One month down... five more to go...

Morning sunrise over the North Arabian Gulf

Good morning family & friends! (in the event that you are reading this in the AM!)

Let's seet. Since my last post.... other than Dan getting a job... let's see.

Well, last night I spent the night on a DDG and it was actually not a terrible time. Their wardroom was really cool, all of the JO's were really chill and nice. I went with three other people from ABOT, two enlisted guys and an LT, one of our pilots (Rachel, this is the guy who has the son who I think should be marry Madison. His wife's name is Amy Griffin, they live in Coronado if they were interesetd in working on said arrangements :).... Madison, by the way, is Rachel's 5 year old niece and I have come to know of a lovely 5 year old boy who is the son of one of the guys on staff).

I didn't really do much, we hung out on the flight deck while a bunch of the guys smoked cigars as the sun set (it was their holiday routine day so it was pretty chill) and then hung out in the wardroom and watched Family Guy while some of the department heads played poker. I met a nice girl named Katie, who is taking over as the Navigation on the Phil Sea (my old roommate Emily's ship) in Mayport in a few months. I brought over a bunch of magazine that I had brought/been sent that I'd already read to give to the girls in their Wardroom. I had the potential to get like NINE straight hours of sleep (no blog or skype or Gossip Girl to distract me...) but the bed wasn't as comfortable as mine and it smelled like a ship (ship's have a REALLY distinct smell if you haven't been on one for an extended period of time) and it was really cold and I was paranoided about over sleeping (I had to get up at 5:15 to make my boat ride back to ABOT). So it was not a good night's sleep. But it was worth it, a good $100 earned pretty easily.

So let's see. I've got some pictures that I took of a tanker from its arrival to departure that are kinda interesting.

These hooks that you see here to the left, that look like big teeth, this is what the mooring lines are tied to. It would be nearly impossible for a person to unhook these lines, even with slack on them, as they are really really really heavy. So these "teeth" are connected to a motor/machine or something, and when the ship is ready to get underway, the hooks drop and the voila! the mooring lines fall inot the water!

So my CLU is on the little teeny bit of the platform that you can see on the right side. This is a tanker pulling in.

This was a night shot but here you can see how high up the ladder has to go to reach the main deck of the tanker when it comes in. I didn't get a picture of it from here right before it left, but if I had, that whole black side of the ship would be WAY lower and you could look from where you were standing on the platform over to the ship and see that deck at eye level- crazy! You can also see many pallets of our favorite bottled H2O!

Here is a tanker "de-ballasting". What does that mean? The tankers fill their tanks up with water to keep their weight lower to make it easy for them to maneuver and stay lower.  When they pull into port, they dump all the water out of their tanks to make room for the oil.

These are the big "fuel hoses" (Just like as the gas stations!) that lift up and connect into the tankers

This isn't the same tanker as the "Eliza" shown in the other pictures, but it does a good job showing the stern of the tankers when they are empty. It's almost hard to believe there is ANY rudder at all in the water!

Here is the same tanker as before, 3 1/2 days later, right before she pulled out that night.

Here's me, hangin' out on ABOT, waiting for our RHIB to arrive to take us to our DDG Sleepover.

Alright well, there's more to say but I think that's all for now. Tomorrow I will write about our fourth round of distinguished visitors. Also, looks like I'll be headed to the Nimitz around the 17th so that gives me a little more time to enjoy Skype and also have some time to blog about why we're going to the Nimitz and what we'll be doing. Til then, miss you all!