I know that it’s been a while since I’ve written, but nothing too interesting has happened recently.  After Estonia, we stopped one more time in Poland at the same place that we were at a few weeks prior to that.  I did find a good restaurant there that we missed the first time that we were there.  The menu was also in English, which is always helpful. J  We had a huge reception of more than 200 people, and it was a lot of work for the crew.  The US has been trying to influence Poland to allow the installation of a base here for a long time, and it’s exciting to realize that we may be playing a large role in the impression that we give to the people here.

After Poland we stopped in the Netherlands, but we were only there for a couple days.  The Netherlands were very close to Antwerp, where we stopped on our little 2 month excursion before deployment.  The city that we stopped in was called Vlissingen, and a lot people said that it was ok, but there isn’t much info about it on Wikipedia.  We were there for such a short amount of time that I wasn’t able to go out in town at all, but I suppose that not going out in town probably helped me save a little money.  We took on a lot of supplies and fuel, and my duty day on Saturday was pretty quiet.  I had a watch from noon to 5pm roving the weatherdecks with an M-16.

Even though I never went into town, I did notice a ship that was pretty interesting.  Near where we were moored there was a large ship that was sitting in the water, and it had six large posts sticking up out of it, 3 on each side.  The next day, during my rover watch, I was surprised to see that the ship had “jacked” itself up on the 6 large supports that are built into it, and a crane, which I hadn’t noticed before, was doing stuff on the shore right next to it.  After a little research I discovered that the ship is called a “self-elevating platform,” and it is used to construct windmills for generating electricity.  The description of the ship says that it provides a “stabilized construction platform for windmill construction in hostile costal environments.”  I thought it was pretty amazing that the ship was designed to lift itself out of the water.  Here’s the website on it:  http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/mayflower/

The weather in the northern European seas was a little below 70F most of the time.  It was really nice, considering that I was surprised to find that the weather in Norfolk has been high 90s or 100s.  Everyone on the ship is looking forward to the end of our deployment.  There have been a lot of cool things to see throughout out deployment.  A couple of the highlights of all the ports that we visited were the scuba diving in the Caribbean and the festival in Kiel, Germany.  I still need to get the photos developed from my underwater camera when I took pictures while snorkeling in Curacao.