Cast off!

Sea trials in 40 knot winds and nasty seas... No word on the swells, but they've had all night to build up... The smoother this goes the happier it'll make me. 

A Mullet? Really!?

Being in the shipyard is dull.  Yeah, there is plenty of activity and there is an endless stream of stuff to do, but we're not underway so the time I would be doing my navigation watch is spent in a guard shack, instead (per earlier post).  One of the oddities you might encounter should you be able to board my ship at midnight is the Ordinary, the Chief Cook, and the GVA hanging out on the stern.

The Chief Cook is half Filipino and looks Hawaiian; he's as wide- muscle, not fat- as he is tall.  The GVA is Arabic and always wears a derby hat with suspenders and sings decidedly Arabic vocals in quarter steps.  The Ordinary is Filipino.  They gather around the Ordinary's 4 foot tall hookah and pass the pipe around while the Cook plays a tiny ukulele, and I imagine if he were to spontaneously burst into song he'd probably sound like Don Ho.

And just about every time I go to the port stern, directly over the furthest aft deckspace on her quarter, a two foot mullet-looking fish slowly swims out from under the dock, does a loop, and disappears back into the shadows and doesn't reappear again until the next day.  The first few times I was like, "huh, would you look at that."  The first dozen times it started to be remarkable.  Now, 6 weeks into our shipyard stint, it's just friggin' creepy.

If we have spirit animals I sure hope mine isn't a giant mullet.

For Whom The Bell Tolls...

20 years of tarnish and abuse, gone.  Grease from my elbow, liberally applied.

Seen in the shipyard...

68 knots... That's fast!

Log

The gangway log...

Sailoring as a "Job?"

So every ship is different, and some are more different than others… my current ship is at the shipyard and that means we sailors are on a totally different schedule than we would be on if we were under way, making way.  One big difference that took some getting used to was going on an eight hour watch… my new watch, while at the quay, is midnight to 0800 (really 2345 - 0745)- or, as it has been called for time immemorial, “the midnight watch.”

I am currently almost through season 3 of “Californication,” a remarkably explicit sitcom given to me by the first Bos'n on the Polk (and now mi amigo), and I have started rereading the "Game of Thrones."  The proclivity of modern sailors for amassing large hard drives full of music and video is one I am glad I have tried to develop… I literally do nothing for the first 6 hours of my watch.  Pull ups, push ups, jumping rope, reading, and watching movies… more movies than pull ups, I’m afraid...

After I’m relieved I have about 15 minutes to change and get out on deck, b/c at 0800 is the daily safety meeting, which kicks off my 4 hours of overtime.  When do I eat, you ask?  I take about 15 minutes after the meeting to throw down whatever I can fit into my piehole.  The deck work goes so quickly after the full midnight watch… I grab a needle gun and go to it with a gusto.  If I had to compare the two parts of my day in terms of apparent time, my watch feels 12 hours long and my OT only 2.

I bought my brother’s motorcycle.  I think I have already not spent several hundred dollars on taxi’s, but I can’t say I have saved any money… what I can say is it’s nice to explore and just get lost in Charleston and the outlying areas.  While getting sea time.

And friends Beth and Dan (former owners of Seattle’s Aster Coffee Lounge) now live here with their bouncing baby boy so I have been fortunate enough to spend a little bit of time with them.  And agree to help them move stuff.  And borrow their garage.  And eat Mexican food.  And go to the beach.  You know… friend stuff.  Beth is now running her dad’s business (marine related, of course) and tomorrow I go out on their schooner for brunch.  It’s a hard life, I know… but if anybody could do it, anybody would, right?

And Laura has a ticket to come visit, as well.  Yay!  So I’ll do my night shift while she’s here (I really can’t get out of it) and then spend the two days she’s here zombified-but-happy.... Barring any unforeseen complications it will be the first and only successful visit we will have pulled off- and then only because this ship has more hoses, pipes, cables, wire looms, lines and walkways holder her fast to the dock than she can shake off between now and then.

Actually, being in the shipyard is more like having a job than being a sailor…

Anticrepuscular Kind of Morning

My new quarters...

The Hitchhiker

So last night, as we steamed north from Cape Canaveral to Charleston, an osprey landed on the foremast.  The moon was behind a thin, stratus mist that acted like a diffuser and lit the night as effectively as the full moon might have, and when the raptor came in from above the wheelhouse and banked hard, landing on the range light in profile to where I stood with binoculars, I thought it was a trick of the light that made this seabird look like a raptor.

I tried to convince myself that I was mistaken, too... when you're 100 miles offshore you don't expect to see an osprey.  The last raptor I saw at sea was off the north coast of Africa - some type of kestrel or falcon, I think - but I could see the hills of Algeria looming in the humid air off to the south, then.  I was not 100 miles offshore.  It was not night time.

Osprey are surprisingly large, with bold black and white plumage- you don't mistake them for anything else.... so my inner conversation was "Is that...?  No.  But wait!" and I stared for 15 minutes, afraid to look away, in case it took flight and I could see that familiar shape and be certain that the dark wasn't playing with my eyes.

The bird preened for hours, I got a good, conclusive look- it was, indeed, an osprey... but she never flew off during my entire watch.  She eventually put her head down and, as far as I can tell, slept.  When I handed off the watch I handed her off to my relief and like to think she was satisfied that our ship would take her where she wanted to go, red-eye express, and arrived in South Carolina well rested.

Seaturtle eating algae off Yokohama Fender and cable

Underway

My quarters are only a few meters above the water- a big change from my last ship.  And when we’re underway I hear the water beneath my deck, also a big difference from the Polk… instead of being in a twelve story building surrounded by cargo, this vessel and its “talking cargo” is less than half the length of my last ship and about 50,000 tons of displacement lighter, which is orders of magnitude smaller.

Where 2.5 meter swells are almost unnoticeable in a 275 meter ship, this smaller ship bucks around and rides more like a boat.  She steers like a power-boat, too, with twin screws and rudders, but I am spending lots of time at the helm so I had the hang of the differences inside of a day and grew bored at the helm soon thereafter.  

Next stop- The Low Country, my ancestral homelands, but the furthest northern extremes of the Coastal Empire…. Charleston, SC.  

My Travel Companions

They're still underway with me!

My View

Here We Go Again....

I am out at sea again after only 3 months ashore- 5 long months stretching out ahead of me.  I arrived at port 2100 hours on Wednesday night and stood my first watch at midnight of that same night… welcome aboard, AB Jackson- now get to work!  While in port I stand a security watch- which is to say, I sit in an air-conditioned box and sign people on and off the ship.  Reading is allowed while on the midnight watch (there’s no need to hide the kindle) so it is a good thing I have well over 50,000 pages of book-stuffs with me.  Not really much else to tell about that part of my job.

Anyone who has read any of my previous posts can imagine how happy I was to look off the stern during the midnight watch and see great schools of mullet illuminated in the floodlights, multiple swarms of fish segregated by size, moving in an unchoreographed yet synchronous manner.  And sea turtles, lazily swimming through the schools of fish looking for (and finding) their dietary staple- jellyfish.  

The mullet keep several feet of distance from the turtles and it forms a circle- a fishless circle- that follows the turtles wherever they swim, casting an in-the-spotlight illusion.  It wasn’t until I watched a seaturtle eat a jellyfish that I realized I’d never actually seen a seaturtle eat a jellyfish before.  Every sting I’ve ever suffered from a jellyfish, especially the one that went up my shorts in 1997, made me very content to stand and watch every single jelly-fish destroying bite.

Out on the perimeter of the floodlights I watched a ten foot shark very slowly pass back and forth, never getting any closer to the action below, but never going away, either.  And a big ray or skate of some sort, diamond shaped and flying through the still waters like a prehistoric bird.  And two big gar-pike or barracuda, swimming as a pair.  All the predators hung around at the edge of the light on separate occasions, until they grew bored, or restless, or whatever, and melted into the murk below.

After my frustration aboard the President Polk with recognizing the ocean’s animals and birds I brought two physical books with me this time- a guide to the whales and dolphins of the world, and a guide to the seabirds of the world- but I neglected to bring a single book on sea turtles and sharks.  I will have to remedy this.