A Sailor's Life

Split, Croatia

2009-03-24T04:41:00.004-05:00

Hello again, everyone. I know that it has been nearly three months since my last post, but that is because we've spent a lot of time at sea. We broke our record from the other long underway time that we had. Back in October/November we were underway for 54 days, but after we left Bahrain in January, we were underway for a record breaking 59 days.

There have been numerous news articles online on various news sites and on the Navy Newsstand about everything that we've done during the past 3 months. Mainly our primary purpose was to protect and guard the Gulf of Aden from piracy. The nature of that narrow bit of water in that area makes it easy for small fishing boats in the Gulf to intercept and attack large slow moving merchant vessels.

Nearly every other day we would find out about a new contact that we needed to investigate. We would approach it and communicate with them as well as we could. We would often have to search their boat, and we would gather as much information about them as we could.

Most of our time there was spent patrolling the waters in that area, and we assisted and aided vessels in that area. It was very boring at times, but then there would be times when we would have to go chase down a small boat, and then we would have to man all the small arms gun mounts on the main deck. There were times when it was exciting, but nobody really wanted to have to shoot at small boat while we were out there.

After all the time underway, we made a very short stop in Salalah, Oman. There was very little to see there. I didn't have duty the first day that we were there, so we went out in town to see what we could find. The country of Oman is primarily desert. There were some mountains near the coastline, but aside from a few palm trees and expensive landscaping, there was very little green. We only were allowed to go to a few places where the bus would drop us off. The bus stopped at a Hilton, a shopping center, and a Crowne Royal Resort. We were able to find a nice restaurant and bar at the Crowne Royal Resort, and I was glad that we waited for the 3rd stop, because I heard that the Hilton got a little crazier than I usually prefer when I'm on liberty.

We spent very little time in Oman, and ended up getting underway the day after we pulled in. I don't think there was really very much to see there, but I read some things about frankinsense trees and the perfume from them. Apparently they are up in the mountains, so we didn't see any where we were.

After Oman, we made our way back to the Mediterranean, which is a welcome sight after patrolling the Gulf of Aden for so long. There are some pictures that I have of our ship passing through the Suez canal, which we've done 4 times this deployment altogether. I can email them to anyone that is interested.

Everyone on board has been excited about a couple of good port visits in the Mediterranean after having so little relaxation time in the last 3 months. We were very fortunate to stop in Split, Croatia, which is one of the largest cities on the Croatian coastline. Croatia is a small country directly to the east of Italy. The people here seem to like Americans quite a lot, and nearly everyone was very friendly with us. I think they must teach English in their schools, because nearly everyone had no problem understanding us in restaurants, bars, or other shops that we stopped at.

I had duty the first day that we pulled into port, so I wasn't able to go out in town that day. My chief also had some projects that he wanted us to work on while we were in port, so I spent a good portion of my day chipping and painting a deck that has suffered from a little too much exposure to seawater.

I was excited to get to go out on liberty in a port that we'd heard about a lot of good chances for some relaxation. The weather was a little chilly the first day, but then the next two days that I had liberty there were 20-30 knot winds in the harbor where we were moored. Fortunately the city was on the other side of a hill, and it wasn't nearly as windy there. It was a short 10 minute bus ride to get to the downtown area, and the harbor there is protected from the stronger winds.

The most significant landmark is a Roman palace that was built there a long time ago. All that remains of it is the walls, and a very ruined Catholic church in the center. It looks like they were restoring it, but there was still a lot of work to do.

We stopped for breakfast at a small restaurant, but apparently breakfast isn't very popular in Croatia. Most people drink tea and coffee for breakfast, but we got a basket of bread, which came with jelly and butter. I also ate an omelet, which I think they serve for the Americans that stop by.

After breakfast we walked along the wall of the old palace, and stopped at a lot of the stores along the street. There was a surprising number of lingerie stores, but the guys in the group didn't go in, while the girls shopped for a little while. There was a fish market that we stopped at, where all the fishermen were selling their recent catches of fish. There was an excellent restaurant right next to the fish market where we ate lunch at after we explored for a little while longer.

The restaurant was called Nostomos, and they had a delicious seafood platter. The exchange rate to convert dollars to Kuna was about 5.5, so $1 converted to about 5.5 Kuna. The fish platter was about 400 Kuna, which made it quite expensive. I think my meal cost as much as all the rest of the meals combined, but it was delicious. It had a variety of shellfish, some crawfish, and a whole fish.

The rest of that day and most of the next day we spent walking around town. There were a lot of caffe bar's where a lot of people get coffee, but they had a pretty good selection of alcohol for us to choose from. It had been so long since we'd had the opportunity to drink that we just felt like bar hopping. We ended up stopping in probably 6 or 7 small bars, and having a drink at each one. It sounds like a lot of drinking, but it was spread out throughout the day, and none of us was feeling too tipsy by the time we went back to the ship.

Inside the walls of the palace there were many very narrow winding alleyways. It was weird to walk down one of them, because when you would look down it, it wouldn't look like anything interesting was down there, but as soon as you started walking down it, you would find all kinds of shoe stores, lingerie stores, internet cafes, bars, and small restaurants.

While we were going around to various bars and enjoying the city, we ended up stopping at a place that had cheeseburgers. It wasn't like any cheeseburger that I've ever had before, but it was very good. It was mostly a large light roll that was cut open on one side so that the whole roll stayed intact. Then the meat wasn't too well done, which was good. There was still a little bit of pink in the meat, even though it was a pretty thin hamburger patty. The person at the counter asked me if I wanted mayonaisse, ketchup, pickles, and he even added some chili powder which added a little spice to it. The burger was good, and we left pretty quickly after that.

Unfortunately after about 10 minutes of walking around, I realized that I forgot my backpack there. It was amazing at how difficult it was to find the tiny cheeseburger shop again. I was almost certain of the area where it was, but it took us nearly 30 minutes of wandering around through the narrow alleyways of the city before we finally found it again. The store manager had kindly placed it behind the counter in case I came back for it. I didn't really have anything valuable in it, but I would prefer not to lose my backpack.

It was windy and cold in the evenings, and it seemed like the bus took a long time to show up at the spot where it dropped us off. There was a small shop with New York style pizza near the bus stop, so we ate a couple slices while we were there. I was also surprised to find a number of pastry stands like I have seen in France before. There were quite a few small shops with a lot of pastries available. It seems like a combination of French and Italian cultures have affected Croatia quite a bit.

My second duty day the weather got a little nicer, and I was able to do some maintenance to an antenna that has been neglected during the past few months. I had an evening watch on the quarterdeck, and it started to get windy again during that time. We have been in areas that have been so warm that very few people on the ship have very many really warm clothes, but I had some gloves that I had stashed in my luggage on the ship.

The weather was calm again the day that got underway, and now we are back out to sea again. It won't be long now until we return home, and I can't wait to see my beautiful fiance that has been waiting patiently for me all deployment. I will write about our final port visit in a week or so, and it should be pretty similar to our time in Croatia.

Christmas At Sea

2008-12-26T04:10:00.002-05:00

Out of the three deployments that I've been on, this has been the first one where I've missed Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is very difficult to miss the holidays, and everything that we do out here loses it's significance when we think about the memories that we are missing when we are not with our families and loved ones for the holidays. I thank you for all the encouragement that family members in the states give to their loved ones. It is always appreciated, and you have no idea how much it means.

We just not long ago left from Israel, which was an amazing port visit, and being able to be there at this time of year was a blessing. We have already been underway for a week since that port visit. Our minds have been heavy with Christmas, and everyone has thoughts of home. Christmas Eve was not really any different than any other day that we are underway.

Then we heard the news that we were going to have an underway replenishment (UNREP) on Christmas Day, and that we would have to work all day to replenish the ship with supplies and fuel. We moved our "holiday routine" day to the 26th of December, since we were doing this underway replenishment. When we do an UNREP, it makes for a lot of work for the crew, and it doesn't make for a very relaxing day. During this UNREP we took on 76 pallets of supplies, which means that we have to form a working party to empty each pallet to clear the decks above for the next pallets. We take on all the food that we need to provide for the crew for the next 3 or 4 weeks at sea. This means that we take on big boxes of meat that weigh 50-60 pounds each, heavy boxes of dry goods, bags of rice, flour, onions, potatoes. The light small boxes are few and far between.

We woke up on Christmas Day to the sounds of the UNREP detail being called away. They completed the re-fueling before we started with all the stores. This gave us some time to sit in the shop and wait until we started with the supplies. Everyone was in a pretty good mood, but I think that my Chief was a little too happy. He has 3 young children at home, and one of them is just entering their teenage years, so I know that he is feeling the pain of separation from being far from home during Christmas. He was a little too loud and obnoxious, and I must admit that he started to get on my nerves, so I went to another shop where I could wait for the supplies working party to start.

We started handling the supplies and stores a couple hours after the refueling started. Even the Chaplain was part of the working party, and I personally sat at the top of a ladder where you have to slide the boxes down slides that are built into the ladder. Some of those boxes of meat are really heavy, and then there are the boxes of milk, which weigh almost as much as the meat. I'm not complaining, and we are thankful that we have so much food available to eat, but it wasn't quite what I pictured doing during Christmas Day.

The best thing about having the UNREP on Christmas Day, was that we would be able to get any mail that friends and families had sent from home. Of the 76 pallets of supplies, 26 of those were mail, and everyone on the ship was hopeful that we would receive the packages that were sent as long ago as the beginning of November. We found out later that some of the mail had been misdirected to another ship, and that it took a while to catch up to us.

We were happy once all supplies were on the ship. It was a lot of work, but it was the mail that kept us the most hopeful and cheerful. All together we got 354 bags of mail delivered to the ship from the 26 pallets that we received. On a small ship like this there isn't really any space to store all that mail, so one of the passageways was used to store the mail. It was completely crammed full of bags and bags of mail. Our mailroom, which is attached to the same passageway, was also crammed full of mail (to the ceiling).

The SKs had a big job in front of them to get all the mail sorted. They called "Mail Call" over the ship's announcing system, and everyone showed up in a long line to get mail according to whatever division they belonged to. I showed up the first time, and picked up the mail that they had sorted. I wasn't sure if they had already sorted all of it, I didn't get the package from Chelle right away that I'd been looking forward to so much. Then they called "Mail Call Part 2" on the announcing system. The line was just as long as the first time, and people kept walking away with armloads of packages in their arms, but still the package that I was hoping for wasn't among the packages for my division.

They called "Mail Call Part 3" over the announcing system, and finally in this one, I got the package that I was hoping for. I think that altogether they called mail call about 5 or 6 times before they finally had all the mail sorted out. It was really an amazing amount of packages, and it is incredible how much it shows the love of everyone at home for all of us out here.

One other thing that meant a lot to the people on board was a bunch of boxes that we received as part of Operation Gratitude from a group of people out there that made Christmas boxes for every person on the ship. We had no idea who the people were that made all these boxes, but there were notes inside written by schoolchildren, adults, and a lot of people that just wanted to get together to provide Christmas packages to everyone on the ship. I don't know a lot about Operation Gratitude, but even after all the regular packages for everyone were sorted, there were still piles and piles of the Operation Gratitude boxes, which had to be sorted. I know that there were people that didn't get any boxes or anything from their families, and I know that these Operation Gratitude presents to all the people on board meant a lot to all the Sailors on this ship.

Personally, I was so happy to receive the package from my fiance, that I knew had been coming to the ship ever since the end of November. She packs boxes for me with such love and care, that I am moved to tears to see all the things that she sends me. I am so thankful for her love, and words cannot express my longing to marry her when I return from deployment. This is one of the longest and hardest deployments that I've had, but her love and support from home keeps me going.

After all of the disappointment at working on Christmas Day, and all the heavy boxes of meat, and all the hundreds of bags of mail, Christmas Day was all worth it once everyone on board received our packages from home.

Today (the 26th) is our observed Christmas Day, and it is very quiet on the ship today. I think there are a lot of people that are sleeping nearly all day, unless they have to get up for watch. I had watch last night from 2200 to 0200, and I slept all morning until about lunchtime. It felt so good to sleep in after the day that we had yesterday.

There is a joke around the ship that only the USS Mahan could move Christmas. It is funny to joke about the fact that the ship moved our observation of Christmas Day to the 26th. It was nice to get all our presents and packages on Christmas Day, but it was really strange that a ship would move Christmas Day.

Thank you for all your emails from home. I am always glad to hear from people that still follow my blog. Email me whenever you get the opportunity.

To all back in the States right now, Merry Christmas!

Haifa, Israel

2008-12-19T17:37:00.003-05:00

The entire crew of the Mahan was happy to hear that we would get the opportunity to stop at Haifa, Israel for about 6 days. Haifa is north of Jerusalem and directly west of the Sea of Galilee. The ship had arranged for multiple tours and there were a lot of exciting things to do here. Personally, I was very pleased to hear that we were going to stop in Haifa, and I've always hoped that I'd have the opportunity to stop there.

We pulled into Haifa on a Sunday, and I had duty on that first day. It was a good day to have duty, since there weren't any tours or events happening on that day. I had a watch on the bridge wing manning a gun that is mounted there. Other than a few tug boats and the random merchant ship pulling in and out of port it is pretty quiet.

The watch did give me an excellent opportunity to observe the hillside of the city. From the harbor you can see a big hill covered with houses. The hill is Mount Carmel, which apparently is a very long hill, because we could still see it as we traveled south on our tours. A few of the famous things in Haifa are the Temple of Ba'b, the Tomb of Elija, and Mt. Carmel itself. The Temple was built to represent unity and peace between religions of the world. I didn't get to go see any of the famous things in Haifa, but the other places that I did go to were far more interesting.

Dead Sea and Masada
On the second day in port I had signed up to go on a tour of the Dead Sea and Masada. The tours were offered at a very reasonable rate, and the Navy paid for half of the total costs to go on the tours, which allowed us to get the tours at half the price that the Navy was already getting at a discounted rate.

The journey to the Dead Sea started at about 8am, which is when the bus left from Haifa. The weather here has been chilly but dry. The sun was shining and we pulled the shades in the bus halfway down the windows to shield our eyes. With as much time as we spend inside the ship, our eyes take a while to adjust to the brightness of the sun.

The bus traveled directly east to get to the Jordan river. We passed the Yizreel Valley, which is cluttered with fields of olive trees and other agriculture which I couldn't identify. There was even a corn field, but I only saw one of those. Once we got to the Jordan, we headed directly south toward the Dead Sea. The country is very hilly, and the bus went steeply down a number of hills as we made our way south. We passed by Jericho on our way, but it is not much more than a tiny city along the Jordan River. Somehow, whenever I think of Jericho, I normally think of a huge city with towering walls, but the city that I saw was not even close to the city of my imagination.

It took about 4 hours to get all the way to the Dead Sea, which is south of Jerusalem. The first stop was Masada, which is a very high plateau that towers over the Dead Sea. The plateau's history has been mostly undiscovered for nearly 2000 years until the 1960's when it was extensively excavated to determine it's history. In the time of Christ, King Herod built a palace on top of the plateau as a refuge against the Jews if they revolted against him.

Our guide took us to the top of the plateau which conveniently has a cable car which goes all the way to the top. There is a "snake" path that winds up the side of the plateau, but we didn't have the time to spend climbing it. There are a lot of ruins on top of the hill, and our guide took pride in telling us how the archaeologists determined that the people of Masada stored food and water on top of such a high place. King Herod was an excellent builder, and they had an extensive system of aqueducts that collected rainwater, so that they could store the water in large cisterns. King Herod built it to be able to withstand siege for many months and perhaps even years.

I got a lot of pictures from the top of the plateau, and you can see most of the Dead Sea from the top of it. There was a huge siege of Masada by the Romans in 72 AD, and from the top of the plateau you can see a line of rocks drawn to show the line of the Roman encampment that stretched all the way around the plateau. The Roman camps along the line were also outlined and could be clearly seen in the valley below.

We spent a couple hours on top of Masada, and observed the palace of King Herod. I personally think that there must be much more that they didn't show us, or that hasn't been discovered yet. What they have discovered is impressive, but I'm certain that there was more to the palace inside the plateau.

After exploring Masada and all the ruins, we went back to the bus, which took us to a place where we could eat a buffet meal and after eating we could swim in the Dead Sea. There were a lot of people that were there with other tour groups, and the Dead Sea is a big attraction because of it's health benefits. The minerals and salts are sold around the world in many skin creams and body care products.

I ate quickly, and changed in a large locker room. I went down to the Dead Sea and tested the water with my hand. The water of the Dead Sea is 10 times saltier than the Mediterranean, which makes it 35% salt. The water was a little cool, but once I got in, it felt pretty good. It felt pretty much like normal water at first, but once you get in to about your chest, your legs lift out from under you, and they float toward the surface. It's weird at first, and you feel like you have fight the water to stand back up again.

It's a really amazing experience. You can easily float on the surface of the water without moving or trying to swim at all. One person tried tasting the water, and said that it is really bitter and feels like it is burning your tongue. They warned us to not stay in the water more than about 15 minutes. After 15 minutes we went and washed off with fresh water before going back in the water for a little longer. The salty water feels slick on your skin, and any cuts on your body burn a lot from the salt.

After half an hour or so of floating around in the Dead Sea we were called out, and we had to go shower and get ready to get back on the bus. The Dead Sea was really amazing, and the tour of Masada was pretty interesting too.

Jerusalem
On the third day in port, I went on the tour to Jerusalem. This was the most popular tour of the 4 that were offered. All the tours were offered every day that we were in port, so anyone that was unable to go on a tour on a particular day would still be able to go on that tour on another day.

To get to Jerusalem we mainly followed the coastline of Israel until we got close to Jerusalem. Our guide was able to avoid heavy morning traffic in Tel-Aviv by going a little more inland on another highway. On our way to Jerusalem the tour guides stopped at a famous restaurant where the owner of the restaurant loves Elvis.

There were statues of Elvis and the entire restaurant was plastered with signs and pictures of Elvis. It was obvious that the tour guides reward the restaurant for catering to tourists, and it was pretty funny to find something like that in Israel.

One of the things that surprises me about the Israel landscape is how many hills there are. It seems like we were constantly climbing or descending hills. The highway must have taken a lot of construction to carve out a path through so many hills. Even in Jerusalem there is barely any flat valley area where you could grow crops. The Yizreel valley from the day before is one of the most fertile areas of Israel.

It took us about 3 hours to get to Jerusalem from Haifa. We started our tour of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives which overlooks most of the main city. I got a couple of good panoramic pictures from there. You could see the Muslim Dome of the Rock, and the Jewish Church of the Holy Sepluchre. The wailing wall is also visible from the Mount of Olives, but is hidden behind the Dome of the Rock temple.

The surprising thing about the view from the Mount of Olives was the huge cemetery of Jews that are buried on the side of the Mount of Olives. From the top of the mountain where we stood the entire side of the mountain was covered with gravestones of all the Jews that have been buried there in hopes of rising when Christ comes. I've never seen so many gravestones in one place.

You can also see the gate that Jesus entered into when he entered into Jerusalem. The gate is walled up, in a Muslim attempt to "prevent" Jesus from entering the city. There is also a Muslim burial area, which is right outside the wall. Another interesting thing is that the Muslims built a mosque (temple) next to any place where there is a Jewish church, and they always build the mosque to be a little bit higher than the Jewish church.

After looking at all of this from the Mount of Olives, we walked down the hill to the Garden of Gethsamane. There is a garden of very old olive trees that had huge trunks. There was a tree there that was planted just 50 years ago, and it looked nothing like the gnarled huge trunks of the ancient trees in the garden. The garden was right next to a church that was supposedly the place where Jesus first laid eyes on Jerusalem, and inside the church were a number of murals and depictions of Christ.

We took the bus up the hill from this point and drove around the wall to the gate of Jaffa. The tour guide had no other explanation for the name of the gate other than that the road that leads to the gate is also called Jaffa. Names for many places in Israel have stayed the same for thousands of years, and the guides weren't sure of the origins of the name. We walked through the gate and passed through a number of narrow streets crowded with tiny shops selling everything you could imagine. We felt a little rushed through this area, but the guides told us that it is easy to lose tourists among all the shops, and we found out later that some of those areas are dangerous for tourists.

The guides took us to a shop where we could buy souvenirs and all kinds of novelty items that tourists might like to buy. We spent at least half an hour there while nearly everyone purchased a lot of souvenirs. After that we walked through the Jewish quarter and Muslim quarter until we got to the wailing wall. The wailing wall is also called the western wall, and it is called that because it is the last of the original walls of Jerusalem that were destroyed. The new wall follows surrounds a different area, and the one original wall is considered a holy place in Jerusalem.

We had to go through a security checkpoint with metal detectors to get to the wailing wall, and to go up to the wall your head must be covered. Women are not allowed to go up to the wall, and they have a section of the wall that they may go to. We were allowed to walk up to it, and at one place there was a clear glass plate on the ground where they excavated down to the original base of the wall which is many feet below the level of the ground now. There were many Jews saying prayers toward the wall, and there are thousands of notes to God stuffed into the cracks of the wall. The tour guide told us that once a year the notes are collected and buried. There were so many that it looked like the mortar of the wall until you get up next to it and you see that it is thousands of tiny folded bits of paper.

We went back to the tour bus after that and made a short stop at the church of the Virgin Mary, and nearby also was the tomb of King David and the site of the Lord's Supper. We made hurried stops at each of these, because the tour guides were supposed to have us out of the city before dark. The room of the Lord's Supper was not very impressive, but somehow I think that the real upper room would have been even less impressive than the place we visited. It is hard to know for sure where all of the events in the Bible took place, but the places that we visited are what has been passed down through the generations.

The ride back to Jerusalem was uneventful, and nearly everyone slept all the way back to Haifa. The biggest impression that I got of Jerusalem is how much conflict there is there. The guide mentioned how the archaeologists want to do further excavation to find more of the ancient ruins of Jerusalem that lay beneath the level of the streets, but the Muslims would create much conflict and say that the Jews are trying to destroy the Muslim temple if they tried to do any excavation. It seems like Jerusalem teeters on the brink of conflict constantly, but that is the curse of this part of the world. The conflict will continue until Christ comes again and resolves the conflict between the Jews and the Muslims.

Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee
I had duty on the fourth day in port, but the fifth day I got to go on the tour to Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee. The tour guide that we had was a very nice lady who has been giving tours for a long time. She even read her Bible to us when we reached certain areas that the Bible mentions. We left at about 8am, like we did with the other tours, and we went directly East toward Nazareth.

Nazareth is only about 30 minutes away from Haifa, and it didn't take us long to get there. The city of Nazareth is much bigger now than it was during Jesus time. Our guide said that in the time of Jesus there were probably only 10 houses, and the town would have been very insignificant compared to any other towns around there. There is a very large church built over the site where Mary and Joseph's house stood. There is an actual small stone hut carved out of the side of the mountain in the center of the church which is supposedly the actual site of where they lived. There was a church service there when we walked in, and surprisingly the sermon was in English. We listened for a bit, but then moved on.

From Nazareth we took the bus to the Sea of Galilee where we visited a number of sites where Jesus taught. It is also very likely the same area where Jesus blessed the loaves and fish. He also probably called to the disciples in the fishing boat from there, and told them to cast their nets to the other side of the boat. The church of the Beatitudes is up on top of a nearby hill, and there is a lot of excavation where the site of Peter's house and the surrounding village and synagogue were.

Going to the Sea of Galilee was probably the most moving part of all of the tours that I went on. It boggles the mind to think of how Jesus walked and taught in the same places where we were standing. I walked away from the group a little to just sit and look out over the Sea of Galilee to think about everything that happened there. It gives a new meaning to everything that you read in the Bible and all the stories that are there that talk about the places where we were standing.

After the visit to the Sea of Galilee, we went down to the southern side of the sea to where the Jordan river exits the sea. The Chaplain was with us, and he performed baptisms on 11 people that requested to be baptized in the Jordan River. It was pretty moving to watch each person as they were baptized. There was one last souvenir shop before we got back on the bus to go back to Haifa, but there was much to think about as we rode back to the ship one last time.

...... So that was everything that I got to see in Israel. I apologize for how long this post is, but there is so much to write about. I wish that we could have been here even longer to spend more time in Jerusalem and learn more about the city. From about 2000 to 2006 there has been almost no tourism in Israel because of conflict, and I'm sure that conflict will break out again. We have been very fortunate to be able to visit Israel, and I've always hoped that we'd be able to stop there someday.

Email me if you have any comments about everything that I wrote here. I may have made some minor errors in my recollection of facts. We're over the halfway point of deployment now, and getting closer every day to returning home.

2008-12-06T00:21:00.004-05:00

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.

A long rest...

2007-12-01T17:26:00.000-05:00

Yes, I took a long rest from posting on my blog. I'd been posting pretty faithfully for the past 3 and a half years, but once I got to the end of the last deployment, I had to take a break.

Since July when I posted about going home for the summer for a couple of weeks, we have gone on a couple little excursions down to Mayport or up to Annapolis. The ship has been busy, and we wish that we could get more time in port.

We went down to the south Florida area for a big exercise with a number of other ship's and submarines. During last deployment the Mahan got an award called the "Bloodhound" award, and we are able to fly a special white flag with a bloodhound on it that very few ships get to fly. Because we got that award, we were selected to go down to the Carribean for a couple of weeks to participate in an exercise where we play war games with a number of other submarines. We were mostly successful at winning the war against the submarines, but we got "shot" at a couple of times by the "enemy" too. More than once we went weaving through the water as we simulated an emergency evasion of a torpedo in the water.

Our trip up to Annapolis was merely for a Navy game that we were selected to be at. Most of the ship would have preferred to stay in Norfolk, and I know that I had better things to do. I don't usually follow or get too excited about sports, so football isn't all that amazing to me. We were there for a weekend and then returned to Norfolk.

One of the biggest reasons that I'm writing this post though is because I was selected to go on a special assignment with another ship. This particular ship is not a regular Navy ship. It is manned by civilians, and it is a United States Naval Ship (USNS) instead of a regular USS ship like the Mahan. The ship is called the USNS Prevail, and it is a Training Support Vessel. It was something else once upon a time, but the Navy recently converted it to help support boarding operations. Basically what this ship does is toprovide a boarding platform for other ships. We will have multiple boarding teams come on board so that they can practice boarding unfamiliar vessels.

Originally, I was selected to come on board this ship so that I could assist them with their communications equipment that provides them with Internet and phone lines. There is a civilian on board that is capable of configuring all of the communications systems on board, but they wanted me here so that I could support the civilian with any problems that may happen while we are underway.

Right now we are underway near the southern US coast, and we will soon begin operations with many other ships that are out here to help with the boarding exercises that everyone is participating in. I will pretty much be staying out of the way while actual boarding teams are on the ship, and if I got in their way, they would probably handcuff me and search me. They have to look for possible "intelligence" that the ship has, and if you get in their way, they have to search you. If it were a real situation where you were actually searching an enemy vessel for intelligence, then I'm sure that they would go into every space, but here there are certain off-limits areas. They can only search the allowed areas, since we are a friendly ship, and the captain wouldn't appreciate the boarding team bagging up all of his belongings in his stateroom. :)

So far we haven't had any major problems with the Internet communications gear, and my job has been pretty quiet. Since I am the only ET on board though, and the Captain rarely actually has a technician on board, he asked me to go through the rest of the communications gear and perform any alignments or diagnose any equipment problems that he might have. So over the past couple of days, I've been going through the maintenance cards that he has on board for all the equipment and determining what I'll be able to work on. This coming week I will spend plenty of time doing alignments and whatever work I can do with the test equipment and tools that are on board.

So that's my new adventure. I will try to enjoy this time that I have on a new and different ship, but in all honesty I would rather be back in Norfolk enjoying the apartment that I need to add furniture to. I guess I that I haven't probably ever mentioned that before, but yes, I got an apartment after this past deployment. Myself and another ET share the rent, and I have enjoyed just having a place of my own. I have a couch and a bed and a couple of tables, but other than that it is pretty empty.

I hope that the people that used to get this blog's posts haven't completely forgotten about me, but I'm still around. My current email address on this ship is spenceri@prevail.navy.mil That email address will only work for the next couple of weeks that I am on this ship, but I would love to get some email from people that I have not heard from in a long time.

Home to Oregon

2007-08-07T14:20:00.000-05:00

We got back from deployment on July 22nd, and it's been great to be back in the US with things that are familiar. After a long deployment like this one, the entire ship goes on leave for a couple of weeks. So for the past couple of weeks, the first half of the ship went on leave for their two weeks, and now the second half of the ship is going on leave to finish off the standdown period after deployment.

So here I am in Atlanta airport waiting for my connecting flight to Oregon. I'm looking forward to returning to Oregon to visit friends and family that I haven't seen since Christmas.

In the past couple of weeks, I've made a few advances in my standard of living. For over two years now, I've lived on the ship and refused to spend my money on an apartment, but after I got back from this last deployment, I decided that the time had finally come to move off the ship. Some people ask how it is that I've stayed on the ship for this long, but the only time when it's difficult to live on the ship is when we're underway on deployment. When you're in port, there's hardly anyone on the ship, you get 3 meals a day, and there's no rent, water or power bills. :)

Now that I've made rank to 2nd class, it is time to move off the ship. I found a place that is a 15 minute drive to the base, which is pretty quiet. Another ET, that I've been working with for the past year or so, was willing to share the rent for a 2 bedroom apartment. We still have hardly any furniture, but I'm sure that will accumulate in time. In the meantime, Ive been sleeping in a sleeping bag on the new carpet. It's probably not quite as comfortable as my rack, but it's nice to get off the ship. I made scrambled eggs for myself the other day for the first time in a long time. It's been a long time since I actually have gone to a grocery store to buy eggs, bread, and milk, but there is a grocery store right around the corner from where the apartment is.

I'm looking forward to relaxation time while I'm in Oregon. I think that I would like to go hiking if I can find the time. Other than that I will probably catch up with a few friends. My brother got married while I've been away on deployment, but I guess that's on of the drawbacks of being in the Navy; you tend to miss some of the big events in family member's lives.

It was a good deployment, but now it is time for some rest. :)

RTHP!!

2007-07-22T15:21:00.000-05:00

Return To Home Port!!

Sunday morning we returned to Norfolk! There were at least a hundred people on the pier waiting for us as we pulled into our berth at the head of the pier. Last deployment I went directly to sleep after we pulled in, but this time I stayed topside and watched for a little while.

A few days ago we stopped in Yorktown, because we had to offload some of our weapons. It was a little strange, because usually we wait until after our stand-down period (the leave period when everyone takes a break) before we go to Yorktown to offload stuff. So we actually stepped foot on American soil before we returned to Norfolk, but they wouldn't let us go on liberty at all while in Yorktown, for obvious reasons. :)

After stopping in Yorktown for a couple days, we performed some drills that the Navy requires us to do every six months. This time it was called a TSSE (ti-zzy) or Total Ship Survivability Exercise, which basically means that we pretend that we are being attacked by enemy ships (we call them boghammers during our exercise). We get hit by multiple missiles, and then various fires will break out, and certain equipment will "break." We had to properly respond to all the casualties that we were presented with, but of course, we've been practicing for a couple of weeks for these drills. We passed fine, and it wasn't as difficult as people were expecting.

Sunday morning was complete torture. We did circles off the coast of Norfolk until it was time for us to pull into Norfolk. The entire morning everyone was on edge as we waited to pull in. Just to prove how "on edge" everyone was, there were a couple of chiefs that broke out in a heated argument in the passageway near my shop. The argument was inconsequential, but it proved how eager and impatient everyone was to pull into Norfolk.

Finally, in the afternoon, they stationed the Sea and Anchor detail for the last time this deployment. The tugs were waiting for us and spraying water into the air with their firehoses to welcome us home. The head of the pier was never a more welcome sight than it was that day. The anticipation was hanging on the air, and nobody's patience could hold out any more as the mooring lines were heaved onto the pier. At the head of the pier, there was music, and all the relatives of the sailors on board were eagerly waiting our return.

It was agonizing as we waited for the brows to be put in place, and at one point while people were coming on board they secured the brow so that we could hook up to shore power. For the entire afternoon the ship was crowded with friends and family coming on board to see where their sailors spent the last 6 months. I had the first watch after we pulled in, but it was an easy watch where I just sit at a desk and answer the phones and watch an alarm panel. The duty section leader ordered Pizza Hut pizza, which was welcome compared to the galley food that we've tired of.

The first thing that I did on Monday was to retrieve my car from the long term parking lot near the base. My car's battery was dead, and had to be jump started. I failed to let it run long enough after I picked it up for it to get a full battery charge, and I had to ask a couple of guys from my ship to push-start it for me, but by now the battery has got a good charge. There haven't been any other problems with it. I wasn't expecting the air conditioning to still work, but amazingly it seems to be working full force.

The next thing that I went to do was to apply for an apartment. I've had plenty of time to do my internet research from the ship, so I've been in contact with the apartment's office for a couple weeks now. I was unable to do anything financial while we were in the middle of the Atlantic, but fortunately, I was able to reserve an apartment in time for myself and another ET to move in this weekend. Now I have to begin the process of collecting furniture so that we don't have to sleep on the floor, but even sleeping on the floor would be welcome over the past 2 years that I've been sleeping on the ship.

Thank you for all your emails during the deployment. They have been uplifting and encouraging throughout the deployment. I'll be getting in touch with various people soon to see if I can reconnect a little with the people that have befriended me in Norfolk.

We're happy to be home. :)

Poland and the Netherlands

2007-07-14T11:40:00.000-05:00

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.

Tallinn, Estonia

2007-06-26T14:04:00.000-05:00

Estonia was a far better port than I was expecting. There are a lot of cruise ships that are constantly in and out of Tallinn, and I’m sure that keeps the economy going. From where our ship was moored we could see the “Old Town” area of Tallinn, which was obviously intended to be a major tourist attraction. The city was definitely very entertaining, and I had a great time in Estonia.

I got to go out in town twice, and both of those times were a lot of fun. From where the ship was moored, you could see at least 10 spires reaching for the sky in the old town area. One of the churches was an old Russian church from when Estonia was occupied by Russia. It had about 5 little spires on it that looked kinda like Hersey’s Kisses. It’s hard to describe, but I’m sure that you know what I mean. I still haven’t uploaded Germany pictures yet, but I will upload the Estonia and the Germany pictures together soon.

The first day that I got to go out into Estonia, I went with 3 other guys. The liberty van was making short trips back and forth to the town, so the four of us and some other people all squeezed into a small boxy-looking European van. It was only about a 10 minute ride to get to town. The van dropped us off next to a McDonalds which competed with an Estonian version called HesBurger across the street. We did actually eat at the Hesburger on the last day, and they were successful at making food that that is equally as bad as McDonalds.

The main street was crammed with souvenir shops, restaurants, and some clothing stores. There was an Arizona Saloon along the main street, which I thought was a little ironic. The majority of everyone that we met spoke English pretty well, and we learned later that they teach English in the schools. We ate lunch at a restaurant in the center of the old town, which was definitely designed to attract tourists. The menu had a lot of exotic stuff, like boar, bear, rabbit, and elk. In fact, now that I think about it, I don't think they had any pork or chicken, unless the boar counts as pork. The boar was excellent, but I didn't like the rabbit very much. It was a little dry. They also make their own beer, which was really good. The beer selections on the menu said, "Dark Honey Beer" and "Dark Strong Beer with Herbs," and it came in .5 liter or 1 liter authentic looking mugs. I heard later that the beer that they make does not last more than about 2 weeks, so apparently they haven’t ever commercialized it with a lot of preservatives or whatever people have to do to sell their beer halfway around the world.

For lunch I had what was listed on their menu as the filet mignon steak. What actually came was three small round pieces of meat that were really good, but didn’t resemble a filet mignon much. The other stuff around the plate was really good. There was barley, and the vegetables were marinated in something, I think. There was a thing called a bean bag, which was a bit of pastry with , but it was there mostly for novelty, I think. The steak was in an excellent mushroom sauce, which I realized later that they use on all the meat that they serve. The bill wasn’t too expensive. Their money was called Krooni, which is similar to the name of the money in Sweden and Poland. The exchange rate was about 11 Krooni to 1 Dollar, which mean that the 1000 Krooni bill at the restaurant was about $25 per person for the meal.

We walked around and took a lot of pictures of the city for a while. At the top of the hill where the Russian church was, there was a little archery range, where 3 targets were set up. For 75 Krooni you could shoot 5 arrows at a target. All of my arrows hit the target, but not very many of them hit the center. I competed with one of the other people that I was on liberty with, but he’s had more practice at archery before, and he was able to get a little closer to the center than I could.

We went to another restaurant directly across from the one that we ate lunch at, and experienced a similar experience to the first one. The food was really good, and I was still a little full from the lunch meal, so I was unable to eat all of the food at dinner, but I must admit that it was delicious.

The second day we also walked around for quite a while and took more pictures, but didn’t experience anything much different than the first day. We returned to the same restaurant that we ate lunch at the previous day, and it was again an excellent experience.

Monday morning we got underway again, and the weather has been pretty nice. I’m still working on my ESWS qualification, which is difficult to work on when we are pulling in and out of port so often. There is not much left to accomplish, and I hope to complete it by the end of deployment.

Thank you for all your emails. Returning to Norfolk is continually on everyone’s mind.

Kiel, Germany

2007-06-21T13:31:00.000-05:00

Germany is awesome! I think Germany has probably been one the best ports that we’ve visited this deployment. There was festival in Kiel that we were told is the biggest festival in Germany all year. There was a lot of food, and many of the stands had food from many different countries. You could go from stand to stand and try food from all around the world. There were a lot of stages set up throughout the downtown area for live music. Much of the singing was in German, but a lot of American entertainment makes it’s way to Europe, so a lot of the music was recognizable. On Sunday and Monday I went to Hamburg, which is the nearest large city in Germany. I got a lot of pictures from both Kiel and Hamburg, and I will be posting them to Flickr soon.

We pulled in on Friday, and it was pouring rain. They called reveille early, and we had all the lines hauled up by 0515. Unfortunately, I got pretty wet while we were hauling the lines up. I put on a plastic rainsuit later, but since I was still a little damp underneath the rainsuit. I was definitely glad that I had it later, and when we were tossing the mooring lines to the pier most of the other linehandlers got drenched. This made for a bad first impression of Kiel, but I went on liberty that evening. We stopped at an Italian restaurant for dinner, and the food was really good. I got a steak (as usual), and the spaghetti and pizza that the other guys got was pretty good. We walked around for a bit more that evening, but most of the stores were closed, so we ended up heading back to the ship.

Saturday was a duty day, and I was supposed to have the 0700-1200 pier watch, but there were two of us assigned to the watch. We didn’t need both people standing watch on the pier, so the other guy, who was junior to me, stood the rest of the watch. It is the responsibility of the host country to provide armed sentries on the pier, so we didn’t really need two of us standing on the pier. The rest of the duty day was quiet. We had training in the afternoon to learn about the proper responses to a swimmer attack or a fire or flooding problem. It rained almost all day Saturday, and it was a good day to have duty. I went to bed relatively early, so that I would be prepared for liberty the next day.

By Sunday the skies had cleared, and we swept all the water off the decks before we turned over duty to the next duty section. I did some research online to find out how expensive it would be to get to Berlin, but it turned out that it would cost 148 Euro for one person to get from Kiel to Berlin, and it would take over 3 hours! That was a little too much over budget, and we figured Hamburg would probably be pretty interesting. Hamburg was only a 1 hour train ride away, and it only cost 29 Euro for 1-5 people to ride to Hamburg. It’s a good deal, because the one 29 Euro ticket is good for all 5 people.

So by Sunday afternoon I found myself walking around downtown Hamburg. It is a big city, and you definitely need a map to find your way around the city. I have been trying to get lost, just to see if I can do it, but my sense of direction hasn’t failed me yet. Despite our not having a map, we found a lot of stuff to take pictures of. Almost all the stores were all closed, so we didn’t really want to stay in Hamburg very long, since we wouldn’t really be able to do anything else.

We headed back to Kiel, where the festival was in full swing. We found many small booths with a lot of interesting food to try. There was one of those gigantic towers where a large platform goes all the way to the top and then falls rapidly. It was fun to watch, but I didn’t go on it. We spent the rest of the evening walking around the festival and listening to the live music. The evening passed pretty quickly, and it was the first time that I took advantage of my new liberty hours. As a 2^nd Class I am able to stay out until 0100 instead of the midnight time for 3^rd classes. We got back to the ship at 0018 and went directly to sleep.

Monday morning I was still debating on going to Berlin, but I still didn’t want to spend that much money. I went to Hamburg again, but this time it was with a couple of the other ETs. After my experience with the city from the day before, I went there with a purpose this time. We wanted to see all of the major sights in the city that we could. I found an excellent tourist book in the train station, and we used it’s map to guide us to most of the major buildings. One of the most impressive things in the city was the catholic cathedral that was bombed during WWII. Only the tall pointed tower remains, and the rest of the Cathedral was never rebuilt. There is another cathedral not far from the bombed one, which we also visited. The ruined cathedral has a lot of pictures of the extent of the damage to the city from all the bombing. There was an elevator that went all the way to the top of the tower which is the only remaining part of the cathedral, and it was an amazing view from the top of it.

The other cathedral, which was obviously built within the last century, was also very tall, and we went to the top of it also. We could have taken the elevator, but we felt adventurous and took the stairs. I would recommend the elevator! We were huffing and puffing by the time we got all the way to the top. The view was just as rewarding as the view from the top of the other cathedral’s tower, and I got a lot of pictures of the city. We took the elevator back down the tower, and continued our tour of the city.

By this time it was about 1600, and some places were beginning to close. We tired to stop by the Museum of Hamburg History, but it was closed. It was beginning to rain by now, and we were beginning to get hungry. We found an electronics store that must be the biggest electronics store in existence. It had a total of 6 floors, and it had almost everything imaginable for electronics. There was one entire floor dedicated to TVs, and one of the floors was all music and movies. There was also an Internet Café in this store, so we each bought 30 minutes of Internet time to check our Hotmail and chat with anyone from back home that might be online. The most amazing thing was that the only thing that I bought in the entire electronics store was a package of AA batteries. J I looked through the laptops, and browsed through the European techno selection, but didn’t find anything that I really wanted.

We stopped in a restaurant to get some dinner, and found a nice lounge where a waitress was very talkative and discussed a lot with us about Germany and some of the interesting things to see. It turned out that we missed a few things, but maybe someday I’ll come back to the Hamburg. The waitress was very friendly, and wanted us to look her up again if we ever returned to Hamburg.

We were about tired of tourism by the time Monday came to a close. We grabbed a couple of pieces of pizza in the train station before heading back to the base via one of the many plentiful taxis. I would definitely like to come back to Germany someday.

The next morning was slightly cloudy as we pulled out, and the Germans had a marching band that sent us off. It was pretty moving to hear them playing our national anthem as we were pulling away from the pier.

Everyone on the ship is looking forward to returning to Norfolk. Even though we stopped in Norfolk during the middle of this deployment, it feels like we’ve been gone for a very long time. Most people have countdowns on the whiteboards in our workspaces, counting the days until we return. There are still some interesting ports left, which I will take full advantage of, but everyone is anticipating returning to Norfolk.

Thank you for the many emails that I got about my advancement to 2^nd Class. News from home is always appreciated.

2nd Class Advancement

2007-06-13T03:03:00.001-05:00

There is an announcement that I’ve neglected to tell everyone about, but I’m pretty excited about it. Back in Denmark, the results came out for the advancement test that I took in March. I knew that the results would be coming out soon, but I wasn’t expecting to make rank.

Over 17% of the crew made rank to either 3^rd class, 2^nd class or 1^st class. The captain read off the results in alphabetical order, and I patiently waited for him to get to S. There is one other guy on the ship named Spencer, who made 1^st class this time, and then immediately after that I heard ET2 Spencer! I was pretty excited, and a lot of people in berthing were all whooping and hollering, because a lot of people made rank. We were all shaking each other’s hands and congratulating each other.

A couple of Chiefs even came down and congratulated a few of the guys that are in their division. It was pretty funny, because one of the Gunners Mates that made 2^nd class was just getting into the shower, and about a minute later the Gunners Mate Chief came down and once he found out that his new GM2 was in the shower he just opened the shower door and walked in. It was pretty funny.

The next day we had the advancement ceremony, and the captain congratulated each of us personally. The photo turned out pretty well, so I attached it to this email. I pretty much have put my new rank on all of my uniforms now, and I’ve been working on additional qualifications that I need to complete for my new rank.

Aarhus, Denmark

2007-06-03T08:43:00.000-05:00

A mere two days after leaving Poland, we pulled into Denmark. I sometimes wish that we would pull into port less often, because when we're underway time goes faster.

Denmark is a little more expensive than Poland was. We have done our usual walking around the city, ate at a variety of restaurants, and took a lot of pictures. I've already uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr site for people to see. We found some free Wi-Fi yesterday, which is how I'm writing these blog posts.

Denmark is pretty green. There is a canal that runs through the center on the main street with all the restaurants. It makes a pretty good picture.

So far this is the fourth time that I've gone on liberty here in Denmark. The two times before this we only got a few hours in the evening. It was just enough time to walk around a little and catch some dinner before we had to go back to the ship.

Yesterday, we went to a restaurant that served kangaroo steak. It was a little unique, but tasted really good. The restaurant turned into a karaoke bar about the time that we finished, and it started to get a little too loud for eating.

We also went to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which is also in English as Spiderman 3 was back in Poland. Pirates 3 is really good, and I would recommend seeing it.

I never realized how far north Denmark, Poland and Sweden are. It gets dark at about 11pm, and starts getting light again at 4am. It makes it seem like it's not nearly time to head back to the ship yet. In Poland the weather was almost summer-like, but in Denmark I was happy that I had a coat in my backpack during the later evening hours.

We have yet to find a place to eat this evening, but so far everything that we've eaten here has not been disappointing.

Gdynia, Poland

2007-06-02T07:51:00.000-05:00

It's been a little while since I've posted, so I apologize, but we've had some problems with Internet access, so posting new stuff has been a little difficult.

Poland was a good port visit. The downtown area of Gdynia was very near to where the ship moored. Many people were very impressed with the food, and I had to agree that it was very good.

The first day in Poland we just walked into Gdynia, which is a moderately sized city. I took a few pictures, but somehow I didn't find anything interesting to take pictures of. First we stopped at a cafe, but they didn't serve dinner, which is what we were looking for. We found a place called Oktoberfest. It wasn't particularly festive, but for some reason underground restaurants are much better than street level restaurants. I ordered something which said filet, but it ended up being chicken. The chicken was really good. There was some kind of mushroom sauce on top of it, and it was just a little charred, but the charring made it better. We made one final stop at a blues bar, which turned out to be surprisingly good. The bartender was quite eager to talk about what he thinks of the economy in Poland. According to his explanation of Poland, there is only a lower class and an upper class. This was his explanation for why his bar was relatively empty that night. The rich people go to the high class restaurants, and the poor people can't afford to go anywhere.

There were a couple of interesting things that I learned about Poland. To say "Thank you" means that you don't want any change back. I believe that I experienced this without noticing at first, but once I had left Oktoberfest, discovered very little cash remaining in my wallet. The other thing that I learned was that it is considered insulting to drink Vodka with anything in it to dilute it. A good vodka should be able to be drank straight with no Coke, or orange juice, or whatever you usually mix your vodka with. I did not learn this from experience. We were warned about it ahead of time by a powerpoint presentation with a lot of useful information.

The blues bar has jazz on Tuesdays and blues on Wednesdays, but we were only in Poland for the weekend, and didn't get to go back on a night when they were playing music.

The following day we went to Sopot, which was a city a little ways south of Gdynia. Sopot is were the part life is supposed to be. We didn't hang around late enough for any of the party life, but there was a wider selection of restaurants, which we took advantage of. While we were walking around a number of thunderclouds rolled in, and we ducked inside a mall just before it began raining huge torrential buckets of water. The streets flood quickly when that much water is coming down at once, and we were glad that we stepped inside. While we were in the mall, we ate at a Mexican restaurant. The fajitas were pretty good.

The rain didn't last long, but by the time it stopped we were tired of Sopot, and we went to a theater in Gdynia which was playing Spiderman 3 in English. My personal opinion of Spiderman 3 was that it was very good. Other people didn't like it very much, but I thought the whole storyline was good. The only fault that it may have had was that it was a little too predictable, but it had a lot of good action scenes. That was our last night of liberty in Poland, but we had a good time there.

Gothenburg, Sweden

2007-05-15T07:22:00.000-05:00

Pulling out of Portsmouth, England at 5am and an Underway Replenishment (UNREP) at 2am the following night do not mix well with pulling into port and having duty on the day you pull in. I was completely exhausted upon arriving in Gothenburg, Sweden. I think that the exhaustion was felt by everyone on the ship, since a large part of the crew participates in the UNREP. Gothenburg was a pretty good port. The worst part about it was that we were anchored so far away, but I enjoyed the time that we had there.

So we anchored (again) in a bay outside Gothenburg, Sweden early on Friday morning last week. The first time that we anchored was, apparently, to close to a major traffic lane in the bay, so we had to move further away, which made for a pretty long ride between the pier and the ship. I was supposed to have a watch on the pier in the morning, but we were so far from shore that it took about 3 hours round trip to get to shore and back. I was tired enough that I just went to sleep after most of the important stuff was done in the morning. We had been told that we were going to receive over 40 pallets of supplies, so everyone was expecting to have a big working party sometime in the afternoon. The pallets didn’t end up arriving until around dinnertime, so I was glad that I spent most of the afternoon catching up on my sleep. There were hundreds of cases of sodas, big 50 pound boxes of frozen meat, small boxes of snack bars, more soda, fresh fruit, big boxes of chips, and even more soda. The working part was probably one of the biggest that I’d seen. The entire ship took part in it, and even the chiefs and officers joined in. The XO hooked up the 1MC, the main announcing speakers throughout the ship, to an iPod, and wherever you went on the ship, you could hear the music playing. The working party just barely finished before sunset, and everyone was glad that it was done. I had colors in the evening, which meant that I had to get into my dress blues and haul down the flag when it was time. Even though I had slept until almost dinnertime earlier, I quickly fell asleep after taps.

The next day was Saturday, and I had already arranged with another guy on the ship who’s name is also Spencer, that we would be liberty buddies in Sweden. We planned to leave on the 0930 liberty launch, and we were pretty close to the front of a long line of people that were eager for some liberty. The launch was pretty big, and we fit everyone that wanted to on liberty onto the boat. The ride to the pier was just a little over an hour, so we actually got onto the pier by 1015. We spotted a mall within sight of where we were, and decided to see what kind of stuff a Swedish mall sells. There were a few souvenir shops near the entrance, a lot of clothing stores throughout the mall, and a few restaurants. We ate at a restaurant that hadn’t been inundated by the lunch rush yet, and the food was actually really good. We didn’t really want to eat very much, so I just had some soup. The best store that we went into in the whole mall was a store that sold chocolate, coffee, and tea. They had an entire wall of tins of tea, some very shiny coffee bean dispensers, and a whole counter of chocolate. I posted the counter of chocolate on my Flickr photos page. Yes, I did buy some chocolate to bring back home to share with a few people.

We wandered around the city for a while in the afternoon. The streets are really wide throughout the city. There is a path for bicycles, another path for pedestrians, the normal two lanes for car traffic in each direction, and a set of tracks for the public transportation that goes almost everywhere in the city. You can see how wide the streets were in a couple of pictures that I posted on Flickr. We passed by two large soccer, or it’s correct European name of football, stadiums near the center of the city. There was a theater playing Spiderman 3, but we didn’t have the extra two hours and 20 minutes it would have taken to watch it. We made our way to the downtown part of the city, where there was a large crowd of people all gathered for a 13 mile marathon that was happening that day. A couple of the guys from our ship participated in the marathon, but they weren’t quite as prepared as they thought they were. They were extremely worn out by the end of the day, and they could barely move from how sore they were.

We ate at a Hard Rock café that afternoon, and the food there was very American. I got a New York Strip steak, which was cooked almost perfectly, except for the extra fat that isn’t usually on a steak like that. The Hard Rock café also had a virtual bowling alley on the top floor of the 3 story restaurant, so we played a couple of games. I’d never gone virtual bowling before, and it was a little strange. The lane was only about 15 feet long, and then there was a projector screen hanging at the end of the lane. When you bowled, the ball would roll down to the end of the lane, and then stop and a virtual bowling ball would continue down the lane on the projector screen. I didn’t do very well at it, but I firmly believe that the physics of the virtual bowling computer were flawed. If I’d been in a real bowling alley, I don’t think I would have lost.

The money here was called Kronars, which we I believe translates to Crowns. We were a little confused about the actual exchange rate, but determined that it was about 7 crowns to 1 dollar, which was a pretty good exchange rate, except that everything seemed like it was more expensive than if it were in dollars. I’ve gotten a pretty impressive collection of coins from all the different ports we’ve been to this deployment. I’m sure that I’ll have quite a lot of interesting currencies by the time this deployment is over.

We had been told that there would be a liberty launch departing at 1900, and it was about 1830 by the time we were done bowling. We made our way back toward the pier as quickly as we could, but as we were crossing a bridge to get back to the pier, we could see our liberty boat leaving. I must admit that it was very prompt and left exactly at 1900, and if we’d been just 5 minutes early then we would have made it. Since we missed that one, we determined to wait for the next one, which was supposed to be there in just a couple of hours. Two hours came and went, and our liberty boat hadn’t shown up yet. We occupied our time talking with some guards from the Royal Navy that were on watch on the pier, but after 3 hours still no liberty boat. We discovered from someone more informed that us that the last boat would be at 2300, which it would have been nice to know ahead of time. Near the pier that we were on while we were waiting for our liberty boat, there was a Spanish supply ship, which happened to be the same ship that we refueled with only a couple days earlier. The other Spencer that I was with had spent a couple of days aboard the ship because of a special request that he had put in. He was pretty friendly with some of the guys that were the equivalent rank of a 2^nd class Petty Officer, so we went over there to see if they would let us hang out while we waited. Once the quarterdeck on the Spanish supply ship finally figured out what we wanted, they let us go below decks to the 2^nd class mess. We hung out there with about 10 guys that were there, and they were very friendly. They were watching the equivalent of American Idol on the TV and playing some game with dice on the counter. All the other navies of the world allow their sailors to drink on board, so they were also offering us beer and wine while we were there. If we’d gone over there earlier, we would have had more time to relax with them, but we didn’t want to miss the liberty boat again, so we left by about 2240. It was another hour ride back to the ship, and we had to drag a few drunk people on board, but it was a pretty good day of liberty in Sweden.

Sunday was pretty relaxed, and we got underway from Sweden in the afternoon. The weather in the Northern European oceans has been pretty calm. Someone said that it rains 340 days out of the year in Sweden, and it did rain on us a little while we were there. It is a lot chillier here than it was in the warm Caribbean seas, but I’m looking forward to some of our other planned ports that we will be visiting soon.

Portsmouth, England

2007-05-14T09:10:00.001-05:00

Originally, our stop in Portsmouth, England was only a short anchoring in the bay, but it turned into an official port visit. It was actually two weekends ago that we pulled into Portsmouth, and since then we have pulled into Gothenburg, Sweden, which I will write about shortly.

We anchored just outside of Portsmouth, England a week ago Sunday in the afternoon. It was originally just a short stop for diplomatic reasons, but while there it came to the attention of the Chain of Command that a cable that lifts our security boats out of the water was in need of some repair. We use our Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats (RHIB) for almost everything. We use them whenever we need to recover people that have fallen overboard. (No, that hasn’t ever happened, but it could theoretically happen as part of a man-overboard drill.) Or we will use them for security boats whenever we pull into a port, and we feel the need to increase the security of the ship. We will put the RHIB boats in the water to create a perimeter to keep small craft away. We also will use them for our boarding teams. If we ever find it necessary to send a boarding team to a suspicious ship, we will deploy a RHIB with a boarding party. Thus they can be a pretty significant portion of the ship’s mission.

It is a big enough deal that we couldn’t proceed without getting it repaired, so we pulled into Portsmouth to get the impromptu repairs done. Originally, the Captain wasn’t going to let anyone go on liberty in Portsmouth, but our Command Master Chief was able to negotiate some liberty for us. The deal was that the Captain would let us go on liberty, it we would do extensive topside preservation the following day. Translation: You get liberty if you paint a lot of stuff the next day. I had some maintenance scheduled that required repainting of certain motors that tilt some of the antennas that I work on, so that didn’t bother me too much.

So the day that we pulled in, I got to go on liberty in Portsmouth for an afternoon. I’d been to Portsmouth on our last deployment, so I was already a little familiar with what to expect there. Our only goal was to get some food, and maybe take a few pictures of anything worth seeing. It turned out that a lot of places were closed by the time we got on liberty, so we couldn’t really do any shopping. We found a decent restaurant that wasn’t very crowded. The most unique thing about this restaurant was that you simply found a table, and once you figured out what you wanted to order, you go up to a counter where they take your order and give you a number to put on the table. Then you return to your seat and wait for your food. It was the same with the drink counter, if you wanted to order something to drink, just go up to the counter and buy it. No waiting for the waiter/waitress to bring you your drinks. The only other purpose for the waiter/waitress was to clear the empty glasses and plates off the table. One last advantage: the check is already paid individually by each person at the time of ordering. The food that I ate there was good. I don’t remember the exact name for what I ordered, but the primary item of focus on the plate was shaped like a piece of pie, but had meat on the inside and a lot of gravy. It was very edible. The vegetables on the plate looked suspiciously freeze-dried, but the amount of gravy made up for it.

The rest of the evening we walked around and observed whatever scenery we could in the fading light. During our journey to the restaurant we passed an old wooden ship that has been turned into a museum. It wasn’t open for a tour, but it looked really impressive from the outside. There must have been over a hundred cannons sticking out of the sides, and the dizzying web of lines that stretched up to the 3 different masts looked like they could be a nightmare to work with. I’m amazed that such creations could be controlled very easily. The men that sailed on those ships were far different and far more courageous than today’s navy.

The following day the paint flew, the grinders ground, and the needle guns…errr….needled. The weather wasn’t ideal for painting, and it even began to sprinkle a little in the afternoon, but that didn’t stop us. We still got a lot of the ship repainted. Sometimes I wonder which is the higher priority, making the ship look good or making the ship work well. I was proud of how my antenna motors looked after the scrubbing and painting that I did to them.

That night we got underway at a bright and early 5am. The crew was very tired after that night, but that wasn’t the best part. The night after that we also did an underway replenishment at 2am. Ummm…..yeah…..nobody did any work the following day. Everyone was exhausted, only the minimal number of watches were manned, and not many people could be found roving the main deck.

Here’s a bit of Naval history that’s been floating around email inboxes for a long time. It may be incorrect, but it’s pretty funny and gives you an idea of what the old navy used to be like:

The U.S.S. Constitution (Old Ironsides) as a combat vessel carried 48,600 gallons of fresh water for her crew of 475 officers and men. This was sufficient to last six months of sustained operations at sea. She carried no evaporators.

However, let it be noted that according to her log, "On July 27, 1798, the U.S.S. Constitution sailed from Boston with a full complement of 475 officers and men, 48,600 gallons of fresh water, 7,400 cannon shot, 11,600 pounds of black powder and 79,400 gallons of rum."

Her mission: "To destroy and harass English shipping."

Making Jamaica on 6 October, she took on 826 pounds of flour and 68,300 gallons of rum. Then she headed for the Azores, arriving there 12 November. She provisioned with 550 pounds of beef and 64,300 gallons of Portuguese wine. On 18 November, she set sail for England. In the ensuing days she defeated five British men-of-war and captured and scuttled 12 English merchantmen, salvaging only the rum aboard each. By 26 January, her powder and shot were exhausted. Nevertheless, although unarmed she made a night raid up the Firth of Clyde in Scotland Her landing party captured a whisky distillery and transferred 40,000 gallons of single malt Scotch aboard by dawn.

Then she headed home.

The U.S.S. Constitution arrived in Boston on 20 February, 1799, with no cannon shot, no food, no powder, no rum, no wine, no whisky and 38,600 gallons of stagnant water.

GO NAVY!

Rota, Spain

2007-05-05T00:04:00.000-05:00

We pulled into Rota in the morning on Wednesday. It was mostly just so that we could get some more mail and supplies. The crew just about emptied the Navy Exchange (NEX) there though stocking up on snacks, entertainment, and needed uniform items. I’ve heard that the city of Rota is nice, and there was some kind of festival going on while we were there this time. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to see it, because of the short bit of time that we had. I had duty on the day that we pulled in, so I didn’t make a trip to the NEX. They tried to rotate everyone in the duty section off the ship so that they could get whatever they needed, but I don’t need anything that badly.

The next morning reveille was actually half an hour early, and we got underway just as the sun was coming up. It was a really nice sunrise. There were just enough clouds in the sky that the sun created some beautiful colors. The weather is a bit chillier here than it was in the southern regions. I may have to get out my warm weather clothes again.

Mindelo, Cape Verde

2007-04-28T09:11:00.000-05:00

The Cape Verde Islands were our third stop near the equator, near the western coast of Africa. They gave us some perspective on how poor the economy can be in some countries. There weren’t any good places to go snorkeling in the bay that we moored in, and out of the 5 days that we were in Cape Verde, I only got one actual day of liberty.

Early on Monday morning we pulled into Mindelo. The harbor had a lot of shipping boats in the harbor, and there were a few small fishing boats floating around in the harbor. The island is very rocky and barren. As we were pulling in we could see some pretty high, treeless, and very rocky hills along the shoreline. The hills looked like they could have been fun to climb, but they looked pretty dangerous. The wind in Mindelo seemed like it was always blowing. You wouldn’t think that wind would blow a ship around too much, but as we were sitting in the harbor waiting to moor to the pier, it blew the ship around a little. The first day in port I had duty, but I had an easy watch from 1200-1600 as the M-16/9mm topside rover.

During my watch, the ship organized an event on the pier, which we call DC Olympics. (DC stands for Damage Control.) Basically, there are a number of events, where each department on the ship has teams to demonstrate their Damage Control prowess. Some of the events were pipe patching, dressing out in fire fighting gear, a stretcher bearer relay, and a ruptured hose drill, where they had to swap out their “ruptured” hose for a new one. All together there were about 5 fire hoses on the pier, and in the end it started to turn into an all-out water fight. A few people needed to relieve a little tension, and it was good for the crew to loosen up some. Combat Systems department tied with Engineering department for 1^st place, which was good, because we lost last time that we had a DC Olympics.

After the DC Olympics, there was a barbeque on the pier, and a talent show for anyone that wanted to display their skills. There’s a guy on the ship that has a turntable and a huge collection of music, which he played during the whole time. I wonder what the people of Mindelo thought as we were booming our American music across the harbor… There was also a movie, which we played by pointing a projector at the side of the ship. I think they played Déjà vu, the new movie that came out a little while ago.

Tuesday, which was the only day of liberty that I got, I went into town. There wasn’t a whole lot to see, but I got a couple of pictures. There were a lot of street beggars and shopkeepers that were eager for us to spend our money on them, and we spent a lot of time avoiding them. There was one little kid that looked to be about 10, who came up to us and began telling us that he was hungry in the whini-est voice he could muster. He looked like he’s had more than a couple good meals in the recent past, and I’m sure that it’s because of his persistence. He followed us a little while, but it didn’t take long for us to leave him behind. I heard a couple of stories from the other ET’s that there was a lady that latched onto them for a while, and kept complaining that her baby was hungry. They didn’t see any sign of a baby, but I think they gave her a little money, which only encouraged other beggars in the area to prompt them for more money.

We walked over most of the downtown area. There was a flea market in one part of town, but most of the wares were cheap beads, trinkets, and a few other things. There were a number of woodcarvings that many vendors were selling, and one of the vendors was quite insistent that we had to go inside of his store. He was quite upset when we refused and moved on. He also followed us for a little while, and by the 10^th time we said no, I think he got the point.

There was a lot of construction in Mindelo, and hardware stores seemed to be on every street corner. We didn’t wander far from the downtown area, but there were a lot of new building being constructed. Some people are calling the Cape Verde Islands, the “Hawaii” of Europe. While we were walking around, a couple of guys in nice white button-up shirts, slacks and ties walked up to us. I immediately recognized that they were probably Mormons, and their nametags looked like they would translate to “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints.” They are halfway through their year-long stay in the Cape Verde islands, and I think they were just happy to talk to someone from the US. They were curious about where we were from, and I was surprised that they hadn’t noticed the US Navy destroyer sitting in their harbor. You could almost see it from the hill that we were standing on as we talked to them. We talked with them for a little while, and they gave us directions to a good place to eat.

We made our way down the hill and located an Internet Café. There seemed like there were quite a few Internet Cafés in the downtown area, and we stopped there to check our Hotmail accounts, which we can’t access from the ship. It was nice and cool in the café, and the 7 computers all seemed to be sharing 1 slow dial-up Internet connection. It took me about 45 minutes to check my Hotmail, but it only cost me about 180 escudos, which is about $2.50.

We went to a restaurant that was part of a hotel, because it was one of the few places that was serving any food. The regular dinner hours started at 1930, which was still a couple hours away, but they were serving pizza, which was really good. I got the Fantastico Pizza, which seemed to be the equivalent of a Supreme in the US. It had green peppers, cheese, shrimp, tomatoes, and a few other miscellaneous things. It was beginning to get dark at this point, and we headed back to the ship.

I was going to go out again on Wednesday, but apparently, we moored to the only refueling pier in the harbor. There was another ship that needed to refuel, so we pulled out in the afternoon, did circles all night and came back in on Thursday morning. It meant that I wasn’t able to go on liberty on my only other liberty day, but I think that I already saw everything there was to see.

Thursday night/Friday morning I had the 0300-0800 M-16/9mm topside rover, and immediately after my watch we had to station the Sea and Anchor detail once again to pull out Friday morning.

I was a little disappointed with Cape Verde. I was expecting a little better economy, and maybe even some places to snorkel or scuba dive. The water in the harbor fairly clear, but we were warned that the water here isn’t very clean. The locals have built up immunities to things that we could get from the water.

Today we had an UNREP for about 5 hours, and besides the usual hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel, we also got food, mail, and vending machine supplies. (You would be amazed at how much soda the crew drinks.) Maybe I’ll get some statistics from the cruise like I got last deployment.

We may be done with our warm-weather ports, but I’m looking forward to some of the other places on our schedule. I have the 0200-0700 watch tonight, so I’ll probably go to sleep directly after chow, so that I’m well rested for the late night hours.

If you can understand this paragraph, then you are well versed in Navy slang:

“Me and Willy were lollygagging by the scuttlebutt after being aloft and were perched on a bollard eyeballing a couple of bilge rats and flangeheads using crescent hammers to pack a fitting on a handybilly. A deck ape ran through the nearest hatch and dogged it tight because he knew the sewer pipe sailor was going to lay below, catch him between decks and punch him in the snot locker. He'd probably wind up on the binnacle list but Doc would find a way to gundeck the paper or give it the deep six to keep himself above board.”

(There is more to this story, but it’s a little too non-PG. I even had to modify this portion of it to remove some of the cruder terms. If some of saltier old dogs out there understand this small paragraph and want the rest of it, I’ll send you the full story.)

Fort-de-France, Martinique

2007-04-16T16:01:00.000-05:00

Our second island visit in the Caribbean came last Tuesday. Martinique is a French territory, hence the name. The people there speak French, Creole, and a little English. Even though the city that we pulled into was the Capital of the island, there wasn’t very much to do. There were a few good restaurants along the waterfront within sight of the ship, but the bay wasn’t as good for snorkeling as Curacao was. We were also unable to schedule any scuba diving trips, as we did in Curacao.

Tuesday, we pulled into the bay of Fort-de-France fairly early in the morning. The bay was shallow, but we couldn’t see the bottom very clearly. The city here was much larger than the city in Curacao that we moored next to, so I suspect that has something to do with it. In Curacao we snorkeled about 100 feet away from the ship, and we could see 20 feet down into the water. Tuesday afternoon I got to go into town for a little while. We walked around the downtown area, which was a really crowded area filled with small shops. The shops were all closing down at about 4pm for the day, so we never saw much of what was in them. It surprised us how many pharmacies, shoe stores and sunglasses stores seemed to be on every street corner. The pharmacies were almost everywhere, and you could almost always spot one from wherever you were.

Most of the restaurants in Fort-de-France opened at 7pm and stay open well into the night. This made it difficult for us to find any food though between 4pm and 7pm. We mostly walked around the city observing how many stores were closed before we were able to get any food. Shortly before 7 we found a restaurant that was willing to open about 10 minutes early, and serve us some drinks before they began serving their main entrees. The menu was a little cryptic, but the waitress, who had a hard enough time with English, was able to sufficiently describe what we were ordering. I got a steak, which was probably about the equivalent of a filet mignon, but not quite as good as the steak that I had in Miami. (The prices were a lot better, too.) We went back to the ship soon after that, with our bellies satisfied and a little knowledge about the island.

Wednesday was a duty day for me, and I had an easy watch. I went to bed fairly early to prepare for liberty on Thursday.

Thursday morning we left the ship in a fairly large group. We had the intention of seeing how easy it would be to get away from Fort-de-France and find some good snorkeling or hiking. There is a large volcano in the northern part of the island, and some guys had heard about canyoning. Unfortunately, we never actually went canyoning, because we were told that we wouldn’t be allowed to rent any “motorized vehicles” while in Martinique, so our transportation was extremely limited. Canyoning is a sport where you rappel or climb through canyons to get to waterfalls or whatever else you may want to see. It sounded fun, but I think we would have needed to prepare far in advance in order to do it.

We caught a taxi to a city further up the coast called Saint Pierre. The city was small, but the coolest thing about it was the black sand on the beach. It wasn’t quite black, but it was definitely a dark grayish color. We snorkeled for a little while, but the area that we were in wasn’t very good, and we should have found some rocks to snorkel near. The volcano loomed up in the sky behind the city, and according to the history books, Saint Pierre was called “Little Paris” before the city was covered in lava in 1902. Now it is a small quiet city with a lot of fishing boats in it’s harbor. We were concerned about getting back to Fort-de-France in any reasonable amount of time, so after a couple of hours of snorkeling, we crammed our group into a small bus that was the nearest we were going to get to a taxi. The price was pretty inexpensive, but there were about 15 people on the bus altogether. The rest of the evening was spent in Fort-de-France enjoying the food of Martinique.

We are underway once again now, and tonight I will have the 2am-7am watch. Lately, it seems like a lot of the equipment that I own has been breaking, so I’ve spent a lot of time troubleshooting and repairing stuff. The atmosphere of the ship has relaxed quite a bit from the stressed-out state that it was in a couple of weeks ago.

I have heard much about the strange weather in US recently. I would appreciate some email about the strange weather that has been happening up there, if you feel so inclined. J

Deployment maps

2007-04-09T08:43:00.000-05:00

Google recently added a feature that allows you to personalize maps and add places that you've been to. I thought it would be cool for people to see where I went to last deployment and each of the ports that we visit during this deployment. I will continue to add ports to the Deployment 2007 map as we visit them, but you can see where we've been so far.

Here are the links:

Deployment 2005
Deployment 2007

There's also a link to these maps on the sidebar where I list the names of the ports from last deployment.

Curacao, Nederland Antilles

2007-04-05T13:32:00.000-05:00

Scuba diving is awesome! J I had a great time in Curacao, and I spent about 5 hours snorkeling and about an hour scuba diving.

We pulled in on Friday last weekend, and the first thing that struck me was the clarity of the water. You have to be in pretty shallow water to clearly see the bottom. We were going to pull in to the downtown area of Willemstad, which was the biggest city in the nearby area, but the water was too shallow for us. We moored in a nearby bay, which ended up being great for snorkeling, and we went scuba diving in the same bay.

Friday was a duty day for me, so I had to stay on the ship. Our mail was lost for a while, so we had a big working party to get over 300 pounds of mail on board, and anything that had been mailed to me, since the deployment started, finally arrived at this port. We also had a big trash party (stinks bad, literally) and some huge stores working parties. All of the work on Friday was well worth it, because of the snorkeling and scuba diving that I did Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday morning I got out the snorkeling mask and tube that I bought in South Beach, and I was glad that I bought some good equipment back there. They had the same type of masks here, but I didn’t see any good snorkeling tubes here. I immediately walked off the ship with another guy that bought some snorkeling stuff in South beach, and we snorkeled in the shallow water. It is amazing when you can see all the stuff under the water. We saw a multitude of different types of fish. There were some fish that we saw that were extremely well camouflaged that hid in rocks. We saw what looked like an underwater snail, and right underneath the pier that we were moored to, there was a huge school of little tiny fish. When I say huge, I mean that there must have been at least 5000 of these little shiny fish that all stayed in the same spot and surrounded you as you swam through them. I snorkeled that morning for about 2 hours and had to stop because our scuba diving class was that afternoon.

We had to take a beginner’s class, because scuba diving can be dangerous if you don’t understand the hand signals, the equipment you’re using, or the dangers of the water pressure around you. Once we got to the dive shop, which was close to where we were, we watched a video about the basics of scuba diving. Then an instructor took us in small groups of 4, and introduced us to the equipment and repeated the basics of hand signals and safety. After that we went down to the beach, got into the scuba diving gear, and went to a shallow part of the beach to demonstrate the basics that we’d learned. The training took a long time, but some people are slower learners than others. It’s really awesome to breathe underwater for the first time. It’s a little weird at first, and I think that the snorkeling earlier helped a little. I used the same mask that I had used for snorkeling earlier, and I knew that it would keep a good seal. Even if your mask doesn’t keep a good seal, there is a way to clear your mask of water that the instructor taught us.

After we’d all gotten a basic grasp of scuba diving, we all followed the instructor out into the deeper parts of the water. All together, we didn’t go further than about 7 meters (~20 feet), but it felt like a lot deeper than that. I never knew about the Buoyancy Control Device (BCD), which you use to go higher or lower in the water. You basically use the air from your oxygen tank to inflate a vest that makes you float. It was difficult to get the buoyancy right, but after a little practice I was able to get at the right depth in the water. There wasn’t a whole lot to see in the area that we went to, and I actually saw cooler stuff when I was snorkeling in the morning, but learning how to scuba was great!

After scuba diving, we went to a beach that the liberty bus was taking us to, called Mamba beach. There was a good restaurant there, and each set of tables was covered by a “grass hut.” I got some fajitas, and we had tiramisu for dessert, which was excellent. The sun had started to go down, and there were an awful lot of empty beach chairs on the beach, so we laid out on the beach for a while and relaxed in the warm Caribbean breezes. (I’m trying not to make too many people jealous.)

The next day, Sunday, I went snorkeling during the morning again, and I finished off a roll of film for an underwater camera that I’d bought the day before for scuba diving. I wished that I’d had two or three rolls of film, or an underwater digital camera. I’ll try to get the pictures put on CD so that I can upload them to Flickr. I uploaded some pretty good pictures this morning for Curacao. We went to downtown Willemstad, which is the biggest city in Curacao. Since it was a Sunday, the majority of the stores were closed, but there were a few restaurants and stores that were open. There was a market downtown on Sunday that was similar to a Grower’s Market or a Farmer’s market, like there is in the US. We got to the market too late to see what was being sold, so we ate at a large restaurant that was open to the air. You could look out over the city of Curacao as you were eating. It was really nice.

We walked around for a little while longer, and I got some night pictures of Willemstad, and then we headed back to the place where the bus dropped us off. The bus had a slightly erratic schedule, so we ended up taking a cab. The money that they use there is US Dollars or Nederland Antilles Guilders. You could usually use either one at any place that you went to, and apparently the Guilder has a fixed exchange rate with the US Dollar. The exchange rate was about 1.75 Guilder to 1 USD.

The next day, I had duty, and we had a huge working party for loading more supplies. You wouldn’t believe how many gallons of liquid eggs we loaded that day. It must have been at least 100. The following day we left port there, but I won’t forget what the snorkeling and diving was like there. I hope that the other places that we go to soon are half as good as Curacao was.

Miami, FL

2007-03-23T18:26:00.000-05:00

So we’ve been on deployment for over 60 days now. People are starting to get a little annoying. Fights are picked easily, and people tend to start complaining about things a lot more. I’m doing alright, I guess. The last 60 days really have gone by pretty quickly, maybe that’s because we’ve been pulling in and out of port so much. Some of the ports that we’re going to soon are going to be pretty good, and I’m looking forward to them.

This past weekend we stopped in Miami. We pulled right up to the pier that all the major cruise ships pull up to. Over the course of the weekend at least 10 cruise ships pulled in and left in the same day. On Saturday 4 cruise ships pulled out all at once in the late afternoon hours. They look huge next to our ship, but they wouldn’t be much good in a fight. J

Once again, we rented a car while we were in Miami. The car rental agency that we rented from was significantly out of the way, but it was also $100 cheaper than some of the rental agencies near the downtown area. When we got to the rental agency, there was a bit of a line, and we ended up waiting about 45 minutes for our car. Since we waited so long they gave us an upgrade, and we ended up getting one of the new Dodge Charger cars for $80 for the weekend, which was a really good deal.

Friday night we went to the South Beach area, which was almost within sight of the ship if there weren’t so many tall buildings in the way. We really had no idea what we wanted to eat, so we walked around and just picked a place. We ended up finding out that South Beach is a little too rich for us, but we could afford to spend a pretty penny for one night. We ate at a place called Tuscan Steak, and it was definitely expensive. Some of the cheapest things on the menu were about $35. The total cost per person ended up being about $60 each, which was a little extravagant. I don’t think that I’ll plan on doing that again any time soon, but I will admit that the food was incredible. One of the guys with us had never had a steak that melted in his mouth before, and he was amazed that a steak could actually taste like that. I had the smallest portion of filet mignon that was available on the menu. The food was worth the price, but I don’t think that I can afford to do that again for a while.

On Saturday we went to South Beach again, and we wanted to buy some snorkel gear for the beach. The other guys bought fins, masks, and little boots for the fins so that they don’t tear up your feet. I didn’t feel like spending very much money after the previous night, so I just bought the snorkel and the mask. I must admit that both are very good quality. I’ve never had a snorkel before that has valves on it so that it will automatically close if water tries to come inside the tube. I still got a little seawater in my mouth a few times. The water was a little too rough on South Beach for the snorkeling to be very good, but there are some other ports that we will be going to soon that will be excellent for snorkeling.

Sunday I had duty, but it was an easy duty day. I was glad that I still had my mobile Internet connection through my cell company, because I still needed to do my taxes, and the Internet connection on the ship is not fast enough to get anything done. My watch was from 2200-0300, so my sleep schedule got messed up again.

Monday was a work day, so we didn’t get off the ship until about 1400. We returned the car and caught a cab to a Dunkin Donuts that had free wi-fi. There was a restaurant right next to it that had some pretty decent food, so we ate there and used the wi-fi from next door. One more cab ride later, and we were back at the ship.

Pray for us as the close quarters of the ship can stress everyone’s nerves. I hope that our next couple of ports are relaxing. We’ve still got 4 months left. Hopefully they’ll go as fast as the first couple of months have gone.

Norfolk, VA

2007-03-03T21:23:00.001-05:00

Yes, we stopped in Norfolk, Virginia, our home port, for about three days. It’s a weird deployment, I know. We were in Norfolk for such a short time that I wasn’t able to get off the ship hardly at all. We pulled in on a Monday, the 26^th of February in the morning. In fact, we had an early reveille in the morning, so that we could pull in extra early. They mustered the line handlers by about 0630, but it was still dark outside. We really didn’t need to start that early, so after all the lines were all out on deck, everyone went back inside to wait for us to get closer to the piers.

It wasn’t too chilly as we pulled along all the aircraft carrier piers and the amphibious piers, and we moored at a pier that was within reasonable walking distance to the NEX. We didn’t get off the ship until late in the afternoon, so I took a nap until they would let us off the ship. I was pretty tired from getting up so early, and being underway just wears you out sometimes.

In the evening a bunch of guys wanted to go to the NEX, and one of them had a car. We all piled into his SUV, and drove over to the NEX, which really isn’t very far away. I had a few things that I wanted to get, and somewhere about a week into the deployment, I realized that I had no white hats at all (you know, the crazy Dixie cup sailor’s hat). I bought a few ribbons, and things that we will earn from this deployment and stocked up on snack bars that I’ve been eating whenever the ship’s food isn’t very appetizing.

We went to Applebee’s later, and I got my favorite meal there, Bourbon Street Steak. I don’t know what it is about how they cook it, but it’s got great flavor. I think it’s the sauce or something. We hung out there for a while until it was time for a movie that we wanted to watch at the theater nearby. We wanted to see the Number 23, which ended up being a little too superstitious for me. The whole movie is about how you can take a lot of different words, assign numbers to the letters, and the numbers will add up to 23. By some freak of nature, the main character had a lot of things about him that added up to 23. The movie had an interesting twist that I wasn’t expecting, but I’m not a real big fan of movies based on superstition.

After the movie it was getting pretty late, and we were all getting pretty tired, so we went back to the ship. The following two days I had duty. I took one of the other ET’s duty days (for a small fee), so that she could spend time with her husband and enjoy her time in Norfolk. I ended up having the 00-04 Petty Officer of the Watch on the quarterdeck for her duty day, and then the following day, my duty day, I had the 20-24 Petty Officer of the Watch. Technically, I stood 8 hours of watch in the same day, even though it was two separate duty sections that I was standing watch for. It was a lot of watch for two days, and I was really tired after messing up my sleep schedule two days in a row.

I apologize to anyone in Norfolk that I wasn’t able to visit or talk to. Our time was just too short. I wish that we could have had a few more days there. We would have been able to do so much more, and we wouldn’t have had to cram all of our supplies onloading into three days. When we arrived in Norfolk Monday morning, I think there were 4 semi trucks waiting for us with supplies, parts, food, and whatever else it is that we need. Each of the following days we onloaded more stuff besides the stuff from the first day.

We departed Norfolk on Thursday, and we’re out doing the Navy thing again. I’ll have a little more of an opportunity to study my college course. I went out and watched flight quarters today. We had to do some maintenance on the big antennas that stick off the back of the ship, and they have to be lowered for flight quarters, so I stayed outside to watch the helicopter land. It has been a long time since I watched it, and it’s still really cool to watch a helicopter land on our ship.

I hope that everyone on the land is doing well. Your emails are appreciated, and I hope that people will continue to email me as the deployment progresses.

Cape Canaveral, Florida

2007-02-23T05:33:00.001-05:00

There was a lot of stuff to do in Cape Canaveral. This was a really good port.

We pulled into a bay near where all the cruise ships pull in. From where we were moored we could see a number of launch pads for the Kennedy Space Center. While we were in port there, we witnessed the launch of the THEMIS rocket launch, which was pretty big on the news last weekend. The rocket was the first to ever launch 5 satellites into space at once. The details of the THEMIS project are on NASA’s website: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/themis/main/index.html The blue rocket in the photo on the NASA page was pretty small in the distance, but watching the launch was still incredible. I posted a couple of the better pictures of the launch on my Flickr photos page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ijspence

On Saturday, we tried taking the bus to see where it would take us, but apparently the bus route was about 2 hours long, and transportation was difficult. The guys that I was with decided that renting a car would be a good option, but we had heard rumors that rental cars were unavailable due to the Daytona 500 race going on the same weekend. We stopped at a tourist information center, and the helpful attendant there called the main AVIS office, which reserved us a car. The AVIS office that we picked up the car at wasn’t very pleased that the main office had given us a car so easily, due to the high demand, but since we were already in the system, they gave it to us. The prices were a little inflated too.

The first place that we went to on Saturday was a place called Jungle Adventures. They had over 200 alligators there, and a bunch of Florida Panthers. The guy that was giving us a tour got in the cage with them, and the panthers came over to him and started licking his head. He has really short hair, and he said that a panther’s tongue is the equivalent of rubbing 40 grit sandpaper over your skin. I got a lot of pictures of that too, that I posted. After Jungle adventures, we went to get some dinner, and stopped at a free WiFi place to use the Internet for a little while. With my Cingular cellular connection, I can get Internet wherever, but the other guys wanted to get on the Internet with their computers too.

On Sunday we started out by going to a community church in Cocoa Beach. It was a pretty good service. We went to the “contemporary” service, but the average age of everyone there was about 50. The pastor had a mild Dutch accent, but one of the guys with us had a hard time understanding him. I enjoyed the sermon, and even though we had no idea what to expect from the church, it was a really good service. There was another service directly after the contemporary service, but the contemporary service was pretty calm. All they really did was jazz up the songs a little by adding some electronic drums through an electronic keyboard.

After the service we got some breakfast at a Waffle House nearby. It was packed, but after a short wait we got a seat. I got a cheesesteak sandwich, which was nearly dripping with cheese. It was worth it.

We went to Kennedy Space Center, and spent a few hours there walking around all the interesting stuff about space. The rocket garden was pretty cool, and seeing the inside of a space shuttle was impressive too. We watched a 3D IMAX movie there about what it’s like to walk on the moon. It talked about a lot of the history of the space program and all of the Apollo missions. A lot of the enthusiasm about men walking on the moon has died out in our time, but it’s pretty amazing to think about. The IMAX 3D theater experience was stunning, and I learned a lot about the space program that I never knew before.

We drove to Orlando in the afternoon, and went to a museum called Wonderworks. The have a lot of those exhibits that play with your mind and get you to think a little. There were paintings on the walls like the neverending stairs illusion and many other similar paintings. There were flight simulators, a bed of nails that you could lay on, a hurricane simulator, an earthquake simulator, a huge bubble maker, and a lot of other interesting things. There were a bunch of seats that were attached to a rope with different combinations of pulleys attached that you could pull yourself up with.

The coolest illusion was right at the beginning of the museum right after you walk past the ticket counter. There is small room with a catwalk in it. The room is a cylinder on its side that follows the catwalk, and the whole cylinder rotates around you with various different colored dots shining through the outside of the cylinder. The only thing you can see at the other end of the cylinder is an open doorway. The effect is that once you are about 1/3 of the way down the catwalk, the doorway in front of you that you’re walking toward suddenly seems to start spinning. This makes you think that you’re about to fall off the catwalk and makes you lean in the direction of the spinning to stay upright. Of course, the doorway isn’t spinning, only the room around you, but it’s a pretty awesome effect.

Later, we drove to the Downtown Disney marketplace/shopping mall to walk around for a while. There is a person that works there that one of the guys wanted to say hi to. We got some dinner at a restaurant in Downtown Disney. We didn’t do a whole lot of shopping there, but one of the guys did go to a candy store and bought an entire pound of Nerds! (that’s a lot)

I slept on the drive back from Orlando, which is about an hour, and I still didn’t have any trouble going to sleep later on the ship.

Monday was a duty day, but since it was President’s Day, we had a really easy day. I had a watch from 2000-2400, and I spent a lot of time on the main deck with my computer. The sun was shining brightly, and I had a really good Cingular signal. I actually had to get out of the sun, because the one part of my body that was exposed to the sun, my hands, started to get a little burned from the sun. My left hand has a slight hint of a tan to it now, which is a little humorous. There was a chilly breeze, but the sun felt good. I actually napped for a few minutes out in the sun.

We got underway bright and early Tuesday morning, and everyone’s been catching up on sleep. I really like it when we’re doing SONAR operations, and they set a condition on the ship called Q2. It basically means that they pass very little over the 1MC, and they won’t use the boatswains whistle at all. All noise on the ship has to be minimized so that the SONAR technicians can “hear” any nearby underwater contacts. Of course, sometimes SONAR can get a little annoying. We like to tell the new guys that it’s the fish singing to us, because that’s what it sounds like. It doesn’t just sound like the “ping” sound that you hear on the movies. It sounds like someone’s trying to play some kind of strange whistling instrument, but isn’t doing a very good job of it. Sometimes it can keep you awake, but I’ve learned to sleep through it, now.

The seas are much calmer here, and sometimes you can barely feel the ship rock. I wonder if the seas will be rough in some of the ports later in this deployment….

Mayport, FL

2007-02-15T12:09:00.000-05:00

It’s been difficult to establish a routine lately. We’ve been in and out of port so much. When we’re in port, people’s primary focus is getting everything done so that we can go out on liberty and get off the ship for a while. When we’re underway, people tend to relax, get maintenance done whenever they can, and sleep. Being underway is a lot less stressful, and I would actually like to have some more underway time, so that I can focus on the college class that I signed up for this underway. I want to complete my college class, study for the advancement exam for 2^nd Class Electronics Technician, and read a number of books that I brought with me. When we’re in port so much, there isn’t any time to do too much of all that.

The biggest thing that I want to complete this deployment is my ESWS (Enlisted Surface Warfare Specialist) qualification, which will help my advancement. ESWS is based on knowing a little bit about almost all of the systems on the ship. It gives you a better understanding of how everything works together and could be useful if the ship ever had a major problem or significant casualty.

Our most recent port was Mayport, Florida, which wasn’t incredibly exciting. I wasn’t aware that it is the 3^rd largest US Naval port, though, which is pretty impressive. The weather was much warmer than we’ve had in Halifax and Boston. I went out with only a t-shirt on, instead of the multiple layers that I had to wear in past ports. The first day that I was there, I walked to the NEX to restock on some of the basic stuff that I use regularly. We ended up walking off base to get some food at a small diner called Dick’s Wings and Grill. It was a pretty long walk, and we got a cab for the ride back. The food was ok, and definitely better than the food on the ship.

The following day, Sunday, I went with some of the other Christians on the ship to a Baptist church that they had been to before. It was a pretty typical Baptist service. Apparently they have a contemporary service and a traditional service. We were intending to go to the contemporary service, but we got the times confused. The contemporary service is in the early morning, and the traditional service is at 10:30, instead of the other way around. The church is sponsored by the Family Channel, and they just started a series about Desperate Households and why Christian households differ or should differ from non-Christian households. Overall it was a good service, and it was good to go to a real church service. It was the first one that I’ve been to in the past month since we got underway for deployment.

One of the guys on the ship rented a car for the weekend, so after church was over, we went to a Panera Bread, and ended up sitting in there for quite a while. We each took our laptops there, and used the free Wi-Fi Internet access that Panera has. I didn’t really end up doing a whole lot while we were there, but it was cool to hang out there for a while. I ate a good toasted sandwich, and enjoyed the atmosphere. One of the guys has a new online game that he’s playing, and he played that for a while. I caught up on a bunch of news, as I usually do. I like reading a lot of the stuff on Digg.com, and Google’s Technology news page.

We went to Circuit City later, and bought a few things. I’ve wanted an external hard drive for a while now, so I bought one of those small 60GB USB hard drives. We also went to a Sports Bar called Sneakers to get some dinner. The coolest thing about the place was that the whole room, which had a very high ceiling, was surrounded by TVs. There were huge projection screens on the walls, and there were about 6 of those. Between the huge projection screens there were about 4 or 5 small TVs. Even with so many TVs though (there must have been 30-40) there were only 7 or 8 channels actually playing. 4 of the large projection TVs were playing one channel, and the other two were playing another channel. The food there was good, and if I find another Sneakers someday, I’ll have to try it.

We made it back to the ship by 11pm or so. Monday was a work day, so I got off the ship by about 1700. We went to another Panera bread this time to hang out on the Internet again. I got a Sourdough Soup Breadbowl with the Cheddar Broccoli soup inside, which was really good. We looked like a bunch of dorks with all our computer huddled around a table with all our power cords going to a splitter on a lone power outlet on the wall. You would think that places that offer Free Wi-Fi would provide more places to plug in your computer, but perhaps they don’t want to encourage people too much.

Tuesday was a duty day, and it was one of the worst duty days I’ve ever had. I knew that it was going to go bad when at duty section turnover in the morning, the Command Duty Officer (CDO) started out by yelling at us about having drinks on watch, showing up to watch on time, and showing up to muster. Apparently, the day before there had been some problems with announcing dignitaries onto the ship, so they said that they didn’t want any mistakes today. That didn’t happen….. In fact, the whole watch team got relieved in the afternoon, because they somehow didn’t realize that a high ranking dignitary was coming on board, and they completely forgot to ring the bell to announce him.

After the entire watch team got relieved, things started to get bad. We mustered shortly after that to clean the port break, which is a passageway on the main deck that opens onto the weatherdecks but is enclosed. A lot of dirt tends to collect in there, but cleaning it for an hour was a bit excessive. Shortly after finishing with cleaning the port break, we got mustered again, because it had rained really hard for about 15 minutes earlier. The weatherdecks need to be kept mostly free of water to preserve them and prevent rusting, so we all got brooms and swept any water that had collected and pooled anywhere. It was also time for dinner at the time, but the chief that mustered us said that we had better finish quickly unless we wanted to miss chow. There was a lot of water on a couple of the decks, and it took us another hour to sweep it all off the ship. Fortunately, the galley had pity on us and kept chow open a little later so that we could still eat.

As soon as chow was over, then they decided to run a fire drill. Everyone in the duty section has to show up to the mess decks to fight the fire. Some people get “dressed out” in fire fighting gear, some people lay out fire fighting hoses, and some people stand by to relieve the fire fighting team if necessary. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do anything, because I really don’t like fighting fires or having to deal with wearing fire fighting gear. If I had to, then I would, but I would rather avoid it.

After all this stuff was over, I had to go on watch for the 2000-2400 Messenger of the Watch. I was quite worn out after having done all this cleaning throughout the day, and I smuggled some Mountain Dew up to the quarterdeck, so that I would have some caffeine sustenance. I like having the Messenger of the Watch, because they don’t have to wear a 9mm, and they can go wherever they need to. They also are not responsible for making announcements over the 1MC, so I didn’t have to worry about messing up when a dignitary or the CO came on board. A couple of times I made runs down to the vending machine, or walked down to a nearby ship to get the phone number for their quarterdeck so that we could contact them. I spent most of my time checking the IDs of the drunken sailors that walked on board during my watch. They really weren’t too drunk, but you could tell that people had been having a good time out in town.

After my watch was over, I had to do some maintenance on a system that could only be taken down in the middle of the night. It was a filter cleaning check that I’d never done before, but it went pretty smoothly. This maintenance check was just recently implemented, and hadn’t been done at all over the past year, since we got our new satellite Internet connection. There must have been about a quarter inch of dust on one of the filters that we cleaned. The other ones were relatively clean, but you could almost make a blanket out of the dust on this one filter. (yeah….that’s gross) I finally got to bed by about 2am, and slept for about 4 hours before reveille.

Mayport was an ok port to visit, but stopping in US ports sure doesn’t seem like a real deployment. Maybe the next port will be more interesting. More news to come….

Boston, Massachusetts

2007-02-06T09:11:00.001-05:00

Last Friday we pulled into Boston, which is our second port this deployment. I know, you’re telling yourself, “They’re on deployment and they’re pulling into a US port?!?” Yes, Boston is one of our deployment ports. It’s a little strange going to US ports on a deployment, and it doesn’t really feel like a real deployment yet. Maybe after a few more days at sea and a few more ports, it will feel like we’re out at sea for a long time.

It was really windy when we pulled into Boston. We pulled into a cruise ship pier that was within walking distance of most of downtown Boston. There were camera on the pier, and people were waving to us. Everyone except the line handlers on the flight deck and foc’sle were in their dress blue uniform and manning the rails. It always looks impressive when a Navy ship mans the rails as they’re coming into port, and this time was no exception.

The first day that we were in port, I went on liberty with a couple of guys, and we just explored downtown Boston. It’s a big city and there’s a lot to see. Boston is nearly as cold as Halifax was, so everyone was well bundled up and trying to keep warm. I didn’t take my knit cap or my gloves with me the first day that I went out, and I regretted it. We walked toward all the tall buildings in the downtown area first, but didn’t find very many stores or shops to stop in, so we headed toward the Prudential area, which has a mall and a lot of places to eat. On the way to the Prudential mall we walked through the main downtown park, which was similar to Central Park in New York but smaller. There was a pond that was frozen over there, and it was fun to walk out on it. The ice was pretty rough, and wouldn’t make for very good ice skating, but there were a few people out skating on it.

The Prudential mall had a food court just inside, and we were all getting pretty hungry. There was a store called Boston Chowda, and I’d heard things about the Boston clam chowder. I got a cup of chowder as the other guys that I was with got their food at other stores. The chowder was excellent, even if it was from a fast food type of store. We perused some more of the stores in the mall for a while, stopping at souvenir shops or whatever looked interesting.

After the mall we went to a supermarket near the mall which had a surprisingly large variety of everything. The guys that I was with needed to get a few things that they’d run out of, and then we left the supermarket. I wanted to stop at another restaurant to get something more to eat, since the soup wasn’t very substantial, but I could tell that both of them were getting pretty tired and were ready to head back to the ship.

It had started to rain while we were shopping, so we decided to test the subway system to see how difficult it is to get around. The ticket system was annoyingly complicated, and we had to ask a local how to purchase the correct ticket. It ended up being very cheap to use the subway and bus system, and we only spent $2 each to get back to the pier that the ship was on. I later found out that you could show your military ID and get onto the bus and subway system for free.

The second day, Saturday, I went out with a large group, and they knew where they wanted to go. We went directly to the Hard Rock café, which it’d actually never been to before. I was impressed with the atmosphere of the restaurant, and I will have to try other Hard Rock cafés at other cities that we go to. There are Hard Rock cafés in a lot of foreign countries too, and I’ll have to try them when I come across them.

We also went to the aquarium a little later, which was on the opposite side of town. The aquarium had a huge tank in the center with a spiral walkway that went all the way up around the outside of it. The tank had over 100 different varieties of fish, and I got quite a few pictures. The problem with trying to take pictures in aquariums though, is that they usually have pretty low lighting, and if you try to use the flash, it makes the fish look kinda creepy. A lot of the pictures that I took without the flash are a bit fuzzy, but they had a lot of cool varieties. It was the first time that I’d ever seen a seahorse, and they are really crazy looking. The tubefish variety of seahorses looks like just another piece of seaweed floating through the water, but it isn’t.

After that we went to get some food at a bar nearby that some of the people had gone to that weren’t interested in looking at fish. I got a pizza there, but it wasn’t that great. After I had my fill of beer, which didn’t take long, I headed back to the ship. It was getting really cold by this time, and even the heavy coat that I’d bought for Halifax didn’t break all of the wind. The walk back was little longer than I’d expected, and we should’ve taken a cab back. By the time we realized that we should’ve taken a cab, though, we were halfway back to the ship.

On Sunday I had duty, and I was supposed to have the 1200-1700 contact sentry watch on the pier, which checks the IDs of the people walking on the pier. In the morning I was told that I was switched to the 0300-0800 watch because the guy that had the 0300-0800 watch had a watchstander’s liberty chit, because of a recent birthday. I was a bit upset that I was taken off the nice afternoon watch for an early morning watch, but I survived. It was pretty cold for my watch, but we had a heater to keep the biting cold away and a little shack to stand in.

I went to bed pretty early because of my early morning watch, but I did see the first quarter of the superbowl. I was surprised by the early touchdowns in the first quarter, but as much as I actually wanted to stay up to watch it, I needed the sleep and went to bed. The commercials were blocked out for the AFN commercials, and I wanted to see some of the good commercials that they usually play during the game. If I hadn’t been on duty, I probably would have gone to a big superbowl party that nearly everyone else went to. I learned the next morning that the Colts recovered from their early low score, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. I mostly glean off the excitement of everyone else, and that’s why I enjoy watching football sometimes. I never follow the teams or get into the whole fantasy football thing.

In the afternoon on Monday, we got underway once again. The wind was very strong as we mustered on the flight deck for sea and anchor. Everyone was bundled up, and I had about 6 layers on. It wasn’t quite as cold as Halifax, but the wind dropped the temperature and bit into your clothes. We cast off the lines, struck them below, and quickly laid inside the skin of the ship to get out of the weather.

The seas are rough once again, and it seems that when sailors aren’t puking from drinking too much, they’re puking from seasickness. The Atlantic is notorious for its rough weather, and nearly everyone is feeling the effects of it as I write this. I took a motion sickness pill this morning, and it seems to be working pretty well.

Overall my impression of Boston was good, but I heard from a lot of people that some of the people in Boston were a little rude. Maybe that’s normal for the New England area. I got a lot of good pictures, and I will be uploading them soon to my Flickr photo albums.

Thank you to everyone that has sent me emails recently. They are greatly appreciated.

Halifax, Nova Scotia

2007-01-29T13:47:00.000-05:00

Halifax is really, really cold! We were underway for a mere two days before pulling into Halifax, and by the time we pulled in at a bright and early 8am, the wave that were splashing on the ship through the night had developed a thick sheet of ice over everything! The foc’sle was the worst, and it had probably an inch and a half of ice with a little snow over the top of it. Back on the fantail where I am, there was probably a quarter of an inch of ice, and after a little while it started to melt.

Everyone bundled up with lots and lots of layers before they came out to the main deck. We were all counting how many layers each person had. I think the most anyone had on was about 8. A lot of people wore sweat pants under their coveralls in addition to multiple pairs of thermals or Under Armor exercise clothing. I was fine for about the first two hours, but after that my toes and hands started getting numb. We pulled up to the pier, and the Canadian sailors on the ship across the pier were only wearing knit caps and a light jacket. We were all bundled up with our extra coats, gloves, ski masks, and everything underneath that you couldn’t see. The lines were stiff and hard to handle in the cold, but we successfully moored to the pier and hurried back inside to bundle up.

The average temperature while we were here was between 0 and 15 degrees F. I’m not sure what the lows dipped down to some nights, but it was pretty cold. I had duty on Friday, and my watch was on the quarterdeck assisting the OOD with admitting people onto the ship. I didn’t even carry a weapon for this particular watch, which didn’t bother me. We had a tent set up, with a large propane heater inside, which we cranked up all the way. If I saw someone coming toward the brow, I would squeeze out through the open corner of the tent, and quickly walk over to the brow to salute the person as they came on board. Then I would quickly head back toward the warm tent to warm up again next to the heater. During my watch I also had to perform colors, and in just the few minutes that I stood outside the tent waiting to take the flag down my nose went mostly numb, and my hands and feet were freezing. I’ve never experienced temperatures like this before, but I suppose that if I lived here, I would probably get used to it.

The majority of our time in Halifax was uneventful. I went on liberty two of the days, and I had duty on Tuesday and Friday. There was casino very close to us within a stone’s throw distance of the ship, and that was the first place that everyone stopped at. I didn’t gamble at all, but I watched a few people dump their money into slot machines or play poker or blackjack. There were about 3 restaurants inside, and we all wanted to get some warm food in out stomachs. I asked for a burger that was cooked medium, but the health laws here state that you can only have meat that is well done. In my opinion, the burger was a bit charred and would have been a lot better if it still had some moisture left in it. I went exploring around the city for a little while after that and stopped in a bar to warm up and played a little pool for a little while. We explored a little more after that and made it back to the ship at about 9pm or so. We’re allowed to stay out until midnight, and we were even so good at not getting into trouble that they extended our liberty hours until 0100 for the rest of our stay here.

I came down with a rough cold the following day, and I slept for about 18 hours one day. I woke up in the night with the chills, and after covering up started sweating, as if I had a fever. I think I may have had a slight fever, but I didn’t end up eating a whole lot over the next few days. I mostly just had a sore throat, congestion, and aching throughout my body. The aching went away pretty quickly, but it sure wasn’t fun. I felt pretty worn out and out of energy for the next couple of days, and slept as much as I could to get over the cold quickly. I am feeling almost fully recovered from it now.

Saturday morning the sun was bright and the air very crisp, and I went on liberty with 4 other people from the ship. We wanted to see some sights and get some good food to eat. We brunch at a place called Boston Pizza, but nobody got any pizza. I ate a cheese-steak sandwich with a salad which was pretty good.

We could see a “fort”-like edifice at the top of the hill in the middle of the city, and we determined to climb it to see what the view was like. The wind was a lot stiffer at the top of the hill, but the view was rewarding. There were a couple of tall buildings that were blocking the view from the top of the hill to my ship, but I got a good panoramic shot of what you could see. The fort was actually called a citadel, and it was closed, but you could walk around inside, and see places where ammunition and guns used to be kept. There were a few cannons sticking out of the wall pointed toward the harbor, and every day a cannon is fired to signal the noonday hour.

We took a tour of a catholic church, which was small compared to some that I’ve seen in Belgium, and stopped in at a lot of little shops, bookstores, and coffee shops. We settled in a pool hall that had about 6 pool tables, and a real billiards table, which was huge! I was probably three times as long as a standard pool table and twice as wide. I didn’t try to figure out how it was played, but it looked more difficult than regular pool. I wasn’t impressed with their selection of beer, but we hung out for quite a while and chatted with the bored bartender. We were glad that we stopped there, because the bartender had a lot of good advice about where to go, and we ended up giving him a tour of the ship the following day. We went to yet another restaurant that evening, where I had a hot bowl of chowder, which was very good.

Sunday, I stayed on the ship and saved my money. I had no interest in seeing the inside of any more bars, and there wasn’t really anything else to go tour or see. I was satisfied to relax, and enjoy the Sabbath for a day, even though there wasn’t any church service or anything.

Getting back underway was just as cold as when we pulled in. The seas are calmer now, so I don’t expect quite as many people to turn as green as last time. I will write again after our next port visit, unless there is something interesting that is worthy of writing about before then…

The Beginning

2007-01-21T21:42:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning started out quietly, and no one had to be on board the ship until 0800 to give them a little extra time with their families and time to pack. I awoke at 0645, shaved and ate breakfast as usual. I nearly always order scrambled eggs with ham and cheese. They even had yogurt this morning! I checked email and put away things that I bought the day before, extra t-shirts and socks. I had crammed my rack full of food and extra uniforms over the past week, and there’s almost no space left in my rack for anything. I got a bunch of books from various people back home and a few books that I bought myself here, so my rack has a pretty wide selection of reading material.

Around 0800 people started walking onto the ship with their arms loaded down with luggage. A lot of friends and family of people on the ship were getting impromptu tours and hugging their loved ones goodbye from 0800 to 0915. We stationed the Sea and Anchor detail at 0915, which means that all of the line handlers have to man their stations. We have 6 mooring lines to cast off, and we are all well practiced at it by now. As we mustered out on the flight deck or foc’sle (bow), the many visitors on the ship departed and waited on the pier to watch us pull away. Orders were yelled a little more curtly than usual, and everyone seemed a little tense.

The ship seemed to strain at the lines as we waited for the GTGs (Gas Turbine Generators) and the GTMs (Gas Turbine Motors) to come online. The stacks bellowed heavy white smoke as each one came online. The GTGs are for the ship’s electricity, and of course, the motors for propelling the ship. Everyone, except the people directly handling mooring lines, was wearing their dress blue uniforms as they lined up along the rails of the ship.

It was a bright sunny morning, but the wind was brisk. Not very many people stayed to watch us leave, since it was so chilly. The family members that wanted to tough it out stayed to watch us as we left. The ship seemed to strain at it’s mooring lines, as if it were eager to leave, but the attitude of the crew was the opposite. Finally, the Petty Officer in Charge (POIC) on the flight deck called to cast off the mooring lines. We quickly slacked the lines from the bitts so they could be removed from the bollards on the pier, and once the line was in the water, we heaved around until it was on deck. Then we manned the rails to watch the distance from us to the pier increase as we leave yet again.

Once away from the piers there is nothing to break the wind, and it became much stronger as we pulled out into the harbor past the many piers. As we passed along the piers and out of view of the families on the pier that we were on, there were many tears shed by all the sailors along the rails. Once we passed the last pier, we took the lines below to the compartment where we wind the lines up on big spools for storage. There wasn’t very much enthusiasm in the crew for the rest of the day, and the only thing on everyone’s minds was whether their families would be okay while they were gone.

The seas have been rough during the past couple of days. When we still moored to the pier, you could see whitecaps on the waves, and I could tell that it was going to be rough as soon as we got underway. When we secured from the Sea and Anchor detail, I immediately went to berthing to take a motion sickness pill. There are some people that try to tough it out, and prove that they are strong enough to not need medicine, but I had no such need to bolster my ego. Even old salty chiefs and well-seasoned officers have spent most of their time in their racks. I can hear the wind whistling through the air intakes as it whips the waves against the ship. Every so often the ship will take a violent jerk as a large wave will crash against it. It is warm and secure inside the ship, and we’re not exposed to the elements on the outside at all. I haven’t been topside since we got underway.

Pray for us as we are underway out at sea. Pray for comfort for the sailors separated from their families. Pray for safety as sailors go on liberty in strange and foreign ports. And please pray for our safe return.

2007-01-10T21:22:00.000-05:00

I had an interesting thing happen to me while I was on my way back from Oregon on leave:

I took my flight out of Portland, and it left late because there were a lot of delays that day from weather. I arrived in Chicago's O'hare airport, and I expected to just have an hour to get on my next flight, but it turned out that my next flight was also delayed, which doesn't surprise me much. My next flight ended up leaving about 3 hours after I got to Chicago, so I got something to eat in the meantime. The airport was packed, since a lot of flights were backed up, and it was hard to find a restaurant that wasn't packed full of people waiting for flights.

I found a sports bar/restaurant that didn't have too long of a line. The table was near the front of the restaurant, and there were three other chairs around the table looking conspicuously empty. As I was waiting for the waitress to notice me and come take my order, a businessman came up to me and asked me if he could share the table. I had no objections, and you never know when you'll meet someone interesting, so I said yes. He sat down and we proceeded to both order a burger, which came surprisingly quickly even though they were packed. He told me that he travels for his company who makes some kind of parts for aircraft, and the Navy uses some of his parts. This led to us discussing the various places that we've each been overseas. He visits a couple of factories overseas that manufacture his products.

A large portion of our meal was in silence, and we entertained ourselves with the wide selection of TV screens lining the walls. The thing that most surprised me was that at the end of the meal we both asked for our checks at about the same time, and as he glanced down at the checks, he suddenly suggests that he pay my bill. I was a bit surprised, and very grateful. I rarely get that kind of thanks from anyone for being in the Navy.

I don't feel like I do a whole lot on my ship. I do my small part to keep the equipment that I'm responsible for running, but I guess that's what everyone does. It's not like I'm under live fire from hostile Muslims in Iraq. I was very appreciative and grateful for his thanks, and it meant a lot to me. I can't say that there's a whole lot to like in the Navy, and I feel guilty when I get to go to places that other people have never been to, like Scotland and Belgium recently. I will continue to do my part, and I would like to say thanks to everyone that supports us as we do what the Navy does best.

2007-01-08T14:28:00.000-05:00

I know that it's been a while since I wrote anything, but after getting underway for our journey for 6 weeks to the northern European area, there wasn't a whole lot of news to post about. Since then we have been on our holiday standdown period. There are two separate standdown periods, and I took the second one. The first one included Christmas, but there was a wedding that I wanted to go to.

A very dear friend of mine was getting married, and I wanted to be home for that. My Mom saved a few presents for each person until the day that I was getting to Oregon, and we all opened a bunch of presents on the 29th. It was like having a delayed Christmas. Besides, is it really that important what day the presents are opened on? The important thing to remember is that we are celebrating the gift that Jesus gave all of us through salvation.

I was very glad that I was here for the wedding. Weddings are always beautiful affairs, but always seem to be so exhausting to the people involved. I wonder if it's possible to have a wedding that is beautiful, but not as exhausting to everyone that plans it? It seems like it would make it much more enjoyable. I am very happy for the bride and groom at the wedding. I think that they will make a great couple, and I wish them a lifetime of happiness. There are always bumps in the road and hard times, but I hope that it will help them grow stronger, as all adversity should.

I spent the rest of my time here for the past week enjoying visiting with friends and family. The church that I used to go to here had a retreat in the mountains that I went to. There is a lodge out in the woods in the mountains of Oregon, not far from the main highway, but far enough away that you feel pretty secluded. We had about 50 people that attended the retreat, and a professor, named Bryan Estelle, from Westminster Seminary came to speak at our retreat. He's written a book titled Salvation Through Judgment and Mercy, which is all about the book of Jonah. The theme of his lessons that he gave us, ended up being a simple message of salvation, but he added a lot of the theological and historical viewpoint to his lessons that helped reveal the story of Jonah in a different light.

I played volleyball and ultimate frisbee with all of the young people from Faith OPC, that I've known for a long time. Every time that I come home more of them have sprouted up, gotten deeper voices, or matured in young adults. It never ceases to surprise me, and it's interesting to watch. They get together on Sunday afternoons or whenever they want, and ultimate frisbee is a favorite summer pasttime to do as a church. I love visiting all of them and having fun together. They also had a great New Year's Eve party, but go to http://livelikefriends.blogspot.com for pictures and videos of that night.

It is always hard to go back to the Navy after being home for a tantalizingly short time. It's like being home for just enough time to remember how good it was to live here, and then you have to go back to the big hard gray box that we call Navy ships. I am looking forward to some of the places that we are going soon on my ship, but I wish I could just take a whole month of time off from the Navy sometime, so that I could really enjoy being home. We are fortunate in the Navy to get as much time off as we do though. How many other businesses do you know that will give you a full 30 days of paid vacation per year? I usually end up taking two two week vacations per year to Oregon, and I take advantage of them as much as possible.

There will be many more posts here in the coming months. When I go to interesting places it's always fun to write about the things that I did there. I will try to posts lots of pictures too.

Thank you to everyone that I visited that helped make my holiday leave enjoyable.

2006-11-25T12:32:00.000-05:00

Have you ever felt like you've been in the Twilight Zone? When we leave on the ship for 6 months, 6 weeks, or even a couple of days, it feels like the rest of the world has disappeared and all that exists is the ship that you're on. It's an odd feeling to get underway, visit foreign countries, and then come back to the States. Everything back home is still going along pretty much the same as it was before you left, but it feels like a lot of things should have changed.

So if you haven't figured it out yet, I just came back last Tuesday from a 6 week underway to the Northern region of Europe. We spent a lot of time near Northern Scotland doing exercises with the UK Navy. We got tired of hearing all the drills on the 1MC, but I wasn't actively involved in many of them. Much of what we did involved planes buzzing us, or jet ski's pretending to attack the ship. We had to properly warn off the "attackers" and if they didn't retreat, then we simulated a retaliation to their approach and attack.

Just after returning to Norfolk I had some interesting adventures with my car. I'm not sure if it was because the car had been sitting for a while or if it was just time for something to go wrong, but the day after I picked up my car the distributor suddenly just stopped working. The symptoms of this were that it just stopped the engine, and it refused to start if you crank the starter. I spent a while trying to find loose wires in the engine, hoping that I could easily fix the problem. After about an hour, I walked down to the nearest auto parts store, and the attendant there recommended that I borrow their "jump box." I knew that the battery was good, but I borrowed it anyway. Of course it didn't work, so then I resorted to getting a real mechanic on the scene, and started searching the Internet (from my laptop with my wireless Internet connection) for the nearest mechanic with a tow truck.

The first few companies that came up on Google Maps were backed up at least 3 hours with towing jobs, but on the fourth try I got a guy that said that he could pick me up in 15 minutes. This sounded great to me, so I told him that I'd be waiting. He showed up, and after looking at the engine for a few minutes he was able to determine that the distributor was bad. He wasn't a very enthusiastic type of person, and you could probably describe him as a bit grouchy, but he was willing to give me a tow to his place and see what we could fix. At this point I realized that his company isn't very large, and that he doesn't do a great deal of business. That may be due to his grouchy attitude about life, but I didn't care very much since he seemed to have the knowledge to get my car fixed quickly. I didn't have much chance of getting anybody else in town to fix my car that day, due to how busy everyone was.

We ended up stopping at the same parts store that I borrowed the jump box from and I bought the needed distibutor. He had no trouble installing it, and after having watched him, realized that I could have easily done it myself. He did have some little tricks to keeping the plugs in the right order that I wouldn't have known though. After the new distibutor was installed, I tried starting the car, and miraculously, it started right up! I couldn't describe how ecstatic I was that I was able to get my car fixed so quickly. The bill wasn't terribly expensive, and he actually trusted me to go down to a nearby ATM to get him the cash, since he didn't accept plastic. I felt that it was definitely a work of God that I was able get my car repaired so quickly, and I was very thankful.

For Thanksgiving I went to a gathering at the house of one of the families that goes to Immanuel. They had a huge gathering of about 50 people, and afterward we went to another house for dessert. I invited another guy from the ship that I've gone on liberty with in both Scotland and Belgium, and he had a great time too. After the dessert time, we played Mafia, and since there were so many kids there, we had a pretty big crowd to play with. The guy that I brought actually ended up being the Mayor for the entire game. It had been forever since I'd last played Mafia, and it was a lot of fun.

Friday was a duty day, but I had an easy watch as pier sentry in the morning. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, and now I have the whole weekend to relax and see everyone from church. I'm looking forward to being home for the holidays from the 29th of December to the 9th of January.

2006-11-24T19:25:00.000-05:00

I just uploaded about 20 pictures to my Flickr photos page. If you liked reading about the adventures that I had overseas during the past couple of months, the you may also like the photos that I took of the places that I mentioned.

Antwerp, Belgium

2006-11-16T04:26:00.000-05:00

The second port that we went to on our short 6 week voyage was Antwerp, Belgium. I got to see Antwerp and another city, called Brugge, recommended to me by the owner of a chocolate store in Antwerp. The chocolate was excellent in Belgium, and people that tried the waffles said that they were good also. We only spent about 4 days in port, so our time was limited. I was thankful that I got too see quite a bit in the short time that we had though.

The Sea and Anchor detail for our trip up the channel to Antwerp was mustered at 0530, and it was still really dark outside. They had to have us on station and available because we were transiting a very narrow channel for about 14 hours to get all the way to Antwerp. We ended up getting the mooring lines out on deck by about 1400. The coolest part of the transit was when we went through a loch on the way to the pier that we moored to. We pulled into a small channel that was only about 100-120 feet across, and they closed a water gate behind us. The water gate in front of us was already closed, and they raised the water about 2 feet or so. After the water is high enough they open the gate in front of us and on we go. It was pretty cool. It took us another 6 hours to finally moor at the pier, which is almost always off in some industrial part of the cities that we pull into to, as this one was.

The first day of liberty that I had I went out with another guy on the ship that also has the last name of Spencer. It was a short 20 minute bus ride to get to downtown Antwerp. (Or Antwerpen as it is called there) We got breakfast at a café that was near where the bus dropped us off. For breakfast I got an omelet with everything on it. I was surprised to find that almost everyone that we met in Belgium, spoke very good English. Apparently, they teach English in the schools of Belgium, and we had no trouble talking with people while we were there. After breakfast we took a tour of the cathedral that was in the main downtown area. It was very impressive, and I am amazed at how much money is put into these huge cathedrals. Catholicism must be a huge religion in Belgium, as we also found another cathedral in another city that we visited. We did find a castle near the waterfront of the city, but it was pretty small and closed on Mondays. It has been turned into a museum, but we never went back to see what was inside.

We found a very good chocolate store during our wanderings. The store was very small, but the variety of chocolate was excellent. The store owner was quite willing to let us sample a number of his truffles and different varieties of chocolate. I’m not typically a very big chocolate fan, but I do appreciate quality chocolate. I bought quite a few small boxes of different varieties of chocolate. They will make good gifts to my family back home. My Mom has always loved chocolate, and quality chocolate cannot be passed up. J The owner of the chocolate store gave us a lot of good information about good places to eat and places to go in the city. The best information that he gave us though was the tip to go to Brugge (pronounced Bruje or Broosh) which was our destination on the second day that we went on liberty.

In the evening we found a restaurant that was uniquely underground. The front of the restaurant isn’t very apparent, but as you enter the door you see a passage going down for about 15 feet. Below are a few rooms with rounded roofs, and lit entirely by candlelight. The restaurant served very good food, and I ended up coming back the next day that we were on liberty for a very good steak. We walked around the city some more until we had satisfied our desires to see more of Antwerp. It is a very big city, and there are many very good places to eat all over the city. One of the most impressive buildings there is “Centraal Station.” (spelled like that) The inside of it is magnificent, and nearly rivaled the impressiveness of the cathedral that we toured there.

The next day that I was able to go on liberty was two days later. We started out early for Brugge. The inside of the train station was quite impressive, but I was saving my camera batteries for our final destination. The train ride was about an hour and a half, and we passed a lot of farmland. I was a bit apprehensive about what Brugge was going to be like, and some of the cities that we passed looked like they would be worth taking a walk through. We were originally told that it would only take about 40 minutes to get to there, so we weren’t quite sure what we were getting into.

Once we actually got there, we were quite pleased that we decided to take the store owner’s advice. I will post some pictures of Brugge once I get back to Norfolk, but the city definitely had a much more cultural feel to it than Antwerp. The buildings were very historical and the streets were all cobblestone except for some of the heavily traveled ones. One of the most interesting things that we noticed right at first was that bicycles are used much more than cars. There were some huge bicycle “parking lots” just outside the train station. There are even bicycle “crossing” signs right next to the pedestrian crossing sign at the crosswalks.

We found another cathedral in Brugge and obviously had to take a tour of it. It wasn’t quite as big as the one in Antwerp, but it was still very impressive. I had a panini for breakfast, which I had never heard of. It is a wide hard piece of bread about 8 inches long and about an inch thick. They put normal sandwich material inside of it, like ham or cheese. I had to get the salmon one, and I was happy that I did. In the restaurant I got my first impression of the people of Brugge, which the chocolate store owner had warned us of. The way he described it was that the people of Brugge want your money, but don’t really want you. They weren’t really rude or unfriendly, but they weren’t particularly pleasant or willing to talk very much.

After breakfast we continued our walking around the city. Near the center of the city, we found a large courtyard where there were horse-drawn carriage “taxis” lined up for customers. There was also a very tall belfry there which you could go to the top of for about 5 Euros. It must have been a couple hundred stairs to get all the way to the top, and we were quite out of breath by the time we got there. The rewarding view was well worth it though, and you could see most of the city from the top. There was a guy all the way at the top that was playing the bells in the top of the tower, which you could hear all over the city. I didn’t recognize any of the tunes he played, but the sound was beautiful. I don’t know how many bells there were, but it seemed that he had a full range to play with.

We had seen a chocolate museum on the map, so we continued our journey in the general direction of the museum. After another hour of walking, we found the museum, which was a small building on a street corner away from the city center. There was a whole tour of the building where they talked about where chocolate comes from, the history of medicinal uses of chocolate, and the whole process of turning cocoa beans into fine chocolate. They say that the Belgian chocolate is better because they grind the beans finer than any other country in the world. (It was something about the smallest particle of cocoa your tongue can sense. The smaller it is the better you taste the flavor of it.) There was a demonstration of how they make truffles at the end of the tour, and the samples afterward were delicious. I never bought any chocolate in Brugge, but I already had a pretty good collection from Antwerp.

We walked around for quite a while longer and marveled at how many people ride bicycles. The idea has occurred to me to buy a folding bike one day that I could easily store on the ship, and then I could ride around the cities that I visit instead of walking. There was a water canal going through part of the city, and the houses were built right up to it. I’m not sure if it was part of a river or for irrigation purposes though. It seemed pretty clean, but wasn’t quite clear.

Near 6pm we headed back to the train station. It was about 30 minutes until the train would arrive, so we got a quick bite to eat in a restaurant at the train station. We barely made it to the platform in time, because our waiter was a bit slow, but we warned him that we had a train to catch. The ride all the way back to Antwerp was uneventful, and once we were back there we went back to the underground restaurant that I mentioned earlier. I had an excellent steak, and I decided that I love the atmosphere of the place. It was pretty crowded, which isn’t hard to do is a restaurant that small, but we were able to find a table in a corner. We spent the rest of the evening talking about our experience in Belgium over good beer and excellent food.

The bus ride back to the ship was full of the usual noisy drunk sailors, as is true to human nature. Many people didn’t seem to enjoy Belgium very much, but I think that they didn’t ask the advice of the chocolate store owner. It was him that also led us to the underground restaurant. Altogether, I was very pleased with our adventures in Belgium, and while the people may have a great deal of pride in what they do, particularly chocolate, I liked Belgium a lot.

We are now most of the way home, and it won’t be much longer before I step foot back in Norfolk once again. I miss talking to some of the people that I’ve become friends with in Norfolk. The chocolate will make it’s way back to Oregon to be enjoyed during Christmas while I visit with my family and other missed friends at home.

Faslane, Scotland

2006-10-26T23:55:00.000-05:00

Last week we pulled into Faslane, Scotland, which is on the western coast. Glasgow was about 20 miles away, and Edinburgh was on the opposite coast of Scotland. I got the chance to go to both Glasgow and Edinburgh on two separate days. Edinburgh was, by far, the best of the two days, because I got to see the Edinburgh Castle.

On Friday morning, I had a topside rover watch from 4am to 8am. The people that had gone on liberty the day before had come back about 12:30, and they were pretty loud as they were going to bed in berthing. Once I woke up from all their crashing around, I wasn’t able to go back to sleep, and I just laid in my rack until it was time for watch. It’s pretty chilly in Scotland, so I was wearing my gloves and long underwear. It was a quiet watch, but I was very tired afterward. I ended up sleeping from about 8:30 until noon.

At about noon, I woke up suddenly because I heard people talking about going on liberty, and I hadn’t realized that I had fallen asleep. I was a bit disoriented as I woke up, but I did successfully end up going out into town with a couple of guys. It was a 20 minute bus ride to the town where the train station was, and from there it was about a 45 minute train ride to Glasgow. I like the train system throughout Europe. It is so easy to get almost anywhere with a pretty cheap train ticket. I got all the way across Scotland to Edinburgh with a £14.40 pound ticket. That’s still about $30, but it was worth it.

In Glasgow we found the downtown area and walked through the shopping mall. One of the guys actually found some pretty good clothes to buy, but it would have been much cheaper to buy them in the US. We walked through the downtown area there for a while. It’s a pretty big city, and the downtown area had a lot of interesting stores. Both of the guys that I was with each purchased some wine in one of the stores that we stopped at. We ended up eating at a Chinese All-You-Can-Eat place, which wasn’t very good, but I was definitely full by the time we left. The train and bus ride back that night were uneventful, but I was very tired by the time I finally hit my rack at about midnight.

The next day I woke up at about 8:30, and I had promised a friend of mine that we would plan to go to Edinburgh this time. We met on the messdecks at about 9, and a number of other people wanted to go with us, so we had a good little group of about 7 people. After about 3 hours and 1 transfer at Glasgow, we made it to Edinburgh. The city of Edinburgh seems very old. The train station goes underground when it nears the terminal, and ends in a station that is almost in the middle of the city. We could see the castle above us from the exit of the train station. I purchased a map, as always, so that I would know which direction we were headed.

The climb up the hill to the castle was steep, but it didn’t take us more than about 15 minutes to get to the entrance to the castle. About half of our group decided that they weren’t very interested in going inside the castle, so 3 of us went inside. It was definitely worth the £10.50 for entrance to the castle. It is high up on a hill overlooking the bay and you can see nearly the entire city from the top. I got some beautiful panoramic shots from the top of some of the walls. There were a number of museums within the castle that elaborated on the history of the castle, and the men who have fought for Scotland. There was also a hall that had thick rosters of all the men that were in each clan, and a big memorial was in the building at the pinnacle of the hill, which memorialized the dead. It was quite impressive.

My camera batteries were mostly depleted by now, and I was pretty hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything all morning, so we stopped at a restaurant the boasted a big sign reading the “Scotch Whisky Experience” on the front of it. They have tours where you can taste and learn about all the many different types of whisky that are available. The restaurant was a nice quiet room with tablecloths and a nice selection of menu items. I try to try something new when I go to countries that I’ve never been to before, and a very traditional food in Scotland is Haggis. We ordered an appetizer that had samples of a few different things, one of them being haggis. I’m sure that you could find out what it’s made of, but I’ve never looked it up. I’ve heard that it’s made up of things that don’t sound particularly appetizing, but it was actually pretty good. The appetizer also came with a shot of whisky, and the guy that drank it learned that you have to drink whisky with a bit of water added to it. Otherwise it’s a bit difficult to drink. J I ordered the Filet of Beef on the menu, and it was extremely good. The sauce was what made it really good, I think, but the little strips of beef were cooked very well.

We discovered some interesting things about the city near the castle. The buildings that were near the castle were nearly as high as the castle, but not far from there the street level drops down to near sea level. Along the main street leading up to the castle there are a number of alleys that lead off the main street that are called “closes.” If you take the right closes you can actually find that some of them lead to an underground part of the city. Particular closes would have specific purposes, some would be all butcher shops, some tailors, and you could go to a particular area for whatever it was that you wanted. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to take the tour of the most famous close, but I did buy a booklet that talks about the history of the underground part of the city. The booklet says that originally only the castle was high up on the hill, and the city below it was at the same level as the rest of the city. Over time the buildings were built 6 or 8 stories high to get out of the filth of the lower streets. The drainage wasn’t good in the early days of the city, and the wealthy would live high up in the buildings while the poor would live down at the bottom. Eventually, the city built on top of itself, and the original city was buried under the old ones. The city continued building on top of itself until the part of the city near the castle “grew” up to meet the castle. It’s pretty interesting to walk in a place like that with so much history, and I wish we could have gone to tour one of the closes.

We walked around the city for a while longer after that, and I took some more good panoramic shots from some other high places in the city. We found one store that sold discount kilts for £25, but we didn’t buy any. In Glasgow the night before there were some kilts that were £350, your clan colors, and custom fitted. Nobody bought any of those either. There were some spots in Edinburgh that seemed almost as crowded as downtown New York can be. There were a lot of people in the downtown area at about 5pm, and we headed back to the train station by 6pm, since the train ride took quite a while to get there.

We stopped off in Glasgow again to eat again. I wasn’t really hungry, but some of the other guys were. I got some Macaroni and Cheese, which was very good. One of the guys got a stein of beer, which I think is almost as big as a pitcher. It was a lot of beer for one person, but it was pretty weak beer and nobody got drunk. We left Glasgow shortly after that, and got on the train again for Helensborgh. We got back to the ship by about 11pm after a long wait for the bus, and I slept well after that long day.

I had two duty days while in Scotland, so I wasn’t able to do as much as I would have liked, but I did get to see an awful lot. I was very glad that we got to visit there, and I hope that I get to go again sometime. The UK is one of the best places that I’ve been overseas. I loved England when I was there last, and now I know that I love Scotland as well. Maybe I’ll get a chance to go to Ireland someday.

Underway news...

2006-10-13T15:19:00.000-05:00

It seems like we’ve been underway a month, and it’s only been a week since we left Norfolk. Apparently the first week or two is always the longest. When we first pulled out from Norfolk the water was immediately rough, and many people got seasick quickly. The waters were calmer once we were off the coast a little ways, but there have been rumors of heavy seas in the near future.

The hardest thing about being underway is the wacky sleep schedule that you end up with. My division only has 5 sections right now, which means that the time that we each have watch rotates backwards instead of forwards. Tonight I have the 1700-2200, and tomorrow I will have the 1200-1700 watch. At least we’re able to walk around with our watch, and we’re not stuck in a space or in front of a console somewhere.

Over the past week, I’ve gotten the opportunity to fix a few things. (It’s always fun to fix things.) Then there’s always those little things that consistently resist fixing, which are frustrating, but there haven’t been too many of those. Recently one of the IVCS (Internal Voice Communications System) phones had a problem at about midnight while I was on watch. My division isn’t responsible for those phones, but we are closely related to the division that does have that responsibility. I went with the guy in that division that was on watch at the time to help him out. Each phone has a handset and an optional headset, and there is a Push-To-Talk (PTT) button on both the handset and headset. So the problem was that the PTT button on the handset seemed like it was constantly pushed. We swapped out the handset, since the most obvious possible problem could be a bad handset. That didn’t fix it. At this point we hadn’t realized that the headset was also plugged in. We ended up swapping out two different control cards inside of the phone box, and it still didn’t fix the problem. So we had to get a little creative and think outside the box. (get it? Yeah, it’s cheesy.) The headset ended up being the problem because it was jammed down in a corner, and the PTT button on it was held down. So the moral of the story is: check all the simple stuff first before you break out the manual.

Of course, we had another problem that was much more complicated. I got a call about our Internet connection failing, so I went down to Radio to see what the problem was. It appeared simple at first, so I proceeded to make the satellite dish try to reacquire the satellite. That didn’t work. So then we discovered that a major gyro input was missing from the system. The source of the input seemed reasonably obvious, but trying to fix the problem at the obvious point didn’t fix the problem. A short time later we discovered that other systems that used the same gyro input were also experiencing serious problems. After a mere 6 hours of troubleshooting and digging through 3” thick tech manuals, one of the ETs discovered a tripped breaker that indirectly powers the gyro inputs for all of the major systems that had problems. The problem started late in the evening, but by the time we discovered the solution, it was about 0500. It didn’t make any sense to go to sleep that close to reveille, so I stayed up for breakfast. We had an UNderway REPlenishment that morning too, so I slept for about 2 hours before I had to wake up to start on the UNREP. Fortunately, the people in charge of the UNREP detail knew that I’d been awake all night, and after the main fuel connections were made with the supply ship, he allowed me to go back to bed. I slept quite soundly until at least 4 in the afternoon, and by then I quite lost track of what day it was. I had the 0200 to 0700 watch in the morning, so I ate some dinner, stayed up for a couple more hours, and went back to sleep for another 4 hours before I took the watch at 0130 in the morning. I have felt very nocturnal after being awake more at night than during the day recently, but my sleep schedule has mostly recovered by now.

Today is the 231^st anniversary of the Navy, so for dinner this evening we had crab legs and steak. Apparently, that was the first meal of the first commissioned ship during the birth of the US. Yesterday we had a photo exercise where the ships that we are with all group closely together for a helicopter to take pictures. I’m sure that it looked impressive, but no one was allowed to go topside since they were taking pictures. Maybe I’ll see them someday.

Stay tuned for more adventures in the near future. They’re guaranteed to happen…..

2006-10-05T19:54:00.000-05:00

Life on the ship has been busy lately. Recently, I've been spending a lot of time painting parts of the ship that the ETs own. A couple of days ago I replaced some antennas on the yardarms of the ship. These antennas are pretty big. We made an attempt to remove them without the use of a crane, but after trying for a little while, we realized that they were too heavy. We ended up using a crane with a basket to take them off, and a few days ago they came back from the antenna shop all nice and pretty.

A guy with the crane company usually helps us rig the antenna to the crane, and he directs the crane operator which direction to move. They have amazing control of where the boom is and how quickly or slowly the hook is raised. If I ask the crane operator to lower or raise the basket a couple of inches or move the boom just a little bit, he's able to get it just where we want it. We were in a basket at the end of the hook. The basket is probably about 4 foot square with a railing that comes up a little higher than my waist, and we're required to wear climbing harnesses with safety lanyards that we attach to the railing in the basket.

We had four antennas to replace that day. Two of them are a bit smaller than the other two, but even the small ones were too big for us to handle without the crane. The first two that we did were the smaller ones, and they went on pretty easily. It just takes patience to get all the bolts in. There is a connection on the bottom of the antenna for the connection to the radios on the other end, and the connector for that is usually pretty hard to thread onto the antenna. The first one of the longer ones went ok, but it's tougher to handle them when they're so long. The bigger ones are probably about 10 feet long and about 6 or 7" diameter at the base, and they probably weigh about 40 or 50 pounds.

The last antenna was the most difficult one. We were both tired, and lunchtime had passed, so we were hungry as well. We had just finished with the first long one, and we just had to finish the last one. The crane operator slowly moved the basket near to the part of the yardarm where we had to install the antenna. When you're in the basket you don't have a lot of control over how the basket spins, so once we got near the yardarm, we slowly spun it around the right direction so that we could easily mount the antenna on it's pedestal. I prepared all the bolts with anti-seize compound so that they would be easy to remove in the future, while the rigger, who was in the basket with me, rigged up the rope to the antenna so that we can keep it upright as the bolts are put into the base. Most of the antenna is sticking up in the air while we are down at the base attaching it, which means that you don't have any support for it up there unless the rope is specially wrapped around a point near the upper part of the antenna.

The rigging of each of the other ones had gone fine, but maybe it was because we were tired or maybe the rigger didn't notice, but the part that was wrapped around the upper part of the antenna was just a little bit too low. The rigger pulls on the opposite end of the rope to lift it up, and the rope, which passes through the hook above us, pulls the antenna up. It seemed fine at first, and we got it high enough that it was near the place where the antenna is mounted. First the cable has to be attached at the bottom of the antenna before we can mount it on the yardarm, so it has to be held up while I try to thread the connector onto the bottom of it. I was having some difficulty threading it, because of some old sticky weatherproofing that made the connector hard too turn.

After trying for a couple of moments I noticed that the antenna was moving around just a bit, but it mostly seemed normal. Suddenly the entire base of the antenna swung away from me, and the top of the antenna started to swing toward the ground. There wasn't any danger of me being hit, because there are a lot of cable around the basket that attach to the hook above us. Fortunately, the end of the rope that was attached to the antenna was tied off, but it did end up falling down the side of the basket a little ways below us before it got to the end of the rope. My heart was pounding, and adrenaline was surging through my veins at this point. Both of us quickly hauled it back up into the basket, and placed the base back into the basket. It had definitely surprised both of us, and we had to catch our breath for a minute after we had it secure again. The antenna wasn't damaged by the fall, and I was extremely grateful that the antenna hadn't gone crashing to the decks below us. The problem had been that the rope around the antenna was not rigged high enough to keep it from getting top heavy. As I was working on the cable attachment at the bottom of the antenna, the antenna had been sitting at a bit of an angle, and once it started to lean just a little bit too much, the top of it started it gravity plunge and too the rest of the antenna with it.

We rigged the rope on the antenna again, this time making sure that it was high enough on the antenna for it to not be top heavy. The connector on the bottom was still hard to get on, but after working it a little bit we were finally able to get it threaded. After the cable is attached, then it must be weatherproofed, which is a combination of rubber tape and really sticky goop that goes on the outside of the tape. After the weatherproofing was done, the antenna was lowered down so that it was sitting on it's pedestal, and I got the bolts all attached. Getting the nut on that first bolt allowed me to breathe a huge sigh of relief, because it meant that it was firmly attached to something that wouldn't let it fall. The bolts were all installed, and the crane let us back down to the ground. It felt good to be on solid ground again after that incident, but fortunately nobody was hurt, and equipment wasn't damaged.

2006-09-14T16:39:00.000-05:00

A little bit about what I've been doing on the ship recently:

I had a duty day yesterday, and my name was on the watchbill three times. I had pier sweepers, colors, and a 3-8am watch. Pier sweepers is just a few people that walk through the parking lot and pick up any trash that they see. Colors is, of course, when the flags forward and aft are taken down at sunset. The 3-8am watch was a topside rover with a weapon and walkie-talkie.

In the middle of the day sometime, I guess that the watchbill was changed, because all of a sudden, at about 1650, I hear my name called over the 1MC (the main announcing system). I quickly go out to the quarterdeck and look at the watchbill to discover that my watch had moved from a topside rover to an inside watch where I sit at a desk and answer phones and monitor alarm panels. The problem was that I was still on the list for colors, and colors was at the same time as my new watch, which was from 1700 to 2200. So I contacted the section leader, which happened to be the ET Chief in charge of my division, and he told me over the phone that, "He would take care of my watch, if I took care of colors." To me that sounded like I didn't have to do my watch of answering phones and all that I had to do was colors, but I was quite incorrect.

About 15 minutes later the quarterdeck told me that ETC was looking for me, so I head toward the space where he was on the ship. Apparently, he meant that I was still supposed to stand my watch, but during the time for colors that he would relieve me, so that I could still do colors. The time for colors eventually rolled around, and so I got dressed in my Dress Whites. Somehow my dress shoes disappeared since the last time that I've been to church or worn my uniform, so I had to wear my working boots, which looked a little silly. Fortunately, noone noticed, and I performed colors back aft on the flight deck under a slight drizzle.

Colors took about an hour altogether, and I changed back into my coveralls to go relieve my chief from standing my watch. A fire drill was sounded off shortly after I returned to the desk, but I couldn't participate since I was on watch. (I didn't want to participate anyway.) I think what I dislike about drills the most is that you are expected to jump into fighting a fire when you haven't fought a fire in a long time. There's a whole list of stuff that you have to do, and I don't have that list memorized. Often people end up with people breathing down their necks expecting to do something that you aren't well practiced at doing anyway.

I finished off my watch, and that was all for the duty day. Today I took the advancement exam. It is made up of 200 questions, and you have 3 hours to do it in. It tests you on a wide range of subject matter varying from basic military knowledge, to highly technical information about electronics. There was a lot of additional studying that I could have done, and probably should have done, but I feel like I did reasonably well on the test anyway. It took me about 2 hours, and even though there were a few things that I had no clue about, there is no penalty for guessing at the most reasonable answer.

I'm still doing a lot of damage control stuff as a Damage Control Petty Officer (DCPO). Today I ended up checking a couple of gaskets for some hatches and scuttles, some maintenance on some CO2 fire extinguishers, replaced the lights in an escape trunk that were completely burnt out, replaced some battle lantern batteries (emergency lighting) that were almost dead, and checked for proper deck drain wrenches in places where they have been missing. I did one of about each of those things, which makes for a lot of running around the ship. As much as I don't really like doing DCPO work though, it's nice to fix stuff that is broken, and I fixed quite a bit of stuff today.

I will be writing more soon, since there are some interesting places in our schedule for the near future. I had to take a little break in writing over the summer months, since there wasn't really a whole lot going on, and I was in school.

2006-09-13T19:30:00.000-05:00

Last week we went to the first port since our last deployment, Annapolis. We anchored in the bay, and a liberty boat would come out periodically to take us to shore. I got to see some cool stuff while I was in Annapolis. We spent most of our time in the historical downtown area near the bay. The hills, narrow alleys, and one way streets reminded me much of the European streets in many of the ports that I've been to overseas.

I went on a tour of the State Capital of Maryland, which was pretty cool. The building was divided in half. The old historical section with wooden pillars and the historical rooms and memorabilia was in that half, and the new section had marble pillars and some very large rooms where all the official state business is conducted. The original treasury is still standing near the main capital building, and it was all pretty cool to see.

I only went on liberty twice while we were there, but I had a good time hanging out with friends. There have been so many new people that have transferred to the ship over the past 6 months, that I'm starting to become the senior person when we're on liberty.

The advancement exam is coming up for ET2 for the third time since I became a 3rd class. I've done a little more studying this time than I did last time, but I don't think that the chances are very good that I'll make ET2. The advancement percentages are still pretty low for my rate, and you have to take the test at least 4 or 5 times before a lot of people make rank. It's because there are so many 2nd class ETs, and the need for more is not there. Hopefully, the advancement percentages will improve, and it'll become easier for me to make 2nd class. Even though I'm taking the test tomorrow, the results won't be available until the end of this year, so I won't know for a while whether I've advanced this time. I hope so....

2006-08-27T16:40:00.000-05:00

The past month has consisted of finishing SHF school, transitioning back to working on the ship, getting underway for a little while, going on leave to visit friends and family in Oregon, and getting underway for 9 days, which is the longest that we've been underway since deployment last year.

There's been tons of work for me to do on the ship. After all those months of being in school, I have had to catch up a little, and now that I'm in charge of working on three systems on the ship, I have slightly more responsibility.

Going home on leave was awesome. It's been far too long since I went home to Oregon. It's so hard to get very much leave time when the ship needs you so much. I'm glad that I'd been planning to take leave since back in January. As it was, I got to take 9 days of leave. I filled it with relaxation, going to the Oregon coast, hiking in the mountains, going to the county fair, and rafting on the Rogue River. I crammed as much as I could into those 9 days, and I had a great time!

The day after I flew back to Norfolk, I got underway the next morning, which was a bit of a shock to my system. The jet lag got to me for a few days. The best thing about being underway is that you can't really spend much money. The money that you do spend is mostly in the ship's store and in the vending machines. It helps me to save money when we're underway, but after a summer of freedom, I had trouble getting used to being cooped up on the ship for over a week!

Altogether it's been a great summer, and I know that it'll end soon. My obligations to the Navy are calling, and I fear that most of the interesting things for the summer are coming to an end. I've had the chance to go to Busch Gardens at least 3 times. I went fishing on more weekends than I can count. I got to spend a lot of quality time with friends that I've met at Trinity PCA and Immanuel PCA. I've enjoyed all the community groups that I've tried throughout the summer, and I've made numerous friends through those.

I'm looking forward to seeing what adventures the Navy takes me to. You never know what will happen at some of the interesting ports that we pull into.

2006-07-05T13:26:00.001-05:00

Wow! What a busy weekend! I took a bunch of photos from Tuesday evening at the fireworks show in downtown Norfolk and interspersed them throughout the post. I posted about 10 on Flickr.

Saturday morning I went with Matt to watch Superman Returns. The special effects were pretty awesome, especially when he set the plane down in the middle of the baseball field! I thought that there were a lot of parallels to Christianitythroughout the movie. Superman is made to be a lot like God. Omnipresence is definitely something that would come in handy for Superman though. He can almost fly fast enough to be omnipresent, but not quite. There was an interesting statement by Lex Luther that, "Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don't share their power with mankind." Of course, God is infinitely more than that, but I think that the statement in the movie was emphasizing Lex Luther's desire for power and to be like God.

I went fishing on Saturday night with a friend from Immanuel and some friends of his from work. They have a good fishing spot, and altogether I think that they caught at least a dozen fish. I think that the time of day that you fish off the beach is important, and that the fish are more likely to bite during dusk.

Sunday morning I went to Trinity for their morning service. Some friends invited me to a barbeque that evening, so I went to that. The people that had the cookout have a daughter that is getting married in the near future, so the barbeque was created to hide a bridal shower that afternoon before the barbeque. There were quite a few people there, and I learned how to play a new game with dominoes called Mexican Train.

Monday I slept in until about 9:30am or so, and I actually stayed on the ship for a couple hours. I needed to talk to my chief who had duty that day, so that I could get my 6 month eval. (I haven't hardly been on the ship for the past 2 1/2 months, but he was able to evaluate the time that I was on the ship.) I took a look at some of the radios that I'm in charge of repairing, and did a little tuning and tweaking.

In the afternoon I went to Barnes and Noble and read for a little while. There was another cookout that I was invited to during the afternoon, and I was there for a few hours. There were scattered thunderstorms throughout the day, so the grill got slightly drenched just when we were about to start putting meat on. The short delay was worth it, and the fellowship with the people there was nice.

There was also a baseball game that evening between the Norfolk Tides and some other team. I'm not a big baseball fan, but I'll go to just about anything (within limits) just for something to go do with people. The Tides lost, but it was fun to watch. The most hilarious thing that happened during the game was when a cat made it onto the field somehow. It looked like it came from the direction of the dugouts. It ran at top speed all the way around the outside ring of fenceline in the outfield, but it got timid when it started to get near the stands on the opposite side and turned around to go back around the field. It made it about halfway and found something on the fence to climb up. Every camera in the stadium was focused on the cat for it's 5 minutes of glory, and the whole stadium cheered once the cat made it over the fence. :)

Tuesday I had breakfast with a guy from Trinity at a breakfast place in downtown Norfolk called D'Egg. I ate eggs benedict, which I hadn't had in a very long time, and we talked about all kinds of topics that two guys might think of to talk about. The place was also a target of a lot of police officers getting their morning breakfast and coffee. I guess Dunkin Donuts isn't as popular as it used to be.

For the rest of the morning and a little of the afternoon I went to the beach (with more people from Trinity (I guess I must know a lot of people)) and attempted to ride a boogie board with a little success. I wore much more sunscreen than I had last time to avoid scorching myself as well as I did a couple weeks ago. There were a few jellyfish that we found in the water, so that started to take the fun out of the beach a little. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting on the beach and soaking up the sun though. I played with some kids and dug up sand fleas for a little while. I think that we found about 15 or so, and some of them were probably about an inch long. It was one of the best times at the beach that I've had in a long time.

The evening was for fireworks, so I went (yes, with some other people from Immanuel) to a good spot on the river just opposite all the tall buildings of Norfolk. The people that I went with had a strategy for avoiding the heavy traffic, so we carpooled to the spot that we watched from. We had a good view of the skyline, and an excellent view of the fireworks. The fireworks only lasted about 15 minutes, but they were great.

So that was my boring (just kidding) weekend. I have tried to thoroughly enjoy the summer as much as I can. My school will be over in a couple more weeks, and then it will be back to duty, standing watch, underway times, painting, test equipment calibration and equipment maintenance on the ship.

The summer's not over yet though!

2006-06-19T12:57:00.000-05:00

I promised to write about anything else interesting quickly without waiting a long time between posts, so here it is.

Friday I got out of class early, so I made a very spontaneous decision to go up there again. Matt and I left by about 1:30 in the afternoon, and made it up there at a pretty reasonable time, despite heavy traffic on the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, and some heavy traffic up near Williamsburg. We had a great afternoon riding all but one of the rollercoasters, and the one that we didn't go on wasn't operating that day. It was a fun and unexpected afternoon.

Saturday I had been planning to hang out with some guys from Trinity, so at about 11am I went over to a guy's house that goes to the Thursday night community group. He has a projector set up normally that he uses to watch TV and movies on, and he got the brilliant idea to set up a second projector on another wall. From time to time some of the guys have gotten together for a Halo tournament, and the time had come to have another one. (This is actually the first one that I've ever been to.) So the projectors were set up and the two XBOXs were set up and connected to each other so that we could have 8 players fight against each other simultaneously. We played for a good part of the afternoon, and consumed about 4 pizzas in between controller-gripping games of Slayer, Territories, or Juggernaut. We finished by about 6pm or so, and we'd all had our fill of battling for the virtual worlds of Halo.

There was also a short spontaneous fishing trip that night that I went on, but it was mostly unprofitable and disappointing. I've been trying to catch Bluefish, but I'm not sure that they are very plentiful in the spot that I am fishing.

While I was fishing, I debated whether I should try a new church that I'd heard about. I didn't want to miss anything at Trinity, and it has been two weeks since I've been there, but what better time to go than now?

The church's name was Sovereign Grace Church. A nice reformed sounding name, right? Wrong. I had heard from someone that it was Reformed Baptist, but upon questioning a person that greeted me at the door, I discovered that they were, in fact, non-denominational, which really is a denomination when you think about it.

The worship service started at 10am. Everyone started out standing and did so for most of the worship time. The worship team consisted of two sets of drums (a bad sign), an electric guitar, and a regular guitar. The lead vocalist also had a small 4 octave keyboard, and there was a secondary vocalist. The first song shocked me a little, not because of the words or anything, which was a typical chorus, but it shocked me because of the behavior of the congregation. The first song was obviously supposed to get people excited and everyone started out by clapping and raising their hands. What surprised me was when a few of the younger people started jumping up and down in place during the more exciting part of the chorus. Have you ever seen teenagers jump up and down at a rock concert? It was kinda like that, but only a couple of people were doing it.

The next song was actually a hymn that was set to a musical arrangement that matches their instruments and livened up a bit to keep everyone excited. They then sang Be Thou My Vision, which is a favorite song of mine, but there was a big problem with the slides showing the right words. Fortunately, I have most of the words memorized, as did most of the rest of the people there.

Everyone sat down after that, and a short speech about Biblical Masculinity (it being Father's Day) was presented by one of their 6 pastors. What was said about Biblical Masculinity was good, and I agreed with the fact that we do need more strong men in the church that are willing to lead their families according to God's Word.

Then one of the Pastors asked the visitors to stand, which I refused to do. I wasn't interested in too much undue attention in a church that I'm having serious doubts about at this point. The entire congregation then welcomed the 4 or 5 visitors that were brave enough to stand by clapping. The Pastor announced that the visitors would receive a welcome package explaining what the church believes and that they were welcome to attend a class after the service about the church, which I wasn't interested in going to anyway.

Once the visitors were duly welcomed and since it was Father's Day, then it was natural to then to ask all the fathers to stand and everyone clapped for them. When I had walked in earlier, I had noticed raffle tickets being handed out, and now I realized their purpose. All of the fathers in the congregation were given a raffle ticket as they entered the church in the morning. The pastor had a small fishbowl up at the front with the matching halves of the tickets for each one that was handed out. A drawing was then held for a toy remote control HMV car which was brought out right before the choosing of the winner. The winning father came up to the front to accept his prize and congratulations by the congregation of winning the drawing. (Yes, this is very different than the church services that I am used to.)

The welcoming of the visitors and the fathers now being finished, a family was invited up to the front of the church. The family seemed to be missionaries possibly, but the focus was on the fact that they had recently adopted two young Asian children, and they were planning on adopting a third. A lengthy life's story of the father of the family was then read, and the point was that he was a good example of a Godly man, in keeping with the Biblical Masculinity theme. The family was rewarded with year memberships to a local zoo and museum.

At this point I was beginning to come to the opinion that this church is glorifying man an awful lot. I don't believe that church was instituted by God for the glorification of man, but rather the glorification of God. If you're going to find a Godly example of a father then why not find one in the Bible, or use the example of God the Father, Himself! I was rather appalled at the whole raffle thing, and I hope that they don't do that every Sunday. Perhaps I just caught them on an unusual Sunday, but I doubt it. With all of these things being given away, it was no longer a surprise to me that the church must have had at least 400-500 people in the congregation that morning.

There was then a 20 minute break to allow all of the children a chance to find their classrooms for their Sunday school, which is during the sermon for the adults. (yet another point that I disagree on) The sermon resumed after the break, and I wouldn't be surprised if a number of people that came only for the worship left, because a lot of seats seems to be vacated. The sermon was on Acts 21-26, of which only the first chapter was really covered in any depth. It is impossible to make one 60 minute sermon cover anything in detail when covering such a broad section of Scripture. The sermon was devoid of any firm doctrinal statements, and the biggest point to the sermon was to pursue being more like Christ. Receiving the Gospel involves dying as Paul was crucified for Christ. I agreed with the sermon, but probably only because they were pretty general in the sermon. It was mostly made up of following Paul's journey throughout chapter 21. The sermon ended promptly an hour after it started, everyone sang a closing song, and then were dismissed without a benediction or anything.

This post is getting pretty long, so I'll end by saying that I don't plan to ever attend church there again. Perhaps that is the right church for some people, but I think the focus needs to be taken off of man and put back on God, where it belongs. I went to Immanuel that night and was quite satisfied with their hymnals, Psalters and piano.

2006-06-15T10:23:00.000-05:00

So I went to Busch Gardens again as you can see from the photos. There's a few more on the Flickr page. The photo on the left is the German restaurant where I ate the first time that I went to Busch Gardens back in May.

The photo on the right is from one of the screens that takes a photo of you as you are riding the rollercoaster. You could get professional prints, but I just took a picture of the photo straight off the screen, hence the glare and bad quality.

The castle-like place is Darkastle, and for a ride that's all inside, it's pretty cool. You get a pair of glasses that make you see everything on the ride in 3D. This was the second time that I ever went on this ride, but this time when we went there was nearly no line. We waited for maybe 10-15 minutes for each of the rides that we went on this time.

I took my camera on the Big Bad Wolf, and tried to take pictures of the entire ride as I was riding it. The photo on the right is one of the better photos that captured how fast we were moving on one of the turns. It was pretty cool. I had to hold onto my camera pretty tightly though so it didn't go flying.

On this trip to Busch Gardens we went up there in the afternoon/evening hours on a Friday and were rewarded by encountering very short lines. There were a few people from Immanuel there that afternoon, and we hung out together for a little while.

All the Busch Gardens stuff happened two weekends ago, but this past weekend was a very busy one too. I was invited by one of the people in the community group that I go to on Thursday nights, to go with him fishing on a pond that he recently started fishing on. He is a very experienced fisherman, and I was very impressed by his skills at catching particular types of fish. He wanted to get an early start though, so we agreed to meet at 4:15am at his place. Yes, that says AM. :) It is a half hour drive to his place, so I got up at about 3:15am, walked down the pier, and got to his house by about 4:10am.

He has a medium sized canoe that partially fits into the back of his truck. About 6 feet of it stuck out the back, but was well secured by a rope tied to the truck. We got to the pond by about 5am, and started unloading the poles, tackle boxes, paddles, and the canoe. It was a short hike through a marshy, muddy forest through which a long narrow bridge led over the muck to the edge of the pond. We pushed the canoe out into the pond just as the sun was getting up, and by this time I was regretting having not remembered to grab my camera as I was leaving the ship.

It wasn't very cold, and I would say that it was ideal conditions to be out on a pond in the morning. We had rigged our lines earlier so that we would be ready to start fishing as soon as we struck out on the glassy quiet pond. You could hear a few frogs croaking away somewhere on the distant side of the pond, and there wasn't even a hint of a breeze. The sun was just barely starting to cause the sky to glow over the treeline, and it was just enough light to see by.

After about 10 minutes of casting and trying different lures, I got the first strike from a wide-mouthed bass that was probably just over a pound. The second one was also mine, and looked almost identical to the first fish that I caught, just a few minutes earlier. The water was so clear that you could see the 6 or 7 feet down to the bottom. There was a lot of weeds growing in water, and the fish often use them for hiding spots. Sometimes we could actually see the fish lurking near our bait, and we could direct the bait closer to them so that they would latch on.

The guy that I was with started to get fish after that, and he caught a bunch of bass. All of the fish that we caught throughout the morning, we let go. We worked our way around the pond over the course of about 4 hours, and continued trying different lures. I used some artificial bloodworms that I had left over from the shore fishing that I did a few weeks ago, and that caught a bluegill that was about 5 inches long.

Over the course of the morning we caught around 16 fish. 6 of them were mine, and the majority of them were bass. The sun cast it's light on the lake at around 8:30, and we could see the bottom even better once the light was stronger. There was one other cool thing that happened as we drifted around the lake. We were near a very shallow part of the pond, and we saw the head of a turtle sticking out of the water about 20 feet away. We paddled over to it and just as we got close to it, I stuck my hand down and grabbed the turtle by the shell! It waved it's feet around in the air for a while, and I held it just under the surface of the water for a little while. The shell was no more than 5 or 6 inches across. I let it go after a minute or so, while deeply regretting not having brought my camera.

While it was a very early morning and I was yawning for the rest of the day, it was one of the greatest fishing trips I've ever been on, and I hope to do that again someday.

The rest of my day was filled with helping Trinity PCA clean out a building that was purchased in the downtown Norfolk area about a year ago. The church has been planning to use the property for a more permanent church building, but has been held up by the red tape of the Norfolk building codes. That lasted until about 4pm.

In the evening I got a call from a guy the goes to Immanuel to go down to the downtown Norfolk area and participate in the HarborFest that Norfolk has each year. It's a bunch of food stands, a stage, and various other attractions down by the waterfront. We hung out for a while there and listened to the music. Collective Soul played for about an hour, and it was pretty cool to see them in concert. There were fireworks afterwards, and some of the fireworks had some displays that I'd never seen before. Particularly, there was one type that had sparks that moved away from the main explosion at different speeds. It was really cool to see, but hard to describe unless you saw it yourself.

Sorry that I haven't posted in a long time. Even though there have been some pretty cool things to write about, I haven't felt like writing very much lately. School is going along at a steady rate, and it isn't difficult. I only have about 4 weeks of school left, but I've been loving every second of it. Especially not having duty has been nice. I sleep on the ship whenever it's in port, but other than that spend as little time around there as possible. I'll get to spend plenty of time on board standing watch and fixing electronic gear during the next four years.

This post has gotten a little too long, but I hope you enjoyed it. I won't wait quite so long next time that I go do something interesting.

2006-05-30T11:28:00.000-05:00

Time has been passing quickly, and there has been much to do. School is going well, and we have been busily studying away. We are about to start the troubleshooting portion of one of the harder parts of the system, but hopefully, they'll start out easy and then work up to some of the harder faults that can happen in the system.

I got the opportunity last week to take a couple of guys to church from the Navy base. They are freshly out of boot camp and Great Lakes, and just about to start "A" school to be helicopter mechanics. One of them has an OPC background, and I was glad to be able to take them to church. One of the families at Immanuel invited them over for lunch, and they elxclaimed that it was the first time they had had a home-cooked meal or even been in a house since boot camp! This Sunday they weren't able to make it because of duty, but I think that they will probably come again.

There was one interesting thing that happened on Thursday because of the long weekend. We were told in class on Thursday that we would have to go to a safety brief before the weekend started. So that afternoon we went to an auditorium on base that was probably far too small to fit all the people that were supposed to fit in there. The presentations that we listened to included a police officer from the local Norfolk police department (or maybe he was a highway patrolman, I'm not sure.) He spoke for about an hour and a half about all the rules and regulations of Virginia driving. Since Norfolk is a big Navy town, very few people on the roads are actual natives of Virginia and know the rules of driving around here. I think that he was trying to scare us a little to keep us safe, but there always seems to be a fair number of Navy guys that are always being ticketed for speeding or something stupid. He talked about how the police were going to be extra vigilant over the weekend, but I never really saw any extra police cars on the road.

After the presentation by the state trooper, there was a presentation done by MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), and they presented their story about how their only daughter had been killed by a drunk driver. It was very sad, and I felt very sorry for their loss. It made a lot of people think about the hazards of drunk driving. One person told me recently, "There is no redemptive value to alcohol." It is very true that alcohol can make you feel a little better for a little while, but it is never a solution to any problem. I haven't really had much to drink anywhere lately, but it's always good to be careful, since other people on the road may not have been as careful about how much they consume.

Yes, I have been fishing lately. I had a great time on Friday when I went out to a beach with a friend from Immanuel. He had heard about a good spot under the Chesapeake Bridge Tunnel, and it is very close to his house. We went late in the evening at around 7pm. We were using the usual bloodworms, and the artificial bloodworms that are supposed to work even better than the real thing. We caught a few fish here and there for an hour or so, and we could see some dark clouds rolling in as the sun began to go down. I had looked at the weather report earlier, and knew that thunderstorms were forcasted, but I didn't think too much of it. Then at about 8:15 or so all of a sudden I felt my rod get a violent jerk. A fish was definitely stuck on my hook, and I quickly reeled it in. It was pretty small, so I threw it back, but then as soon as I could cast my line in again, I felt another fish attack my bait! This one was larger, and I think that was the one that I kept. Shortly after casting in for the third time, another fish was suddenly jerking and thrashing at the end of my line! I was getting pretty excited at this point and enjoying the action. This one was a bit too small to keep, so I threw it back as well. It was beginning to sprinkle a little at this point, so we began to creep under the shelter of the bridge. The rain got steadily heavier, and soon there were waterfalls of water coming off the bridge on both sides of us onto the beach. I continued casting, and the guy that I was with also caught one that we kept. Pretty soon, though, the rain was getting really bad, and lightning was flashing all around us! We hid behind one of the supports that held up the bridge, but not before we got drenched from the heavy rain! It was not a very good downpour to get caught in. Fortunately, it slacked off a little after 10 minutes or so, and we walked back along the beach to get back to his car. We were both soaked, and wrung out our clothes before getting in and driving the few blocks back to his apartment. Fortunately, I had some clean dry clothes in my car, and I showered and changed at his place. I seem to be the expert at cleaning fish, so I did the cleaning of the two fish that we kept. It was a pretty exciting fishing trip, and I look forward to doing more fishing there. I'm not sure if the fish suddenly started biting because of the impending storm or the dusk that was quickly falling at the same time, but it was awful fun to catch fish that quickly.

Memorial Day we went fishing early in the morning, but didn't catch anything significant. The weather was nice, and I almost got a bit of a sunburn.

It is back to school and system troubleshooting this morning....

2006-05-16T19:48:00.000-05:00

A quick note to all of you that are on the subscription list: Bloglet is going away in the very near future, and your subscription was imported into Feedblitz. If you no longer wish to receive the subscription emails or you can't cancel your subscription for some reason, I will be happy to remove you from the subscriber list. There are many people on the list that I haven't heard from in a long time, and I'm not sure if they're still interested in receiving the extra mail in their inbox. Email my hotmail address for any questions: web_man2000@hotmail.com.

2006-05-16T17:34:00.000-05:00

I must write about the fun that I had at Busch Gardens before I forget it! Saturday morning started out with helping the Gibson's move a piano. They had asked me about a week before to help them. They're old piano had some stings that were starting to corrode, and they even had one snap, so it was time for them to get a new one. They were able to get it for free too, which was amazing! Someday perhaps I'll start playing the piano again. I'm horribly out of practice......

After the piano moving, a friend of mine from Immanuel and I headed up toward Busch Gardens. It is normally only about a 45 minute drive, and it is near Williamsburg, so I had a pretty good idea of how to get there. Our drive was significantly lengthened by an accident on the main highway though, so it took about an extra half hour to get there. We were able to sufficiently entertain ourselves during the wait. In the downtown Norfolk area I've gotten pretty good at avoiding traffic and knowing which streets to take, but I digress....

We made it to Busch Gardens by about noon or so. For those who don't know what Busch Garden's is (I didn't), it is a theme park owned by Anheuser Busch. Yes, the beer manufacturer. The theme park is made up of about six different "countries" throughout the park: Germany, Italy, France, Ireland, England, and Scotland. You can choose to eat food belonging to any one of those countries. There are four rollercoasters altogether and a number of water rides, for cooling you off during the hot summer months! :)

Being a Saturday, the park was pretty crowded, but we found a parking spot in a lot called "Ireland 58." There was a "tram" that we rode to the main entrance, which was really a train without a track. The park is expressing it's appreciation this year for it's military patrons, so I happily got in for free! The four rollercoasters were our first objective, so we headed to the nearest one, which was called the Loch Ness Monster. There wasn't anything incredibly monstrous about it, and I think that it may have been the mildest ride that we went on all day! The next rollercoaster was the Big Bad Wolf, which was worth the wait. Each of the rollercoasters have a line that is anywhere from a 30 minute wait to an hour! I think that we only waited for 45 minutes or so for the Big Bad Wolf, and it was a pretty good ride.

By this time we were starting to get hungry, and the Big Bad Wolf happened to be in Germany, so we ate at the Oktoberfest in Das Festhaus. It was a big hall filled with many long rows of tables, and it had a very German feel to it. I got the "Farmer's Feast," which included a slab of baby back ribs, chicken, and a sausage. It was very tasty. :) Near the end of our meal a number of performers came in playing trumpets, flutes and some other horned instruments that I don't remember. Behind them came 8 dancers, 4 male and 4 female, all dressed in a very traditional garb of the Germans. They were wearing something that reminded me of the pictures from the traditional child's tale "Heidi" that I read long ago. It was all very impressive.

The remaining two roller coasters were next on our adventure, so we went to the Alpengeist next, which was by far the best one of them all! It was definitely the roughest and did the most loops and twists of any of them. One person said that it was supposed to be like really skiing down the Alps. I think you would probably experience a bit fewer Gs from skiing though.

The last one was Apollo's Chariot, and it was definitely the highest of all the rollercoasters there. It had a huge drop right at the beginning, and I tried to find my car in the parking lot from the top, but my attention was quickly diverted to my rate of travel in the downward direction. :)

We finished off the day with some ice cream, and slowly meandered our way back out to the "tram" that took us to the Ireland 58 parking lot. The drive home was uneventful, but I do remember seeing the moon very low on the horizon, making it appear twice as large as normal and a very dark brownish color.

....and that is my story of our adventure in Busch Gardens. It was an awesome day, and I'm glad that I finally got to go. I think I may try to get some pictures if we go again.

2006-05-11T10:33:00.000-05:00

We had our first test last week, which went well. Our second test will be this Friday. This week has been full of lab time and troubleshooting. Since there aren't very many students in the class, we're able to see a lot of kinds of faults and things that can go wrong with the system. The instructors have a big "fault insertion" box that sits in a corner of the lab with the front facing toward a wall, and it has a bunch of switches inside of it that will "break" any of the cables or signals going between different pieces of equipment. Some of the faults are pretty easy to figure out, and others are not so evident. I'm enjoying it though and learning a lot.

I went fishing again last Saturday, but apparently the fish don't like beautiful sunny days. We caught 3 fish, but one was a sting ray, and the other two apparently have some parts that are poisonous. Maybe I need to go fishing on a nice rainy day sometime. The fishing might be better. :) I'm not going to go fishing this weekend, but I will be going to Busch Gardens. I think that's a fair tradeoff. I've been wanting to go to Busch Gardens for a while now, and finally someone else wanted to go too! I didn't want to go by myself, because that just isn't any fun, and I don't know my way around. It should be pretty cool. Hopefully, it isn't too crowded.

Trinity had their 7th anniversary of when the church was first established. You would think that after 7 years of having church every Sunday that they would have a building by now, but they are big enough that it's not easy to find a suitable building. They're making progress on getting a permanent place to hold their worship service, but it takes a lot of work. Their anniversary celebration consists of setting up a tent outside of the school where they usually meet. They have a large outdoor picnic/fellowship meal, and everyone dresses a little more casually than usual. I don't think that I agree with dressing more casually just because it is the church's anniversary, and I wasn't going to wear jeans and a t-shirt to church. I just wore my regular church clothes.

This week has been car repair week. For a long time my alternator belt has been squealing whenever I start the car, and it just needed some tightening. It was really annoying, and I got tired of it. I also got my air conditioning recharged. With the coming summer months and inevitable humidity, I know that it will be much needed. I've already felt a little bit of the humidity here, but I know that it will get worse.

I've also been developing a habit this week of spending an hour or two in Barnes and Noble in the afternoons after school is over. I enoying just sitting in the atmosphere of Barnes and Noble and reading various books that I would probably not want to buy, but that have intriguing topics. There's so much knowledge in a book store! It would be easy to spend a couple of weeks locked in the bookstore just reading and reading and reading. I've read so little during the past couple of months, and I think that my love of reading has been reborn a bit.

2006-05-02T10:09:00.000-05:00

I'm already on my second week of school! I sure am glad that I am in school right now. All last week everyone on the ship had to stay onboard until 1600, even though there wasn't any work to do.

Anyway....school has been going well. There are 3 students in the class, but there are about 4 instructors that are sitting in on the class. This is a new course that they have just begun to teach. Because this is a new course, the other instructors that are sitting in on the class are there to evaluate the course, and recommend changes or additions to the course structure. The course used to be in many different sections, but they combined it to save the Navy money, of course. It means that I will have to learn about some variations of the system that do not apply to our ship's configuration, but I could also work on any SHF system in the fleet and know what I'm looking at, after this course is over. (SHF stands for Super High Frequency, and that is what the freqency range is that it operates in. The whole whole system is generally referred to as SHF.) I've been learning a lot, and there are a couple of parts in it that have a strong application to many civilian jobs.

I also went fishing last Saturday with a friend from Immanuel PCA. We went out to a long pier that sticks way out into the water. It costs about $6 to get onto the pier, and you can get a fishing pole and bait and whatever else you need right there. You also don't have to bother with fishing licenses or anything, so that makes it pretty convenient. We were out there for about 5 hours, and caught 5 fish altogether. We only kept one of them, because all the rest were too small. People were catching all kinds of fish while we were out there. There were blowfish, flouders, mullets, and a few others that I didn't recognise. We kept the mullet that we caught. It was only about 7 or 8" long, and we didn't get much meat off of it, but it was fun to go fishing. It's only the second fish that I've ever caught in my life, and I was actually talking on my cell phone when I saw the end of my pole twitch. By the time I got off the phone, the pole had stopped twitching, and I thought that I had lost it, but when I started reeling in my line I realized that there really was a fish on the end of the line. :) It was pretty cool. I think that maybe I'll try to go again this weekend, if the weather is nice.

This week I'm staying in a barracks on base. It's nice to sleep in a real bed again. I'm starting to get tired of always sleeping on the ship all the time. After our next deployment I'll find a good place to stay in the area. I've learned a lot about some of the better places to rent around here.

I'm enjoying being in school. :) Our hours have been from about 8am to 2pm. Today we are spending the entire day in lab to get more practice at setting up the system. Time for me to get back to class...

2006-04-09T16:23:00.000-05:00

This week I was temporarily assigned to a division that does maintenance on the firehoses and extinguishers on the ship. I didn't like it much. Basically, there was recently a separate division on the ship made out of one person from each of the other divisions on the ship. My division has been swapping out who goes to this "new" division so that we still get experience at our real jobs. So, this week I helped clean a bunch of the nozzles on the firehoses throughout the ship. I also did some maintenance on some of the escape trunks and fire extinguishers.

We finished up our drills and training this week. This week wasn't too difficult, but I will be glad to back in my division and working on electronics instead of fire nozzles. I'll admit that it's great to keep the firefighting equipment maintained, and if the right situation arises, we'll definitely need it, but it's not what I joined the Navy to do. I want to work on electronics, solder resistors, and troubleshoot computer systems, not weigh CO2 extinguishers.

Anyway......enough of that. The weather has been odd around here lately, thunderstorms, sun, rain, clouds..... We've had a little of everything during the past week.

I'll be going to school soon. :) It'll be nice to live off of the ship for a little while.

2006-04-02T15:14:00.000-05:00

You remember how I said that it was unusual to have TWO general quarters drills in one day? Well, this last week we had the first phase of two batteries of drills that we're tested on during our training cycle. The training cycle is basically a time when we're tested to see if we can take care of casualties, like fires, flooding, electrocution, medical emergencies, or equipment casualties. During this past week we did a few drills while we were in port, but on Wednesday we got underway.

It was an early day on Wednesday. Reveille was at 0530, and quarters was at 0615. They stationed the Sea and Anchor detail at 0715, which I am on temporarily. The other people that were on it instead of me have been in school, so I am on the Sea and Anchor Detail for the next few more weeks, if we get underway at all. We were underway by 0800 for our training cycle. They started with the drills right away and for the entire three days that we were out at sea, we had drill after drill that they ran.

Whenever we're underway we have the Electrical Systems Supervisor (ESS) watch to stand, and we rotate through our division to stand 5 hours of watch each day. So, the first day that we were underway, I had the 2200 to 0200 watch, which is the only 4 hour watch in our rotation. During my watch they were setting various EMission CONtrol settings (EMCON), and I had to keep running around turning things on and off when they changed the EMCON level that they were testing. After midnight it got a lot quieter, and I was able to relax a little. The guy that relieved me, relieved me a few minutes late, but I was just glad to be off watch.

The next two days were the only days since I've been on my ship that we didn't have any quarters, besides weekends or holidays. They immediately started out with a fire drill in one of the engine spaces, and then turned that into a general quarters (GQ) drill. Once we had gone to GQ, we had an electrical fire in radio, which was caused by personnel getting electrocuted. First the person that got electrocuted had to be gotten out of the immediate danger area, and then the fire had to be subdued with CO2. We have a few CO2 extinguishers in Radio, and one of the guys grabbed one, and I grabbed a second one to stand by with once the first extinguisher ran out.

Side note: Perhaps I should clarify a bit what I mean my Radio and radio. The space on the ship that I go to for GQ is called Radio, because they take care of all of the communications on the ship, and the equipment that had the "fire" was one of the radios that I went to school in San Diego to learn how to fix. So when we are in Radio, it means that we are in the space where all the communications on the ship originate from, but the radio that had the fire was a piece of equipment.

Anyway, once the fire was extinguished, then we had to "troubleshoot" to find out what the problem was with the radio. We invented a "problem" that sounded good and determined that we needed to get a spare part from the supply department on the ship. They often carry "high fail" items so that we can repair our radios quickly. We pretended that this particular "problem" was a part of the radio that is a "high fail" item, so that we could go pick it up right away from supply. During GQ you have to request a battle transit route to get to the supply department, so we requested our route, and I was the one assigned to go pick up our "spare part."

During GQ all of the hatches are closed on the ship, making it very difficult to get to any other part of the ship. We asked for permission to go to the supply department, and made my way down the starboard (the right side) of the ship to get to supply. Once I got back to radio, we "installed" the spare part, and the radio that had the fire was working again.

That was about the extent of the GQ drill that we had. There were a bunch of other things going on, like fires and whatever other problems they could think of throwing at us. They usually simulate a missile hit during GQ, and during a couple of our drill we had SIX missiles hit us in three different volleys of attacks. I was surprised that we didn't abandon ship after having six missiles hit us, but I guess they didn't hit in the right place. When we've done abandon ship drills, we all go to our abandon ship stations topside. There are about 10 or 15 different places where we're supposed to muster topside for our assigned liferafts.

We ended up doing 4 GQ drills during the three days that we were underway, and doing that many of those drills every day starts to wear on you after a while. It was a long couple of days, and we were all glad to get back into port Friday afternoon.

There was actually one drill that I enjoyed, and it was one where the ship simulated dodging a torpedo. The torpedo started out coming at us from directly aft, so the bridge executed a evasive manuevers called a "weave pattern." The coolest thing about this though was that we would suddenly take a hard turn to port, and then they would call on the 1MC, "All hands standby while shifting rudders." They would basically shift from one rudder to another to turn the ship harder. It was pretty fun to feel the ship all of a sudden go from leaning hard to port to leaning hard to starboard. The seas were pretty calm, but I'm sure that there were one or two of the new people that were having a hard time with the rolls that we were taking during these manuevers. I didn't have any trouble with getting seasick, and I think that I've gotten a little more adapted to being underway after having been on the six month deployment last year.

Saturday I slept in until about 10, and then did my laundry and a few other little errands that I needed to do. I also went on a short run on the treadmills that are on the ship, since the Physical Readiness Test (PRT) is coming up next month.

This morning I went to Trinity, and I'm planning to go to Immanuel tonight. Immanuel has a guest pastor there today, whose last name is Beeke. I think that it's the same guy that wrote a Bible course that I used to use when I was in homeschool 9 or 10 years ago. I'm looking forward to seeing how the sermon is this evening. It should be pretty good.

This week will be more drills as they finish up their evaluation of our casualty response. We're going to be underway for a couple of days, but it shouldn't be as bad as last week was. This is all a part of a training cycle that all ships go through, and once it's done then we can relax a little. The ship is considered to be "deployment ready" once we've been through all of this testing. It's possible that we may go on little jaunts to places on the US coastline, but I don't know what is on the schedule yet.

2006-03-25T22:20:00.000-05:00

My 200th post on my blog! In 3 days it will also be the 2 year anniversary of when I went to boot camp! Hmmmm......I've changed a little since that day two years ago. I remember the anticipation of getting to Great Lakes, the confusion as the Recruit Division Commanders yelled at everyone, and the shearing of everyone's hair. Boot camp was pretty fun, and if I had to do it again, it wouldn't be too bad. It's all a big game, and if you can play the game properly, then it's easy. In some ways it can be even more oppressive than prison. You aren't allowed to watch TV, you can only go to the bathroom at certain times, and every part of your schedule is strictly controlled by the RDCs. Anyway.......enough about boot camp.

This has been a busy week. We went to Yorktown bright and early on Monday. We had plenty of missile loading and ammunition loading to do. There were a couple of days when it rained pretty hard, and we all wore plastic rainsuits over our coveralls when it was raining hard. It was pretty miserable to be out there working on the missiles while it was cold and raining hard. Thankfully, we finished in record time, and we were able to pull back into Naval Station Norfolk by Wednesday.

I had an interesting experience when the ship was ready to leave Yorktown. I was suddenly approached by my chief about the possibility of driving the Master Chief's car back to Naval Station Norfolk. Our Master Chief is the highest ranking enlisted petty officer on the ship, and he has the rank of Command Master Chief (CMC). I was a little bit nervous about driving his car back to the base. The CMC wanted me to drive his car, because the XO needed someone to drive his car, so just before the ship was about to get underway from Yorktown, the CMC and I both caught a ride to the parking lot where the cars were. He got into the XO's car and I got into the CMC's car. It was a relatively short ride to the Norfolk base. The nice thing was that I got to get off of work at about noon, and the ship got into port at about 4pm, so I got off of work earlier than everyone else on the ship.

Thursday was an extraordinarily busy day, because we had TWO General Quarters drill in the same day. We've been getting ready for our evaluation of how well we can handle casualties, like fires, personnel casualties, or equipment faults. When they call away a general quarters drill, all hands have to man their battle stations, so that they can be in the place where they would be most effective in a battle situation. I have to go down to Radio during General Quarters, and I man a communications "net" that connects a bunch of electronics spaces to a supervisor that manages any situations that we have. It's not incredibly difficult, but it can be a little stressful to report any damage that is caused by simulated missiles or torpedoes that hit the ship. They try to make it as realistic as possible, but it's hard to simulate the chaos that would occur from an actual missile or torpedo hitting the ship.

Friday, I had to finish up the maintenance that needed to be done for the week. I only had two maintenance checks that needed to be done, but both of the checks that needed to be done had been assigned to be "spot checks." A "spot check" means that someone in the chain of command has to quiz you as you do your maintenance to check to see if you are doing the maintenance properly. One of my spot checks was supposed to be with an officer, but she wasn't available until late in the day, so I ended up doing both of my spot checks with my division chief (ETC). The first check that I did with him ended up being a bit painful. The check included checking to make sure that some equipment was properly grounded by a wire that connects the equipment to the chassis of the equipment. Unfortunately, both ends of the wire had to be checked. The first end of the wire was easy to access and check, but the second end was inside of the equipment, and I had to take a cover off to find the place where it connected. As ETC was watching me, he noticed that taking the cover off also exposed a number of other wires that provide high voltage to the equipment to power it on. This qualified as a safety violation. Fortunately, I didn't fail the check, even though it was a safety violation, because the check said nothing about being exposed to high voltages. I did have to go back and redo the check when the power was disabled the switches that powered the equipment. That added about 2 hours to a fairly simple check, but fixing a safety violation is a pretty big deal.

The second spot check was easy, and went relatively smoothly since I had already done a spot check earlier with ETC. ETC didn't want to keep us any later than was absolutely necessary, so he did the spot check with me instead of the officer that was supposed to do the spot check.

Saturday was supposed to be a day off, but I got woke up this morning at 9am (I was catching up on sleep) to fix some equipment that only I and one other guy know how to fix. It ended up taking about taking 4 hours of troubleshooting, which included 2 hours of talking to the help desk, to finally fix the problem. That wasn't the greatest start to my Saturday, but if something needs to be fixed, then I would rather get it taken care of rather than wait until Monday to fix it.

I finished off my Saturday by going to a hockey game at the Norfolk Scope (an arena in downtown Norfolk). It was between the Admirals and Portland. I think that it must have been Portland, Maine, because I don't think that it could have been Portland, Oregon. I went with the community group that I've been meeting with on Thursday nights. It was about 9 people all together that I was with. The game was pretty good, and it's the first live hockey game that I've ever been to. The Portland team won with a score of 5 to 3, which disappointed everyone that I was with. I've never been able to get into sports very much, but it was pretty cool to go to a live hockey game.

Lately, I've been going to Trinity on Sunday mornings and Immaneul in the evenings, since Trinity doesn't have an evening service. I didn't have the chance to go to any of Trinity's community groups this week, because we were in Yorktown, but I should be able to go to at least on community group next week.

We've got a lot of drills and evaluation that they're preparing us for, so next week will be underway for a few days. Hopefully, we will pass with no problems. They tell us exactly what drills will be run, and what kinds of casualties we will have to deal with, so we shouldn't have any problems.

I will be glad when we are done with all these drills. TWO General Quarters drills in one day is a bit excessive. We should be able to relax a little bit after all these drills are over.

Thank you for your prayers. I appreciate all the feedback that I get from this page. I will keep everyone updated as we continue doing what the Navy does...... :)

2006-03-20T18:09:00.000-05:00

I had an interesting experience last week. I went up in a crane to the very top of the ship to do some maintenance on an antenna up there. I've been up on the yardarms many times, and especially more recently, but this was the first time that I've ever been all the way up to the very top of the ship. The view was pretty good from up there. I could see all the way to the downtown area where all the tall buildings are in downtown Norfolk. It was a little strange to be in a moving platform that is hanging in the air so far above the ship. Whatever you do, like remove a bolt or whatever, it moves the platform that you're in. It was quite safe, of course. The platform that we went up in was completely enclosed by railings, and all of us had safety harnesses that we attached to the platform even though there was no chance of anyone being in any danger. It was a bit windy up there though. The wind is what I like the least when we're doing work like that. We easily completed the work that we needed to do up there, and the crane let us back down. It was pretty cool to go that high up on the ship though. :)

There hasn't been too much going on lately. I went to church as usual yesterday, but it was a bit too cold to play ultimate frisbee at all. I did get invited over to some people's house and had lunch there. I've gotten to now a lot of the people in both Trinity and Immanuel a lot better over the past few months. I can't believe that it is already March, and it's already half over!

This week we'll be in Yorktown loading weapons once again. It seems like we just got done unloading all of our weapons not long ago, but now that we're done with the shipyards, it's time to load up again.

There's going to be a lot of drills and training going on over the next couple of weeks as we are evaluated for our ability to handle fires, fuel leaks, and equipment problems. Sometimes they'll "insert" a problem into on of my radios, and I'll have to "fix" it. They love to pretend that one of my radios is on fire, and I almost always have to "put out" the fire. It should be an interesting next couple of weeks. Maybe I'll have some good stories about everything that we end up doing.

Note: The ship's server name changed recently with all of the upgrades that have been made to the computer systems. This means that my email address for the ship will change to: ispencer@ddg72.navy.mil You can also stop sending mail to my Hotmail address if you are, because we'll be gone enough that I may not respond to any messages sent to my Hotmail account for a couple of days.

2006-03-12T18:10:00.000-05:00

Wow! That 2 weeks went fast! The school that I was in went well. It was pretty easy, but it was a great refresher to all of the equipment that I was introduced to in "A" school. I learned a lot, and it was nice to get on a school schedule for a little while instead of the rigorous ship's schedule that I had been doing.

This past week, since the school has been over, has been pretty busy. I went to three community groups (yes, three!) over the past week on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Each one is at a different place in a Bible study that was written by the pastor of Trinity PCA. It's funny to go to each of them and have just gone through the same part of the Bible study last week at a different study. Oh well.... :)

This past week on the ship has been busy too. Remember those antennas that we had to take off a month ago? Well....I put them all back on during the first part of last week. I actually enjoy going up on the mast and climbing out on the yardarms. The view from the mast is pretty good. It gets a little windy up there sometimes, but I enjoy it. There was a bunch of other stuff that I had to do, like test equipment calibration, maintenance on miscellaneous equipment on the ship, and a few other things.

The weather here has gotten pretty warm today, but it's had it's moments of being pretty chilly. Last Sunday was a duty day, as was Saturday (yesterday). Yesterday I had two watches again (doesn't surprise me), and they were both the topside M-16 rover, one in the morning and one in the middle of the night. I've been up since 1pm, when I woke up for my watch, but I slept for about 7 hours before the late night watch, so I'm not doing too bad today.

I went to Trinity's morning service, and I was glad that I did, because I got in on an ultimate frisbee game, just like I used to play before I joined the Navy! It was nice to play with a bunch of Christians, even though I barely know most of them. The day has been pretty hot (75-80), but I'm sure that it will cool down tonight.

Tomorrow we will finally be done with the yards! We get underway for two days to test all of the changed/upgraded/refurbished stuff that was done to the ship while we were in the yards. It will be interesting to see how this new CO treats the ship, since this is the first time that we've been underway since the return from deployment. The primary purpose of this "test" run is to test the capabilities of the ship, and I'm sure that he'll test it's limits.

2006-02-28T16:18:00.000-05:00

There's only two weeks left to the shipyards! It seems like it was just a couple weeks ago that we pulled into the yards. It will be nice to not have shipyard workers all over the place on the ship, but I'm sure that they got plenty of needed work done. Of course, the biggest bit of work that will affect most of the people on the ship is the equipment upgrade that will enable us to have faster Internet during our next deployment. I am still going to be going to school for about three months starting in April.

I've still been hopping around to community groups from Trinity, and I enjoy the fellowship of the people that go to them. I went to Trinity church last Sunday and then Immanuel's evening service. I'm still undecided about which church I really prefer, but maybe I'll decide eventually. Perhaps, I just need to "catch up" on going to church again after an entire deployment of very little fellowship with other believers. Speaking of fellowship....for some reason it seems like it is easier to become friends with some of the people at Trinity, while some of the people my age at Immanuel are "friendly" but not interested in becoming friends. (It's just a thought, and perhaps it's not correct.) I've met many of the adults in the church (funny how people with kids are adults, when I am 24 already), and I'm pretty good friends with them, but parents don't have a lot of time to "hang out" and do stuff together.

This week I'm in school at the main Navy base, but it's only a short 5 day school, and it'll be over on Friday. The school is pretty easy, and it is basically a refresher on a lot of the stuff that I learned back in A school, except now I have a lot more experience with the equipment on the ship and a lot of the problems that I often run into.

The annoying thing about having such a short school is that yesterday I was at school AND on duty. I suppose that it was an improvement to only have to stand ONE watch instead of the normal TWO watches that I've been standing, but when I've been sitting in class for 6 or 7 hours, I don't look forward to having to go back to the ship to stand watch from 8pm until midnight. (It also cuts into my sleep schedule.) I suppose that's what it must be like to have two jobs, or to go to school and have a job at the same time. Fortunately, that's the only day this week that I'll have duty on a school day, and when I'm going to the school in April, I won't have that problem, because it's three months long.

I was invited to a new community group that meets on Wednesdays, so I'm going to go see what that is like. I still plan to go the the one on Thursday that I've been going to. I have to admit that it's kinda fun to hop between community groups, and I've gotten to know a lot more people from Trinity much better than I would if I were just talking to them at church every Sunday.

Colonial Williamsburg

2006-02-15T18:41:00.000-05:00

Colonial Williamsburg, originally uploaded by ijspence. This is one of the better pictures that I took while I was in Williamsburg. I saw this horse drawn carriage giving a tour of the historical Williamsburg area a little while later in the afternoon.

I also have uploaded about 5 other photos from the shipyards and from Williamsburg. Go to my Flickr photo page to see them.

2006-02-15T17:51:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of interesting stuff happen in the last week, so I better put it down before I forget it. :)

Last week was filled mostly with the usual collection of maintenance, and I've been going to as many church events/meetings as I can fit in. Last week the potable (drinkable) water was turned off on the ship so that mork can be done to that system too, which meant that we had to walk all the way to the aft of the ship and walk over the brow to the berthing barge to brush your teeth, take a shower, shave, or anything requiring bathroom facilities. Since then the aft berthing's heads have been restored and we can now use the head in the aft berthings on the ship instead of going over to the barge. It's still a long walk all the way back there to shave or take a shower, but it's an improvement. I think that all the people that are on the berthing barge now, that normally live in the aft berthings will be moved back onto the ship soon, and the people still living in the forward berthings will probably be moving to the barge before too long.

The real excitement was mostly over this last weekend. I went to church as usual on Sunday. I ended up going to Immanuel for the second Sunday in a row, but that was because I didn't realize that the service at Trinity is at 9:30 instead of 10:30. After the church service was over, I talked with a few people and an invitation to go to dinner at the pastor's house the following Sunday, but none for that afternoon. So, I felt like just going exploring a little, and I got in my car and started driving. I drove on the highway for a while and then decided to figure out where I was headed. I found that I was heading in the general direction of Williamsburg, which is a pretty big historical landmark for the Virginia area. I didn't really care that it was about an hour drive away, and it wasn't very hard to get there, since I could just follow the signs.

It was pretty quiet in the colonial/historical section of Williamsburg that is preserved, but that was mostly due to it being a Sunday, and the weather wasn't entirely agreeable. I found a 2 hour free parking spot, and decided to take a little jaunt down the main street of colonial Williamsburg, and enjoyed looking at all of the houses that have been preserved and restored to look like they used to so long ago. There were various shops and restaurants along the street all in an old colonial style, and it was pretty cool to see many people that were dressed in a colonial manner walking the streets or standing in their doorways. I went into one shop that had a lot of little souveneirs, which included musket balls, shards of flint and those triangular hats that you always see in the movies. I walked all the way down the street, and at the end of the street was a large building that was called the Capitol. At first I didn't think that I was going to get in, because you need to have a ticket for the tours, but the person at the entrance let me in with just my military ID. It contained a small courtroom and numerous other meeting places for the Burgesses and was divided into a "House-like" structure similar to out White House today in the United States.

So that was my interesting Sunday afternoon. I went back to church for the evening service. I think that I would have had more fun if I had someone to go to Williamsburg or places like that with, because I'll often overlook little interesting things that might not catch my interest, but that would be fun to look at "with" somebody. It was still cool to see Williamsburg though, and I'm glad that I went. That was not the end of my adventures so far this week though....

Monday morning I was sent to a one-day class at the main Norfolk base where we used to be moored. I knew about the school last week, and I was dreading it a little. It was about damage control on the ship, and I've never been that interested in damage control. So, Monday morning I woke up bright and early at 5am, and prepared myself to go to the school. I was warned that I needed to bring a pair of coveralls that I didn't care about getting wet in, and I was a bit intrigued about what we might end up doing that would involve getting wet. (Little did I know how wet I would get!) The morning didn't start out all that well, when I realized that I had forgotten my orders that authorized me to attend the class, and I had to drive back to the base. I had only driven about 5 minutes away from the base, but the traffic in the mornings is always so thick that it took me 20 minutes to get back to the base. It wasn't a good start to the day. After running back to the ship, grabbing my orders, and running back to my car, I was able to make it back on the road quickly, and the traffic at the main base wasn't too bad, and I was able to make it to the class with some time to spare. (I really don't like starting mornings like that though.)

The class actually started at about 7:45 after an overcrowding of students was straightened out, and some ships that didn't have a reservation in the class were sent back to their ships to go through the class another day. The morning consisted of about 3 1/2 hours of instruction about plugging, patching, shoring, and other damage control methods. This school didn't include firefighting and focused more of the other less-remembered aspects of damage control. The instruction was a bit dry, and a lot of people had a hard time staying awake. (They didn't have that problem in the afternoon!) We were let out at about 11 for lunch, and I went with a couple of the other people that I know from my ship to get some food.

We showed up at the building we were told to go to for the "wet" half of the training. I changed into a pair of coveralls that I didn't care about too much, and we all gathered on the bleachers in a large room. This room had a great big "pool" in the middle of it, but the pool was entirely filled by a large box that is called the USS Buttercup. It has various sections and has watertight doors, just like a real ship, and it is specially designed so that the instructors can control the flooding and damage in the compartments on the ship. It almost entirely fills the pool, and there is only about a foot on each side of the "ship" at the edge of the pool.

We didn't go onto the ship right away; first, we were instructed in more of a lab style how to do shoring, plugging, and dewatering. In the plugging lab there was a 10 foot long firemain water pipe with a number of holes cut into it. We had to all line up and put our hands over the holes as the 32 degree water was turned on. It is nearly impossible to hold water pressurized to 150psi into a pipe like that, so it got us all soaked. The instructor then took great pleasure in taking another firehose and dousing us all thoroughly. One of the other labs gave us practice at shoring, which means that you brace a bulkhead or a hatch with wooden or steel supports to keep it in place. In the dewatering lab there is an eductor that uses suction from a firehose to draw more water out of a space. It was pretty simple and not nearly as wet.

After the labs, we did the actual scenario, where they sounded general quarters and turned out all the lights. Then a simulated missile hit the port side of the ship, and we had to determine the extent of the damage and fix any problems using what we learned from the labs and instruction. We had to plug a number of holes caused by the missile and the inside of the USS Buttercup bagan to flood with water. We went down inside the ship and began dewatering and plugging holes in the ship. It was actually pretty fun, and the water was heated, so we didn't get very cold while we were trying to fix the damage. It almost felt like a swimming pool, except we were all wearing coveralls and hard hats.

I had a duty day yesterday, and once again, I was given two watches that totalled 10 hours of watch all together. I took a nap this afternoon, and I'll be caught up on my sleep again by tomorrow.

Tonight I went to the Wednesday night service at Immanuel, and I've got a Bible study that I'm going to on Thursday, and some friends invited me over for dinner on Friday, and there's a lunch that I was invited to on Saturday......I'm going to be pretty busy for the rest of the week. :)

This is a pretty long post, but I hope you enjoyed all my adventures. Check out the rest of the pictures on Flickr if you get the chance.

2006-02-02T19:56:00.000-05:00

More Shipyards...
Has it already been 2 weeks since my last post? The past couple of weeks have been a blur of activity, but it's good to be busy. Between going up the mast to take antennas off for maintenance, taking test equipment to the calibration lab, repainting portions of our shop, and radio transmitter maintenance that causes me to find problems with my radio transmitters, which creates some extra work, it's been a busy couple of weeks.

I got the opportunity to go up the mast a couple of times to take off antennas that need maintenance, repainting, or cleaning. There were some antennas that were out on the end of the lower yardarm, and that was the most fun. When we go up the mast or especially out onto the yardarms, we have to wear a safety harness, and it has to have two safety lanyards attached. One of the safety lanyards is attached at all times, and you alternate between the lanyards as you move along the yardarm to do the work that needs to be done. I guess that I must enjoy heights or something, because I had no problem going all the way out to the end of the yardarm to get the work done. Some of the other guys don't like heights much, and the one other guy that went up the mast with me mostly gave me advice from the safety of the railing. We ended up taking 4 antennas off of the lower yardarm, so two seperate days I ended up going up there. There was another day too, when we took some of the big tall antennas off the platform amidships where the engine's exhaust. They are about 40 feet long, and they had to be removed with a crane as we loosened the bolts at the base.

The big news for this week is that I finally relented and got a cell phone. Feel free to call me anytime. There are free nights (starting at 9pm EST) and weekends and more than enough minutes for me to worry about running out. The new number is posted in the sidebar on the right.

I went back to Trinity for church on Sunday morning, and then I went to the evening service at Immanuel. Both of the churches are good, and I will probably be torn between the two for a while. Immanuel doesn't have any Bible studies throughout the week, so I've been trying to go to those. I went to one on Monday at the Gibson's house, but I haven't quite figured out where the one that meets on Thursday nights is at right now. I also went to the Wednesday night meeting at Immanuel yesterday. Going to church meetings is starting to fill up my week. :)

During the past month I've been doing maintenance on all of the radio transmitters that I'm in charge of. The bad thing about doing maintenance to them is that sometimes you find problems that make more work, and that means that I have to order parts to correct any little problems that I find. It's nice when I'm able to do maintenance on one of the radios, and it comes up with no problems at all. I'll be finished with my semi-annual maintenance check in a couple more weeks though, and then I can relax a bit.

I found out that the school that I was planning on going to in January has been moved to April. That means that I'll have about 3 months of school from late in April to the end of July. I'm going to put in a request to take leave for about three weeks in August. With our busy schedule for the next year, we're going to be busy during the rest of the year after August, so August or maybe Christmas look like the best times for me to come home on leave. I am hoping that my request for August will get approved. I will really enjoy taking a full three weeks at home. After being home for that long, maybe I'll even get bored! :)

There is a little more news, but that's enough for now, and I need to catch up on my sleep. Tomorrow is a duty day, and I won't be surprised if I have two watches again. It's becoming a regular habit to stand 9-10 hours of watch on the typical duty day.

Feel free to call me to test my new phone. It is possible that whenever I'm within the skin of the ship though that I may not be able to get a signal, so keep trying or try again in the afternoon. I will get voice mail set up soon, so that if you aren't able to reach me, I will still get your message.

2006-01-20T17:08:00.000-05:00

The past week I've gotten to "stretch my legs" a little, now that I've got a car. On Sunday I went to a new church, called Immanuel Presbyterian Church. It is PCA, but it's the most "OPC-like" church that I've been to since I've moved to Norfolk. They were established back in the 1980s, and they have a modest congregation of 80-90 people that attend each Sunday. They sing only out of the Trinity Hymnal and the Psalter, and the piano is the only accompaniment. I met a lot of very nice people there, and I plan to go back. Unfortunately, this next Sunday is a duty day for me, and I have to stay on the ship on Sunday.

Now that I have a car, I have also become more of a resource for people that need a ride. A couple of people on the ship don't have cars right now, and they have no way to get to their house which is now a long ways away now that we are so far away from the main Norfolk Naval Base. It's helped me to get to know a few people a little better.

The ship's email and internet networks are going to be going down for maintenance for about a month, and I'm going to have to start using my Hotmail email address for a little while until the maintenance is done. So everyone that has me in their address books, please change my current email address from ispencer@mahan.navy.mil to web_man2000@hotmail.com. I will check the Hotmail address as often as I check my ship's email, and it's usually the easiest way to get in touch with me.

I've gotten much more familiar with the highway traffic in the Norfolk area. It has taken some adjustment to get used to interchanging between major highways, but I have a good map that I use if I ever get a little too far out of familiar territory.

This week was mostly just a lot of maintenance. Early this week was a safety inspection which gave me and some of the other ETs in my division some work to keep us busy. One of the biggest things was having a Radiation hazard sticker on all of the walkie talkies on the ship. There are over 100 walkie talkies that are distributed throughout the ship, and it is a pretty big job to collect them, put the little sticker on them and then inventory which radios have been turned in. That has kept us busy for a little while, but I enjoy doing electronic stuff like that.

The weather has been a bit strange lately. One day recently we got a light dusting of snow, and the next couple of days it was nearly 65 degrees and sunny outside. The nights have been getting a bit chilly, but during the day it will often feel pretty warm in the sun.

Speaking of sun, today I took advantage of the warmth to wash and wax my car. I want it to last a little while, since I'm stationed here for the next 4 years. It's been running well, and has been invaluable, now that we are in the shipyards.

2006-01-13T13:46:00.000-05:00

The Shipyards.....
Bright and early on Wednesday morning we prepared to go to the shipyards. At 5am the 1MC announced reveille, and everyone had to be on the ship for quarters by 5:45am. The fog was pretty thick, but it wasn't too cold, as the ship prepared to get underway for our short transit to the Portsmouth Naval shipyards.

The fog was very thick, and it delayed our getting underway for about 2 hours, until it lifted enough for us to see where we were going. It was kinda nice to hear all the prepratory announcements that you hear when the ship is getting underway, but I'm glad that it's only a short transit that we were doing. It took us a couple of hours to slowly make our way up the river toward the shipyards. We slowly floated past downtown Norfolk and where the USS Wisconsin battleship is permanently moored as a museum. We didn't go nearly as far up the river as I was expecting. It's only about a 5 minute drive to get to downtown Norfolk.

The shipyard workers are just now starting to get everything set up to begin their work on our ship. There is a big berthing barge that is alongside our ship, and they've already moved a couple of the main berthings onto the barge, so that some work can be done to that part of the ship.

Yesterday, we spent a lot of time moving the matresses onto the barge. The berthing barge isn't really nice, but it's not really bad either. I suppose that it wouldn't be too hard to get used to. It is completely self-sufficient with it's own galley, machinery workshop and the officer, chief's, female and male berthing areas. Unfortunately it's not big enough to hold everyone from the crew all at once, so after work is done in the aft part of the ship, then I'll end up moving when they're ready to do the work on the forward part of the ship. I still don't know how long my berthing will spend on the barge, but it won't be nearly as long as I was expecting.

Yesterday and today the shipyard workers laid down plastic mats on all of the decks inside the ship, so that they don't damage the decking while they're doing their work. The real work hasn't begun yet, but they're definitely gearing up for it.

In the shipyards everyone is required to wear hardhats and safety glasses at all times, whenever you are topside or walking in a hazardous area. Every person on the ship was issued a brand new hardhat. We're not allowed to decorate them except for the ships emblem or the name of the owner of the hat. They don't want a lot of extra decoration on the hats, so that they maintain a professional appearance.

So far the shipyards haven't been that bad. Everyone parks in a big gravel parking lot that isn't very far away from the pier. It's a lot closer to Norfolk downtown, but there is no Internet or recreational stuff to do the Portsmouth shipyard base. Right now our ship doesn't even have any Internet access, so I have to drive to the main Norfolk Naval Station to use the Internet. I am receiving email, so that is working ok.

I am happily driving my new car, and beginning to know my way around the Norfolk area. There are a lot more highways and interstates than I am used to, but I'll learn my way around before very long. I'm definitely glad that I got my car when I did, because if I still didn't have a car now, then I would be stuck in the industrial area that the ship is in right now. It's nice to have a little freedom.

I'm sure that there will be many more intersting things for me to write about as we are in the shipyards. It will be another 2 months before the work is completed for the ship.

2006-01-05T17:53:00.000-05:00

Time to catch everyone up on recent events. I've been neglecting my blog too much, due to the holidays. There's not as much interesting stuff to write about now that we're not pulling into all kinds of foreign countries or interesting ports.

Well, the last thing that I wrote about was going to Yorktown to unload our weapons. It was quite cold there, but it's not every day that a person gets to unload or load missiles for a US Navy ship!

Since then I went home for 10 days of leave. It was great to get to see everyone back home again, especially my family, since so many things have changed there since the last time that I was home. For those of you who don't know already, after the death of my Dad in March, I left for the 2005 deployment to the Mediterranean. While I was overseas, my Mom got remarried to a very nice guy that has lived in the southern Oregon area for most of his life. I was very happy for her, but I hadn't know the guy at all before my Mom got married to him. So when I went home this Christmas, I got the opportunity to meet my Mom's new husband and his 4 kids. It was a very joyous reunion, and my younger siblings were overjoyed to see me after having been gone for most of the past year. I spent plenty of time getting to know my new family members.

Christmas was great, as usual. There were piles of presents under the tree, and everyone was feeling very festive. There are 6 kids under the age of 15 now, and my younger sister, who will be six this month, always gets tons of presents. She had a free-for-all at the end where she could open all her presents that were left, since everyone else had run out. :)

My flights to Oregon and back from Norfolk were mostly uneventful. I made it successfully to where I needed to go, even though there wasn't anyone to pick me up in Norfolk once I got back. I also had a little problem with my car rental in Oregon, since my license had expired while I was on deployment. Everyone said that I could just use my military ID, but apparently Oregon doesn't work that way. I was able to get my license renewed while I was in Oregon, and I shouldn't have that problem anymore.

I didn't do anything interesting for New Years. The church in Virginia that I usually go to wasn't having any parties, and the family that usually picks me up for church was feeling sickly. I did go out to Applebee's to treat myself to dinner but found that I didn't have much of an appetite anyway. While I was there another ET came in, and as I nursed my nachos nuevos, we chatted for about 2 hours. I got to Applebees pretty early in the evening, and we ran out of things to talk about at 10pm, so I headed back to the ship.

At midnight the ship sounded 8 bells and the Petty Officer of the Watch announced, "2005....Departing," then sounded another 8 bells and announced, "2006....Arriving." Usually the bells are only sounded to announce noon, or to mark the top of every hour when at sea. The bells are also used to announce the CO of our ship or any other official ranking over a Lieutenant Commander from off of the ship. When we were overseas, we rang the bell whenever any foreign dignitary came aboard. The number of times the bell is rung depends on the rank of the official.

Monday was a holiday for us, and I thoroughly enjoyed the day by playing games all day. I know, most disgraceful of me, but it's been ages since I have played any computer games. I bought a laptop from my brother while I was home, and I have been enjoying it thoroughly.

This week has been busy with maintenance and other miscellaneous chores. This is the last week that we'll be in Norfolk, before we head to the shipyards this month. The shipyards are in Portsmouth, south of Norfolk and further up the river. I still haven't heard anything about whether I'll be able to go to the school for the new equipment that is being installed in the yards, but hopefully, I'll hear about that as soon as everyone returns from being on leave. It's almost been a straight 6 weeks that the ship has been letting big chunks of people go on leave, and it will seem strange to have everyone back on the ship again. We took about three weeks at the end of the deployment to let people reunite with their families. Then the holiday's rolled around, and everyone went right back on leave after our little trip to Yorktown.

This week I finally purchased a car. (Took me long enough?) I'm glad that I finally got it, but now, of course, there are expenses for maintenance, gas, insurance, and whatever else I need for it. It is a '91 Honda Civic, and seems to be in pretty good shape. Carfax didn't turn up anything, but it does have 140K miles on it. I finally completed the transfer today, but it was a little late in the day when I picked the car up, and I had some problems finalizing the title, registration and plates.

The seller took his plates while we were at the DMV, assuming that I would be able to get my new plates while I was there. Unfortunately, the DMV had to throw a wrench in the works by requiring me to provide proof of residency in Virginia. That's a little tough since I receive almost no mail on the ship, and I don't have an apartment to receive bills at. I finally discovered that I could show them my military orders, ordering me to be stationed on my ship, and that would be sufficient to prove that I really am who I say that I am. I didn't have my orders on me though, and that's not something that I ever think about having with me.

So now I had a dilema: No plates on my new car, I am 20 miles away from the base, and I didn't want to take a cab for fear of the car getting towed while it sat on the DMV parking lot overnight. After more questioning of the DMV information desk, I discovered that I could get a temporary "trip permit," which is valid for 3 days to drive the car without plates. I was now able to drive my car again.

Yet, there was one more dilema, and that was whether the gate guards at the base would let me get in. I wasn't sure if they would care whether I had a trip permit or now, but I knew that I would need some type of temporary permit to allow me onto the base too. A quick note: Every car that enters the military base has a registration sticker that is independant of any DMV stickers, and it means that your vehicle has been approved to enter a military base. Fortunately, I was able to get a temporary pass for that also, even though I have not updated the title, gotten any registration, or even gotten any plates for the car yet! Heh....heh.....I didn't count on having this much fun today. :)

So, the gate guards let me in after getting the gate pass, and I was finally able to return to my ship. They didn't seem to care about the plates not being on the car, which I was thankful for. I'd had my fill of problems for the day! So, now I am the proud owner of a little blue '91 Honda Civic, and I will be able to go to church without the necessity of asking for ride to travel around the countryside. :)

2005-12-16T22:12:00.000-05:00

I apologize for my silence for the past week. It's been very busy, and there was plenty of work to do! We weren't able to turn on our communications system that sends email and gives us Internet access, because stray radio signals can be dangerous while handling ammunition. We couldn't use handheld walkie-talkies or any of our major communications gear when any type of ammunition or weapons were on the pier.

This past week we went to Yorktown to offload all the weapons that we took with us on deployment. I was on the missile handling team, just like I was before the deployment started and we were onloading weapons. Every single one of those doors that you see has a missile behind it, and it takes quite a while to take all of them out indivudually. There is an experienced team of union workers that actually operates the crane and takes them out of the ship properly, and I am part of a team on the pier. There is a special mounting bracket for safe transportations that each missile is put into once it is taken out of the ship. The team that I am on is made up of about 10 people, and it is our job to take apart the mounting bracket, and then put it back together once the missile is in the bracket. The weather during the first couple of days was pretty chilly, and we all bundled up pretty good. On Thursday the weather started to turn nasty, and we got rained on for that day.

Missiles were not the only ammunition that had to be taken off of the ship, but they were the only thing that I helped to take off the ship. There was also CIWS (pronounced sea-wiz), 50 caliber, 25mm, 9mm, M-16, M-14, and of course the ammunition for the big 5" deck gun. CIWS, which stands for Close-In Weapons System is pictured on the right and is designed for shooting down missiles fired at us.

Saturday I will be going on leave to visit my friends and family back home. I am looking forward to it a lot. There will be much to catch up on and many things to talk about.