Today we cast off, finally.  I was on the needle-gun this morning, knocking the scaling off the steel, then operating the gantry crane until lunch.  After lunch we raised the gangway then tossed off the dock lines.  The newest part of the ship to me is the port side side-port hatch- which is where the pilot and other personnel board the vessel while underway.  There is a starboard side side-port hatch, too, just in case you were wondering- and yes, it is on the starboard side ;-)

I attempted to explain to Laura last night my observation that I have stepped back in time, into a timeless bubble encapsulated within the modern world, where the hierarchy, the commands, the written and the unspoken laws, etc. are identical to how a ship would have been run at almost any point in history.

The ship is divided into departments: The Deck (the domain of the bosun, where I am), the Bridge (the captain and his mates), Engine (ie. the chief engineer's dept), and the Stewards (the cook and his minions- think Long John Silver).  At any time there is friction between departments where they might touch or, god forbid, overlap.  Fellow able seamen tell me to not trust the mates, they manipulate the engineers wherever possible, and the only thing worse than the fighting between departments is the in-fighting within departments.  I mentioned the guy who was going to "burn out" a few days ago- well, he likes being hated, apparently, and has built up quite the tolerance to abuse.  For him, life is just hard no matter what... proof that we create our own reality.

Anyway- I think everyone has seen Pirates of the Caribbean- there was an able seaman on the Manoa (a ship I did some day work on) who looked exactly like some of the pirates from that movie... with one notable exception- he was wearing round sunglasses with big, bulging holograph eyeballs on the lenses... disconcerting, yes.  Anyway, the able seamen I'm working with also all look like they walked out of that movie.  When I signed on, I expected this was going to be much more like the industrial gigs I've worked, where under my hardhat I wear a "dew-rag" and so I brought a stack of them.  Well, we don't wear hardhats on this ship- just the dew-rags.  So literally, the one thing that we able seamen wear that sets us apart is the bandanna on our heads.  We ALL look like we walked off a ship from two centuries ago.  And I brought a stack of them.

So we're steaming down the eastern seaboard now- my watch begins at midnight and I'm going to try to sleep again.  I've been warned I might not get much of that in the next 72 hours...