According to the television ballad, the infamous S.S. Minnow set sail on a "a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour." We all know what happened after that — a group of castaways set adrift on the high seas.

That’s almost kind of how things went Saturday when a group of intrepid paddlers from Hui Wa‘a Kaukahi, Oahu’s oldest kayak club, set out on a rare tour of Pearl Harbor’s Middle Loch to see the fleet of Navy vessels docked there. Although we were in the safe confines of the historic harbor, 25 mph winds made our tour into a challenging victory at sea.

Ken Frey, a member of the club and an Army major, had arranged the trip. The ships are easy enough to view from the Ewa side of the shore, but Frey "really wanted to see them up close from the water level," he said. "I sent the base commander a letter in January, and two weeks later, to my surprise, I got a reply that it would be OK."

Frey knew that with the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000 and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, his work wasn’t over. He eventually got clearances from eight different military offices, informing each of the timing of the kayak excursion and route, making sure "we wouldn’t get shot," he said.

The last known public kayak tour of Pearl Harbor was in the late 1980s. Hui Wa‘a Kaukahi member Rusty Lillico said strong winds that day blew their inflatable kayaks all over Pearl Harbor. "There’s that saying ‘Remember Pearl Harbor,’ and for us it has an entirely different meaning," he said.

We would try to avoid that, as 57 people in 38 kayaks launched from Rainbow Bay Marina. We would paddle about 3.5 miles across East Loch to Middle Loch, take about 30 minutes to tour the "Mothball Fleet," then head back. We were supposed to stay 200 feet from the vessels and not land anywhere except Rainbow Bay.

I was paired in a 16-foot Ocean Kayak Malibu 2 tandem boat with Norman Chun, a former civilian dolphin trainer for the Navy. His strong paddling and the wind at our backs made the trip out easy.

There are 16 vessels docked in Middle Loch in what is officially called the Navy Inactive Ship Maintenance Fleet Pearl Harbor. The ships are being stored until they are scuttled, sold or retooled and put back in service.

There’s a lot of history stored in those vessels, especially the USS Tarawa, which could be considered the fleet’s "flagship." The Tarawa was the first of a new class of general-purpose amphibious assault ships, able to perform functions that previously had required four ships. It is capable of launching a Marine Corps battalion landing team and its equipment by landing craft or helicopter. The Tarawa led a 13-ship amphibious task force in support of Operation Desert Storm, participated in a humanitarian relief mission to Bangladesh and appeared in the 2000 film "Rules of Engagement."

As we gathered in front of the towering, 870-foot-long Tarawa for a photo, one could appreciate the expression "big as an aircraft carrier." The curve of the bow made me think of a huge wave setting up, a wave that was carrying a skyscraper that also would crash down on us.

Most of the other ships are smaller support vessels, but still with illustrious service rec­ords. The USS Cleveland saw action during the Tet Offensive in 1967, cleared mines in Vietnam’s Hai­phong Harbor, appeared in the film "Inchon" and was involved in cleanup efforts in Alaska after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. The USNS Kilauea was deployed during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Force and in peacekeeping operations in East Timor.

The engineering of shipbuilding was equally impressive. The USS Racine’s "bow-ramp" enabled the fast, sleek ship to land heavy vehicles onto a beach, while many of the cargo ships looked like massive construction proj­ects, with towers and cranes projecting out from the decks. Since we couldn’t even stand up in a kayak, it was impressive to imagine these ships slinging tons of equipment across their decks.

The paddle back to the marina was when things got dicey. The wind was so strong it would catch my paddle, blowing it into the water. Norm would say, "OK, Steve, time to dig deep," as we inched along.

My abdominal muscles, shoulders and back were already aching when Norman said, "Forty more minutes of hard paddling and we’ll be there."

The worst of it came a few minutes later, when he said, "Is that storage compartment in front of you closed? We’re taking on water." That was followed by, "By the way, you can swim, right?"

Over the radio, we were hearing of kayaking comrades washing up on Ford Island.

Finally we pulled into Rainbow Bay. To my amazement, we weren’t the last ones to get there. I hadn’t noticed how dispersed the group had become, though apparently not as bad as the tour in the 1980s.

It was a tough but worthwhile paddle. Frey said it was "awesome" to see the ships up close. "You could really get a sense of scale being down that low in the water," he said.

For most of us, the "three-hour tour" had taken at least four hours. I would feel it for days.