After a supporter purchased for McIntire a World War II vintage wooden-hulled Navy minesweeper named "Oceanic" (which McIntire renamed "Columbus"), he tried to broadcast outside the three-mile limit near Cape May, calling the floating station "Radio Free America." The station began broadcasting at 12:22 PM Eastern Time on September 19, 1973, but was only on the air for ten hours—the ship began to smoke from the heat of the antenna feeder line, and the signal interfered with that of radio station WHLW in Lakewood, New Jersey which broadcast on a neighboring frequency of 1170 kHz. Nevertheless, the notion of a Christian pirate radio station off the United States caught the attention of the media. "I became a very famous man out of that," McIntire later recalled, "People stood along the coast to see me. It was a crazy thing to do, but it was dramatic."