers through real-world experience. K-77 was declared refloated in August 2008 and returned to the Saratoga Museum Foundation, however the damage caused by her 16 months she spent on the bottom of Narragansett Bay proved too expensive for the Foundation to quantify.

After unsuccessfully seeking other buyers for the K-77, the Saratoga Museum Foundation sold K-77 for scrapping on August 11th, 2009 to RI Recycled Metals LLC, which floated the submarine approximately 1000 yards downriver and scrapped her.