Looking astern on a motor ship down bound having passed under the Potomac River Bridge. The river was about 0.2 of a mile wide, the bridge measured 1.7 miles and the main span measured 800 feet with a clearance under the bridge of 135 feet. You could hear the trucks (lorries) grinding their way up the incline of 3.75% and as there was only one lane each way this caused bottlenecks. The bridge was built in 1940 and carried 6.5 million vehicles in 2005, far in excess of expectations when it was planned. The depth of water is 195 feet so the bridge is deeper than it is high. The bridge was renamed, in typical American fashion, the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge in 1967.The ship would soon be making a turn to port to go past the Dahlgren gun range which would be to starboard then enter the 200foot(62meter) wide dredged channel of the Kettle Bottom Shoals where they would fire over the ship.

There are proposals in 2008 to build a bridge with more lanes to accommodate more vehicles.