Molly deploys!

Since Molly doesn't have access to blogspot on the ship, I'm the blogger middle man. I will be posting updates from Molly as I get them. Enjoy...
Dan

This morning we finally departed from Mayport! I spent some time in aft steering getting some PQS signed off while we were pulling out, then I went to the bridge to see us leave. There were lots of tornados in the water and it started raining SOOOO hard. The ship was rockin’ and rollin’, but after that it calmed down. Luckily so far, the ship hasn’t rocked too much, I don’t feel sick at all; if anything, these waves make me sleeeeepy. But everyone said this is lucky and it will get worse. Uh oh!

I spent the rest of the morning on watch in Engineering, where I will be for the next week. I also had some DC (damage control) training in hopes of finishing the 60+ pages by next week. Lots of things started breaking (as always!) and I had to give my first report to the CO about it. I didn’t know the answers to some of the things he asked me, but I think it was ok b/c if you admit you don’t know, they just tell you to find out.

We had some flight quarters today and brought on our 2 helos (though it was delayed by a few hours due to the tornados in Mayport). I watched that from CIC which was kinda exciting. I spent the afternoon working on some stuff and then we had some medical training which consisted of a bunch of gory pictures of amputations and burns and cuts. Definitely not up my alley.

I am standing the 0800-1200 and the 2000-2400 watch everyday, which is nice; engineering has 5 hours on and 10 hours off (“off” being relative b/c you still have to do your normal full work day in there) and I have the same watches every day. It is great b/c it means I can get into an eating/sleeping/working out schedule that will be relatively stable; ie- a guaranteed 5 hours of sleep during normal people sleeping hours. The only bad news is I’ll be rotating out next week and into watched of 6 hours on, 12 hours off. We’ll see how that goes.

So far it’s just a lot of watching standing, doing your job, fixing the stuff when it breaks and as a non-qualed JO, doing lots and lots of PQS and learning stuff. Lots of stuff. I better get going now as we have our nightly ops/intel brief. Thanks for reading and I hope to update as often as you can read this, but if not, it’s probably because my days are similar to what you just saw above: eat, stand watch, work, sleep, fix things, etc.