A Sailor's Life

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Saturday, December 06, 2008

Hello, everyone! It's been a little over a year since my last post on here, and I'm sorry for that. It has been a very crazy and educational year. My biggest reason for not spending as much time posting on this blog has been because I have a special woman in my life. I spend a large portion of my time communicating with her, and we are engaged to be married on May 16th, 2009. If you'd like to visit a page that we made for our wedding, you can visit www.isaacandchelle.com

So, I have a feeling that this will be a long post, since I will try to catch everyone up on everything that has happened during the past year. After my last post, the Mahan went to dry dock, which was a new experience for me. The ship is 10 years old now, and every 10 years a ship is put into dry dock to repaint the hull, replace the shafts, replace the propellers, and whatever else has to be accomplished. It was very strange seeing the ship up out of the water, but a lot of things were changed, upgraded, refurbished, and repainted. The ship came out of dry dock in March of this year, and I watched while the propellers went below the water once more for another 10 years.

The Mahan is currently on deployment, which started back in September. This deployment has been very unlike the past two deployments that I've been on. So far we have only had three port visits, and the deployment is nearly halfway over. The first visit was to Rota, Spain, which was a stop for less than a day to refuel.

The second visit was to Palma, Spain, which was more like the port visits that I'm accustomed to from my past deployments. Palma is a city on an island off the coast of Spain, and there was a castle, which I had to explore up on a hill near the city. The city had a huge cathedral, which I never actually ended up going inside, but I got plenty of pictures from the outside. Our port visit there was only for about 4 days, and it was very enjoyable.

The third port visit that we've had was to Bahrain, which is near Iraq and Afganistan and all those countries that you hear about on the news. There was a Navy Exchange there, and since it was a couple of months into deployment when we stopped there, many people needed to get basic necessities, like soap, shaving cream, razors, and other basic necessities. My experience in Bahrain wasn't quite as good as other countries that are more friendly toward us. When we went to the city, you can hear the Muslim prayers blaring over the city at various times during the day. There were many Muslims walking around the city in the traditional religious robes, and honestly, we didn't feel very comfortable walking around the city. We stopped in a few shops and stores to see what we could buy, but headed back to base after a only a few hours.

This deployment has been spent patrolling many of the areas in the Middle East, and we've been involved in some of the events that you hear on the news from this area. I can't really give out any details, but this has definitely a very different deployment from my past deployments. Nobody should worry though. There is no threat to the ship, or the sailors on the ship, but we've spent a lot of time running around this area.

The biggest reason though that I'm writing this post is because of a story that happened just a couple days ago, and Chelle definitely wanted me to write about it. For any of you that used to read my blog ona regular basis over the past couple of years, you know that I've been working on my Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist (ESWS - pronounced ee-swahs) qualification for nearly the entire time that I've been stationed on this ship.

The ESWS qualification requires a person to have a general overall knowledge of almost every area of the ship. You have to know things like, our capabilities for gun and missile systems, ranges and types of our radars, and capabilites of our engines and generators. Those are the biggest things that you need to know, but you also need to know about how the Navy supply system works, like how we get parts, food, and mail, and how that whole system works. We also have to have basic knowledge of all the basic seamanship things, like what a bollard, cleat, chock, monkey's fist, or bitts are. You have to know the size, weight, length of chain, and type of anchors that we have. You have to know what kind of helicopters we can land and what all the markings on the flight deck mean. There is a huge amount of information covering ever part of the ship, and you have to answer all kinds of questions for all that information in front of a 1st class oral board, and then you have to get quizzed by a Chief's oral board examination.

Over the past couple of months that we've been out here, I've been studying and preparing to complete my ESWS qualification. I did pretty well on the 1st class board, even though I had to look up some supply questions, and I did ok on the Chief's board. The chief that quizzed me for my engineering board wasn't convinced that I knew enough about engineering, so I ended up going and getting training on a number of engineering areas again. Then I went back to that chief and he quizzed me on the areas that he wanted to make sure that I have a good understanding of. I completed all of the oral boards a week or so ago, but the interesting story that I wanted to tell everyone was the day that I got my ESWS pin, and was allowed to start wearing it.

So on the morning that I was supposed to get my ESWS pin. There is a tradition of dipping the ESWS pin in salt water, or splashing salt water on the chest of the person receiving the pin. I had seen this done in the past, and I wanted to have it done for my own pinning ceremony. The ceremony itself wasn't until about 1500 that afternoon, but I wanted to be ready for it. So we were trying to figure out an easy way to get seawater. Of course we're floating in a gigantic puddle of it, and the most logical method to get it would be to dip the bucket in the ocean. I think we should have just done that right from the start, but the idea occurred to us to get some saltwater from the firemain system on the ship.

The firemain is used to fight fires on the ship. It is saltwater, and pretty much comes straight out of the ocean. Of course, the fish are filtered out, and any algae or other debris that we might pick up from the ocean. There is a firemain valve in the passageway right outside our shop that we polish and clean every day. We've been pretty proud of how clean and shiny our passageway has been lately, especially since all the smokers walk though our passageway in order to get to the smoke deck. There is generally a lot of dirt and ash that is tracked in from the smokers or anyone else that works topside.

So we figured that we would be able to get clean clear saltwater from the firemain, right? WRONG! There is a Y gate valve on the main firemain valve to allow for two hoses to be hooked up to the main valve. We closed both outlets of the Y gate, and began to barely open the main valve. We could hear a little bit of a rushing sound as the valve began to open. We checked the Y gate to see if we had any saltwater yet, but there was nothing. We opened the firemain valve just a little bit more and heard more sounds of pressure being released. We tried cracking one of the Y gate openings just a little bit and SPLAT! A bit pile of mud sprayed all over the deck, our coveralls, and the bulkheads. It was like that silt that collects in the bottom of ponds and water tanks. It was really nasty stuff.

We spent a good part of the morning after that cleaning the bulkheads and deck. It was a big mess, and we got asked about a thousand times about what happened from all the smokers that were going outside for their morning smoke. It was rather embarrassing, but we learned something about the firemain. We'll probably flush out that valve sometime to get all that silt out of there, but we were pretty surprised when it splattered mud all over the passageway.

So after the firemain incident, we recovered some nice clean seawater from the ocean, which worked out much better.

Later in the day we had the actual ceremony for the ESWS pinning. The CO said a few words, and asked me to challenge someone else in my division to get their ESWS pin during this deployment too. I challenged another ET3 that is really close to making ET2, and I think that he'll make a lot of progress toward getting it. I hope that he completes it, but I know that it is a lot of information to absorb. Our whole division was up on the bridge during the pinning ceremony and we got a few pictures. I'm having trouble uploading pictures to Flickr or Blogger, but I can send anyone pictures via email, if they would like to see them.

So we will continue floating along, patrolling the ocean. I will make a post about our next port visit, which I am pretty excited about. It's a place that I've always wanted to go, and was hoping to go to before I leave this ship.

I check my email often, and I would love to hear from anyone that enjoyed this post. I'm not sure how many people still get the subscription emails, but I hope to hear from you, if you do.
- posted by Isaac @ 12:21 AM - Permanent Link

Comments:

I love you so much, Baby! I laughed out loud when I read your story again. You wrote it so funny. Thank you!

# posted by

Chelle : 7:32 AM