The voyage from the Far East has been entertaining.
One day I was sorting, labelling, and marking centerlines on cargo slings for afternoon overtime, my chicken sounding off like punctuation to my every move, when a crew member came to the rail above and said, "My window is open, you know..."
I also give it a healthy squeeze into the radio every day at 1300... Kind of like the noon bell, only spicier.
The mates had a prank war on the bridge which was fairly entertaining.
My watch partner hid all the binoculars.
The CM gathered up all the pens on the bridge except one horrible, scratchy thing that barely writes, and the third mate took the cup full of them at the end of our watch in concert with the CM, but openly told the 2nd Mate that the CM took them - allowing the bus to stop and then back over the CM's corpse. The 2nd Mate has a "pen thing," and he lost his mind - which was absolutely hysterical to everyone but him.
I told the steward it was the CM's birthday one day and the 3rd Mate agreed with me when she sought clarification.
She made a birthday cake and everyone was wishing him happy birthday all day. His birthday is in October but I feel like the sentiment was honest.
I took his cake up to the bridge and sang him happy birthday, of course.
Everyone has been wishing everyone else happy birthday ever since.
The 2nd Mate laminated amusing photos of things like Kermit the frog with dentures and pasted them into every overhead hatch on the bridge. He pasted a dog's butt in the binacle, and weird AI-distorted eyes in the washdown valve door.
And I left a calling card all over the ship in the cargo areas in the form of the word "BOK" in 1 inch high stencilled letters in hard to reach, out of the way areas, that only the CM or 3rd Mate will see (near cargo switches, fire stations, etc.). These won't be noticed until cargo is offloading, so it's more of a gift to posterity, really.
Dim light bulbs were changed to bright ones, displays were changed from true wind to apparent wind, gps speed to doppler speed, or true north to magnetic north... All of which was done without the Captain ever catching on (he probably knew but had the grace to pretend he didn't).
One minute all the navigation math made sense, then none of it did and they were forced to figure out why and redo it.
But the fun all ran out of steam as we progressed eastward and everyone became more and more exhausted.
I'm getting back to the west coast of the US just in time for daylight savings to cause the clocks to advance an hour.
I'll see all kinds of memes and comments about it on social media, but I'm too tired to have any sympathy for my shoreside peeps - we've advanced clocks almost nightly all the way across the Pacific, even when we repeated last Friday crossing back over the International Date Line.
It can be challenging enough to get sufficient sleep when working a split watch - I sleep in the afternoon and after my 0100 fire round, and while I'm getting 7-8 hours of sleep total, I'm not getting that at once, which makes a significant difference in how rested I feel.
Reduce the day by an hour and my circadian rhythm goes a little haywire. Reduce the sleep time in the remaining time available and the recipe for blithering stupidity is complete.
So I am arriving at the dock tomorrow exhausted and unable to string coherent words together. My give-a-fuck meter stopped working days ago. Writing this blog post has left me winded.
But we make arrival tomorrow, and then I catch a plane home two days later.
By the middle of the week this will all be nothing but dim recollections of an overtaxed brain after the fever dream has fled.
The CM gathered up all the pens on the bridge except one horrible, scratchy thing that barely writes, and the third mate took the cup full of them at the end of our watch in concert with the CM, but openly told the 2nd Mate that the CM took them - allowing the bus to stop and then back over the CM's corpse. The 2nd Mate has a "pen thing," and he lost his mind - which was absolutely hysterical to everyone but him.
I told the steward it was the CM's birthday one day and the 3rd Mate agreed with me when she sought clarification.
She made a birthday cake and everyone was wishing him happy birthday all day. His birthday is in October but I feel like the sentiment was honest.
I took his cake up to the bridge and sang him happy birthday, of course.
Everyone has been wishing everyone else happy birthday ever since.
The 2nd Mate laminated amusing photos of things like Kermit the frog with dentures and pasted them into every overhead hatch on the bridge. He pasted a dog's butt in the binacle, and weird AI-distorted eyes in the washdown valve door.
One minute all the navigation math made sense, then none of it did and they were forced to figure out why and redo it.
But the fun all ran out of steam as we progressed eastward and everyone became more and more exhausted.
I'm getting back to the west coast of the US just in time for daylight savings to cause the clocks to advance an hour.
I'll see all kinds of memes and comments about it on social media, but I'm too tired to have any sympathy for my shoreside peeps - we've advanced clocks almost nightly all the way across the Pacific, even when we repeated last Friday crossing back over the International Date Line.
It can be challenging enough to get sufficient sleep when working a split watch - I sleep in the afternoon and after my 0100 fire round, and while I'm getting 7-8 hours of sleep total, I'm not getting that at once, which makes a significant difference in how rested I feel.
Reduce the day by an hour and my circadian rhythm goes a little haywire. Reduce the sleep time in the remaining time available and the recipe for blithering stupidity is complete.
So I am arriving at the dock tomorrow exhausted and unable to string coherent words together. My give-a-fuck meter stopped working days ago. Writing this blog post has left me winded.
But we make arrival tomorrow, and then I catch a plane home two days later.
By the middle of the week this will all be nothing but dim recollections of an overtaxed brain after the fever dream has fled.
