So here we go.
I picked up a 120 day job as a dayman on a shuttle loop that runs between Guam, Saipan, Yokohama, and Pusan (now more commonly spelled Busan). Apparently the run takes two weeks, so I’ll do it 8 or 9 times before my contract is fulfilled… I suspect that sense of Groundhog Day (all over again) will be fairly intense by the end of it all.
Bad news? None, yet. This won’t become apparent until I get there, sadly...
Good news? Everyone seems to have good things to say about the crew and the run- including about the ship, which is a teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy, 500’... which will certainly take some getting used to.
In two days I fly to Korea, where I’ll sign my Articles. A sailor I know that was on there recently said there’s a “great health food store” in Saipan, which underscores that we’ve sailed together, but calls into question his definition of “great,” and “health food store;” I won’t get my hopes too high…
I just completed two days of standby work on an old 1973 steamship as the standby bosun- our job? Taking every single firehose on the ship and linking them together into one long hose and charging the system for ABS inspectors.
Bad hoses are cut in half there on the spot, and replacements have to be aboard before the inspector will sign off on the test. There were about 120 hoses total… 60 of them we carried up through the maze of the fiddly (smoke stack) from the engine room to the top of the RO RO car deck - that’s about 12 stories of engine room heated stairs to the full Hawaiian sun- and the rest were laid out on either weather deck.
The photo Laura sent of my truck covered in Seattle ice clashed mightily with my Getting-Used-To-The-Tropics-Again reality. It will prepare me for Guam and Saipan, while Japan and Korea will rely on my Seattle training. And warm clothes. Which I brought, not because I thought I’d need cold weather clothing, but for surviving the ship’s air conditioning, which is either on Full-Arctic, or not working at all.
And that’s the news from the the Honolulu Sailors’ Home, aka the Doghouse.
I picked up a 120 day job as a dayman on a shuttle loop that runs between Guam, Saipan, Yokohama, and Pusan (now more commonly spelled Busan). Apparently the run takes two weeks, so I’ll do it 8 or 9 times before my contract is fulfilled… I suspect that sense of Groundhog Day (all over again) will be fairly intense by the end of it all.
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| Lashings for an Hawaiian canoe ama. |
Bad news? None, yet. This won’t become apparent until I get there, sadly...
Good news? Everyone seems to have good things to say about the crew and the run- including about the ship, which is a teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy, 500’... which will certainly take some getting used to.
In two days I fly to Korea, where I’ll sign my Articles. A sailor I know that was on there recently said there’s a “great health food store” in Saipan, which underscores that we’ve sailed together, but calls into question his definition of “great,” and “health food store;” I won’t get my hopes too high…
I just completed two days of standby work on an old 1973 steamship as the standby bosun- our job? Taking every single firehose on the ship and linking them together into one long hose and charging the system for ABS inspectors.
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| Waikiki, a shopper’s paradise, is pretty as a postcard but as dull as a root canal. |
Bad hoses are cut in half there on the spot, and replacements have to be aboard before the inspector will sign off on the test. There were about 120 hoses total… 60 of them we carried up through the maze of the fiddly (smoke stack) from the engine room to the top of the RO RO car deck - that’s about 12 stories of engine room heated stairs to the full Hawaiian sun- and the rest were laid out on either weather deck.
The photo Laura sent of my truck covered in Seattle ice clashed mightily with my Getting-Used-To-The-Tropics-Again reality. It will prepare me for Guam and Saipan, while Japan and Korea will rely on my Seattle training. And warm clothes. Which I brought, not because I thought I’d need cold weather clothing, but for surviving the ship’s air conditioning, which is either on Full-Arctic, or not working at all.
And that’s the news from the the Honolulu Sailors’ Home, aka the Doghouse.
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| The Doghouse mimics the austerity of ships as an architectural statement. |
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| The rooms, likewise, mimic the quarters of a ship. But less so... |
Most of life is a kind of Groundhog day ... at least your views keep changing!
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