Sailor, Rest Your Oar

I read in the news that EMC(SS/DV) John Conyers was electrocuted while doing maintenance on USS RONALD REAGAN on Friday.

Actually, I first found out about it from seeing fellow submariners joining the RIP Chief Conyers Facebook page. I didn't know Chief Conyers personally, but looking at the number of fans of the page (500 and growing) and the pictures of him with his family, at his promotion to chief petty officer, on USS BREMERTON, and in various port calls on deployment, it looks like he was a respected shipmate and loving husband and father. My thoughts and prayers go out to EMC Conyers' family and shipmates as they cope with such a tragic loss.

Sailor, Rest Your Oar.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I don't know anything about the specifics of what happened on Friday, but it sure gave me flashbacks to one of my worst duty days ever. I was the Engineering Duty Officer (EDO) on USS PROVIDENCE one weekend back around '97. The Ship's Duty Officer (SDO) and I had just sat down to lunch in the wardroom when we heard screaming and a commotion coming from somewhere outside the wardroom.

As I backed my chair away from the table to stand up, one of my electricians came bursting into the wardroom yelling to call an ambulance. I say "my" electricians because I was the Electrical Officer at the time, so it was a guy from my division in addition to being a guy in my duty section.

He had been trying to reinstall a fuse in a fuse panel without tagging out the fuse panel. For non-Navy readers, you are supposed to secure power to a panel and hang a red danger tag on the breaker before you do any work in the panel. In this case, the electrician figured it was okay, he was just going to swing the panel door up and hold it open with one hand while he pushed the fuse into place with a pair of insulated fuse-holders with his other hand.

Well, his first hand slipped and let go of the door to the panel, so the panel door slammed down and pushed his other hand into the live electrical panel. The resulting arc vaporized a quarter-sized hole in the palm of his hand. The good news was that it instantly cauterized the wound, so there was essentially no blood, just a very big and very painful hole through his hand. He was in the Yale Burn Center down in New Haven for a while after that undergoing multiple reconstructive surgeries. When he returned to work it was in medical LIMDU (limited duty) status at one of the shore commands there in Groton. It was a very sad loss for our crew. He was one of our best electricians.

Needless to say, it left a deep mark on my conscience, and I've been pretty anal retentive about electrical safety ever since then.

Reverse logic with illogical people

Okay, so I've wanted to tell this story for a while, but I refrained. Now, I think I've put enough time-distance-and-shielding between me and the event to provide an adequate level of anonymity and protection from retribution.

Wait, how do sea stories start again?

Oh yeah, "So there I was..."

I was on a boat that had a pretty decent command PT program. We used to meet three mornings per week and do warmup stretches and calisthenics in formation. Then most of us would go for a run, but there was a group of guys who preferred to swim and went to the base swimming pool next to the barracks.

One morning, we were surprised to discover the gate to the swimming pool was locked, and there was a sign that said something to the effect of:

Swimming Pool Closed
by order of the Base XO

First, the COB got involved and called the base CMC to find out why the pool was locked down.

Apparently, some knuckleheads decided to have a mixed-gender "naked party" in the swimming pool the night before, so the Base XO declared the pool was to be shut down and NOBODY was allowed to use it.

As usual, such stories are grossly over-inflated and exaggerated. Pulling the string, I think the actual story was more like a few people were at the pool and ONE girl thought it was a good idea to go skinny dipping, and none of the guys around the pool seemed to have any problem with that (go figure). Of course, as the story got retold, it evolved into a "naked party" as if a dozen or more hooligans were hanging out around the pool in the buff and posting signs declaring the area a nudist colony.

The COB wasn't able to get the base leadership to listen to reason or allow access to the pool for PT, so the CO went to bat for us. The CO called the Base XO directly and asked that the pool be reopened for our Command PT purposes in the mornings.

The Base XO didn't see eye-to-eye with our CO and basically said, "Pack sand."

Aside: In Navy speak, "pack sand" is an in-your-face way of saying, "Go fly a kite," or "Take a long walk off a short pier" or "go piss into the wind" or "go play on the freeway." For the origin of the term, see definition 2 at this website.

The Base XO said that our guys who lived in the barracks were just as guilty because they lived next to the pool, so they HAD to have known what was going on at the pool and they CONDONED it and ALLOWED it to happen, so therefore they ALL lost the privilege of using the pool.

My CO was much more witty and able to think up creative responses on his toes than I ever was.

He took the Base XO's logic, flipped it around, and threw it right back at him. He said, "Well, I'm sorry to say that I observed somebody jay-walking on base the other day, and NONE of us - me included - did anything about it, so based on your logic, you're now going to have to outlaw all WALKING on base." (It may not be an exact quote, but that was the jist of it anyway - I was standing there listening when the CO made the phone call.)

The Base XO didn't like that much.

Yyyyyyeah, so the pool remained closed for a loooooooong time after that.

Even so, I think the HIMYM fans in the audience will agree the CO's response was pretty legendary. :-)

Reminiscing of Puerto Rico

Reminiscing about my first sea tour on USS PROVIDENCE (SSN-719).

Facebook is pretty cool for the way it's putting me back in touch with old shipmates. I uploaded a bunch of photos from my second and third boats, and whenever I reconnect with someone on Facebook, then I'll go through my pictures and tag them in the pictures.

Aside for those who aren't familiar with Facebook: You can "tag" photos you upload to Facebook so that as you roll the cursor over people in the picture, it will pop up the name of that person. You can click on their name, and it'll take you to their Facebook profile. Also, on a given person's Facebook profile, you can click on "Photos of [name]" and it'll show you all the photos that person has been tagged in on Facebook.

It's taken me a while, but I finally reconnected with one of my fellow junior officers from my first boat. It occurred to me that I don't have any photos to upload or tag from my first boat because it was before the days of digital cameras. Everything I have from that tour is on film and in photo albums or boxes in the closet.

So today I pulled some of those old photos out and scanned them to build a 719 photo album on Facebook. It sure brought back memories.

Back in late 1997 and early 1998, we were doing our deployment workups with the JOHN C STENNIS carrier battle group (before they started calling them "carrier strike groups"). That was back in the days before they closed the bombing ranges on Vieques Island, so we did a LOT of operations out of Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. I actually had more experience driving the boat in and out of "Rosey Roads" than I did out of our homeport of Groton. I lost count after 12 or so maneuvering watches.

USS PROVIDENCE (SSN 719)
Pierside in Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico
Circa 1997

Rosey Roads was a fairly nice place for a port call - not my absolute favorite, but certainly not at the bottom of the list either. Shore power wasn't all that reliable there, and I had my worst duty day in my entire career during a port call there.

Sea Story Tangent...

It all started with us having to snorkel and dead-stick berth shift (explanation: not start up the engine room, just have tugs pull you away from the pier, move you around and push you into your new berth) to make room for another boat that had to load some exercise weapons. After we finished the dead-stick berth shift and got the brow across, the Captain gave me (the Engineering Duty Officer) permission to bring on shore power and secure snorkeling. Then he, the XO, and the Eng all got in a rental car together and took off for San Juan. It was a liberty port call after all. Oh, and this was before the days of everyone having a cell phone, too, so once they left in that car, I had NO way of contacting them.

Aside: These are the types of horror stories that make junior officers dread their Ship's Duty Officer qualification boards. They always have some sort of question that puts them in the hot seat, forced to make a series of difficult decisions without being able to get in contact with the CO or the XO for guidance or permission.

I've always been a believer that you learn more by DOING than by reading books. You need to let junior guys DO things so they can learn. I had a young sailor working on his quals who needed to shift the electric plant to an aft shore power lineup, so I let him.

The pain and agony of this story is much better told in person with people who are properly cleared and nuclear trained so they understand all the gory details, but to make a long story short, the sailor tried to parallel the ship's power with shore power WAY out of phase and tripped the breakers in the shore power bunker at the foot of the pier.

...Yes, that would be the shore power bunker with the barbed wire fence around it and the big padlock on the gate.

...No, the people at Harbor Ops could NOT find the port electrician with the keys to the bunker.

...Yes, it was DARN hot and humid in Puerto Rico that Saturday.

...No, we don't run the air conditioning when we're snorkeling (running the diesel generator for emergency power) and have no shore power.

...and that was just the beginning of a very BAD day. It went downhill from there. I can't really get into the other engine-room details, but when the Captain, XO, and Eng eventually returned to the ship late that evening, it wasn't pretty. I had never seen the Captain so pissed. He was literally hopping mad and secured my liberty for the rest of the port call (that's called being put "in hack").

End of Tangent.

Anyway, I WISH I could say that was the ONLY port call we had in Rosey Roads that involved NOT having shore power.

The other downside was we almost never got BOQ rooms there. The aviators were always down there doing exercises with us, and they always had priority for the BOQ rooms. We had racks to sleep in on the boat - they didn't have racks in their airplanes, go figure.

In spite of the somewhat unreliable shore power and lack of BOQ rooms, Rosey Roads was an okay liberty port. It was fairly cheap. There was great scuba diving. There were the rain forest tours. There was El Morro Castle. There was the Bacardi factory tour with the free samples. We called trips to Puerto Rico back then "rum runs" because everyone would be allowed to bring back two bottles of rum. We would lock up all the rum in one of the torpedo tubes for the transit from PR back up to Groton.

Tangent about El Morro Castle.

The following year, my wonderful wife and I were married and left for our honeymoon in St. Lucia. Our trip took us first to a several-hour layover in San Juan, Puerto Rico, so I thought it woud be fun to hop in a taxi and go see El Morro.

The taxi driver didn't speak any English and had NO clue what I was talking about. Only, he didn't give me any indication he didn't know what I was talking about, he just smiled and shook his head yes to anything I said. He proceeded to drive down the strip of resort hotels along the beach, stopping at each hotel and pointing as if to ask "is this your hotel?" I kept saying, "No. EL MORRO."

I mean, common dude, it's ON YOUR FRIGGIN' LICENSE PLATE FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD!!!

Note the image of the watch tower on El Morro.

Here's the real thing.

Luckily, I had been to El Morro enough times that I just pointed left and right to tell him which roads to take and got us there.

It's pretty amazing to walk through that old fortress and think about all the history there. Sir Francis Drake attacked the fort in 1595. It's been attacked by the British, the Dutch (in 1625), and the Americans (during the Spanish-American War in 1898). Later, I went to a 007 movie, and I laughed out loud when El Morro appeared as a bad-guy stronghold and was blown to smithereens with computer graphic animation.

Anyway, it's time to bring this post to a close. I have a few more pictures I want to scan and upload later and will probably have a sea story or two more to go with those. Stay tuned...

Rant: MP3 Players

Lesson Learned for those of you junior officers in the training pipeline getting ready to go out on your first boats:

Do NOT buy a Zen MP3 player.

Quick Tangent.

One time on my last boat, I was standing in the Control Room and tried to be funny by quoting something from Johnny Carson. All the guys in control just stared at me blankly and had no clue what I was talking about. Man I felt old.

End of Tangent.

On my first two boats, we had these crazy old things called CD players. For music, guys just brought along their own little books of CDs to listen to in the wardroom or in their stateroom.

So when I flew overseas to meet my third boat on deployment, I took my book of CDs with me.

Man, I felt like a dinosaur.

NOBODY listens to CDs anymore. At least, nobody did on the boat.

EVERYBODY had an iPod.

I didn't want to be a conformist and resisted the urge to get an iPod. After we returned from deployment, I bought a Zen V-plus mp3 player with 8GB of memory to use on subsequent underways.

It worked out great for a little while. I was using Yahoo Music Jukebox, downloading lots of songs I had never picked up on CD. I paid like $150 for an annual membership and then purchased a lot of 79 cent music downloads.

Then we left Norfolk headed for Panama, a port call in San Diego, and our eventual new homeport in Hawaii. I vowed I was going to jog at least 3 miles per day on the treadmill for the duration of the trip from Norfolk to Pearl Harbor (aside: I did it every day EXCEPT for the day we went through the Panama Canal - I was pretty happy with that).

About two weeks into the trip, I was jogging on the treadmill when all of a sudden my tunes stopped playing. I couldn't figure out why it stopped. I picked it up and looked at dark screen. It had shut itself down due to inactivity, so I pushed the power button again and waited for it to go through its boot-up sequence. I pushed play, and it flashed an error message on the screen:

"No license to play. Sync license from PC."

I stood there staring at the screen in confused disbelief. Then the screen went black again when it shut down due to inactivity.

Um... dude... I'm several hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean and several hundreds of miles from shore. How the HECK am I supposed to sync this MP3 player up to verify I have a license to play it??? I'm no expert on intellectual property rights and music licensing, but what the heck did I pay 79 cents for if not for the license to play the stupid song on my MP3 player???

Plus, okay, fine, moving beyond the fact that I can't sync my MP3 player when I'm at sea, why the HECK does the thing just STOP and SHUT DOWN when it encounters this obstacle? Hello?!?! PLAY THE NEXT STUPID SONG ON THE PLAYLIST FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!! Don't just STOP and SHUT DOWN! I'm JOGGING HERE MAN!!!

So I didn't use the playlists I had created for the rest of the trip. I just stuck to playing albums that I knew I owned on CD and had burned to the MP3 player from the CD.

I made a few attempts to complain to Yahoo about it and demanded my money back, but my complaints fell on deaf ears. They never responded to any of my complaints, so I cancelled my membership there.

Fast forward to the present.

Here I am on shore duty.

Plenty of easy access to my computer and to the internet.

Syncing the Zen with the laptop was doing nothing to update the licenses. So I thought I'd start from scratch. I wiped the Zen clean and started reloading from scratch. As it loaded the Zen with the music off my hard drive, it kept popping up a message saying it was not transferring this song and that song due to no license. I said, fine, no problem, get rid of it.

So I went to the gym thinking I was all set with JUST songs that I had licenses for and would stay on my MP3 player. I made NEW playlists with just the songs that I now had loaded on the MP3 player.

It worked for about two weeks.

I was jogging on the treadmill at the PAC Annex and all of a sudden I noticed the music stopped. I picked up the Zen... dark screen. I pushed the power button again and pushed play again.

"No license to play. Sync license from PC."

You've GOT to be kidding me.

I brought it home and synced it with the PC. Tried playing my playlist again.

"No license to play. Sync license from PC."

I'm done.

I wanna take this Zen player out in a field like the guys in Office Space did with the printer / fax machine.

(Photo credit: Twentieth Century Fox)

Now I'm wondering if I should be a lemming and buy an iPod. Like I said, EVERYBODY on the boat had an iPod, and I never heard ANYBODY complain about their licenses expiring or needing to sync their iPod with their computer during months out at sea.

If I'm wrong, please tell me. Do iPods have to call home to verify your membership is up to date and check the license data on your music???

Fish Food

I started to write a post about how awesome it's been to have my old college roommate Ryan in town for a visit this weekend. It had been a LONG time since I'd seen him. All sorts of memories and funny stories came to mind, and what started out as a simple blog post was evolving into an epic novel of sorts.

I decided you didn't need to read ALL of my Ryan stories in one night.

Surprisingly enough, Ryan's wonderful wife Jennifer told me something new this weekend that added a whole new dimension to one of our college adventures.

Ryan and I both loved to sail and were on our NROTC sailing team. Together we took 2nd Place in the Trojan Regatta sailing in a 420 class boat. We used to sail a lot on San Diego bay. By day we'd take water guns and water balloons and have water fights between boats. By night we'd take friends across the bay and tie up at Anthony's for dinner.

For Spring Break of our junior year, we teamed up with two other midshipmen and sailed a 27-foot Lancer to the Coronado Islands. The winds were in our favor and it only took us about 4 hours to sail down there off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.

Chris (front), Bill (at the helm), and Ryan (in the back)
en route to the Coronado Islands

Bill checking out the south island.

We sailed along the southern island and anchored out the first night in the lee of the middle island. The next day we sailed up around the northern island.

We rounded the northern tip of the island and got running downwind. Each of us took turns at the helm while the other three guys took turns jumping and doing flips off the bow and grabbing a line trailing behind the sailboat as it went by.

It. Was. A. BLAST!

I had my scuba mask on and would hang onto the line for a while flying through the water. There were a LOT of sea lions on the northern island, and several of them came out to swim with us.

Okay, fast forward 15 YEARS to our kitchen here in Ashburn where Jennifer proceeds to inform me that we were jumping and splashing and acting like sea lions... in a mating ground for great white sharks.

(Silent pause as information processes in noggin...)

Uhhhhhhh.

Woops?

Keep in mind, that was long before cell phones and mandatory ORM training. I'm not even sure we had a bridge-to-bridge radio. We were a LONG way from getting any sort of medical help out there.

Man, am I glad our XO at the NROTC unit didn't have to write THAT Unit Sitrep!

Aside: A Unit Sitrep is a message we send to tell the Navy top brass when something bad happens. We want the top brass to hear the bad news from us before they hear about it from some reporter sticking a microphone in their face and asking, "Admiral, how do you feel about those midshipmen getting eaten by Jaws? Why haven't you instituted a training program to prevent such accidents from happening?" We don't want the admiral giving the news crew the deer-in-the-headlights stare and not having a clue what they're talking about.

Anyway, it was great to have Ryan, Jennifer, and their adorable daughter here this weekend. They were here for a house-hunting trip and out looking at houses all day, but we shared a lot of good beer, good wine, and good memories in the evenings. The Navy's kept us stationed on opposite sides of the globe for a long time now, so it'll be nice to be in the same neck of the woods for once.

It's nice to be a regular

No, no, no, this has nothing to do with eating my fiber cereal in the mornings.

It's nice to achieve the status of being A "regular" at a local business. It's generally hard to do being in the military and moving around every couple of years (or less).

Heck, I've only been in Hawaii a year now, and at some point in the recent past I have attained "regular" status with my favorite barber. She's Korean and doesn't talk much, so it's not like she would remember me from talking about our families or whatever like you might with some other barbers. It took me about 7 months or so before I found her, and a couple more months for me to have sat in her chair enough times that she remembered me.

I knew I was making the crossover into "regular" status a month or so ago when she commented one day, "Samwon else cut you hayah." Do barbers and hair stylists mark their territory? I mean, do they have some "mark" or signature way they do things so they can tell if they were the last person to cut your hair or not? Anyway, she could tell that the previous haircut I got was at the NEX and not in her chair.

Why do I go see this barber you ask? I'll tell ya. One of the things I really liked about Westpac (being on deployment in the Western Pacific) was port calls in places like Okinawa and Korea. I wanted to go get a haircut everyday. Not because I like my hair that short, but because they give you a scalp, neck, and shoulder massage after they cut your hair. I didn't care so much about the haircut as the massage afterwards. Well, this barber I found does the same Korean scalp and neck massage after she cuts your hair, and it's AWESOME. She does a good job cutting my hair, too.

Aside #1: Disclaimer for any of you salty dogs who have been to Westpac before, NO I am NOT talking about the two-pole barber shops.

Aside #2: I know some young impressionable ensigns and midshipmen read my blog and are dying to know what Aside #1 was about. Here's the gouge for any of you guys getting ready to meet your first boat and go on your first deployment: STAY AWAY from the barber shops with TWO poles (your standard red, white, and blue swirling poles outside that tell you it's a barber shop). Your COB will explain why during your port brief before you pull into port, but just in case you're going to fly overseas and meet your boat in someplace like Chin Hae and you get there before the boat does, just remember to stay away from the two-pole barber shops, capiche? 'nuff said.

So what's my point? Why did I bring this up in the first place?

I'll tell ya what's awesome about having "regular" status. Yesterday, I stopped to get a haircut on my way home from work. I didn't have an appointment, and I was walking into the barber shop right behind another guy. She saw me walking in the door and told the other guy that I had an appointment and ushered me into her chair and made the other guy wait for the next chair. That's AWESOME! (Sorry, dude, whoever you were! I didn't ask her to do that!)

Shipmate

The big cover story on the latest edition of Navy Times is about how the term "shipmate" has evolved into a derogatory term or an insult. There's a discussion board about it on the Navy Times website here.

I have to say I don't agree.

I have heard it used in equally as many positive as negative situations. The difference is really in the tone of voice one uses while saying it. For example, when you've been out at sea for a month, it's been a long day, and your up-coming port call was just canceled, and then your stateroom mate breaks out his secret stash of Diet Coke and Kit Kat and hands one of each to you. A likely response from me would be a huge grin from ear to ear followed by a warm and hearty, "Shipmaaaaaaate!" :-)

The comments on the Navy Times discussion board claimed that the term is always used from a senior to a junior immediately before an ass-chewing. I disagree with that, too. I have frequently heard it and used it amongst my peers. When I think of my second Weps from my Nav tour, the image that comes to my mind is his big smile and I hear his voice saying, "Shipmaaate!" in my head. It's sort of like those really annoying "whazzaaaaaaaap?" commercials - only not annoying. It's actually more like Rob Schneider playing the copy guy on SNL, "Steeeeeve! Steve-O-Rama! Steverunavich! The Stevemeister! Senor Steve!" I can just hear Rob Schneider the copy guy saying, "Shipmaaaaaaaate!"

Now, I will say that I've heard many a COB use the term immediately before offering some form of... not necessarily "ass chewing," but more "constructive criticism" if you will. But I've also heard some COBs use it in a, "Good job, shipmate" connotation.

Heck, within the past year there was some sort of official contest to define the term "Shipmate." (I don't remember if it was just a Pac Fleet thing or if it was a Navy-wide thing.) The winning definition most-definitely had a positive connotation.

So I pose the question to you - my loyal 5 or so readers - what do you think?

Is the fact that "shipmate" is in my vocabulary just a sign that I've always been some sort of lifer-digit-nerd?

Is the fact that I don't consider it derogatory or an insult just a sign that I've become "one of them"? A symptom of my being assimilated by the borg "the system" in my transition to being one of the "upstairs guys"? (Aside: On a 688, all but two of the officers live on the middle level in the vicinity of the wardroom. Only two officers don't live down there - the CO and XO's staterooms are the only two "upstairs" or in the upper level next to the control room.)

I wonder if there is a difference in the way the term is used in the surface navy versus the submarine force?

Ahhhh, sweet Georgia...

I had a double-whammy flashback experience at the NEX on Sunday.

First, teleportation song "Say It Right" by Nelly Furtado came on the overhead speakers, and suddenly my mind flashed back to January 2007 in Rota, Spain, driving that teeny-tiny little rental car back and forth between the BOQ and the boat. It seemed to me they played that song on the radio there about once an hour at least.

Then, as we finished our shopping excursion through the NEX, we were all feeling parched, so we stopped in the package store on our way back out to the car to get something to drink. LW found a new canned ice coffee drink that was labeled as a Caribou Coffee drink. I read the fine print on the label and saw that it was a Coca-Cola product and started getting excited.

You see, back during my three trips to Westpac (Western Pacific), I developed an addiction to Georgia iced coffee. It's made by the Coca-Cola corporation, but only sold overseas. According to wikipedia, it's the highest grossing coffee beverage in Japan.

Every time we had a port call, I would buy at least a case of the stuff and stash it in my stateroom. Before we left Westpac in 2003, I stocked up with as much as I could bring home in my stateroom. It actually lasted me through the transit and about a month or so after we returned home from deployment, then I started going through withdrawal.

Starbucks had the Double Shot things, which taste pretty good, but would have driven me bankrupt in a week if I had continued my Georgia consumption rate. When I bought Georgia by the case, it came out to something like 30 cents per can, whereas the Starbucks Double Shot was absolutely ridiculous at over $2 bucks per can.

I've missed Georgia ever since. That's why I got so excited when we found this new ice coffee beverage in a can that was made by Coca-Cola. I had to try some.

[Cue Sound Effect: Angelic Choir singing Hallelujah!]

It was really good - pretty much exactly like Georgia. My only complaint was with the weird shaped aluminum can with the screw top, there was a weird metallic taste from the bottle neck. It'd probably be better if I poured it out into a cup.

Price wise, it still wasn't as affordable as Georgia, but it was a heckuva lot better than the Starbucks stuff. Hmmm... I wonder if I can buy the stuff at Costco in bulk???

BT BT

Yes, yes, I know... FIVE blog posts in ONE day??? I started off writing a "Weekend Recap" type of blog post like I have done before. Then I decided to break it up into different blog posts by topic. I find it's easier for me when I link back to previous blog posts to have the blog post be a little bit better confined to one topic. Besides, I was so busy with mortgage applications and filling out the HHG shipment application during the week that I didn't blog for several days.

Plunk!

I love seared ahi (rare / raw tuna). If it's on the menu, then chances are, I'm gonna order it at least as an appetizer if not an entree.

If you had asked me before tonight, "Kevin, what's the best ahi you've ever had?" then you would have solicited a sea story from Guam.

Let's see... So how do sea stories start again? Oh yeah, "So there I was..." in Guam for a port visit. Two of my JO's practically kidnapped me and dragged me kicking and screaming off the boat to go snorkeling. Even though I had charts to review, I gave in to their skulduggery and went along.

This photo was taken just before we got in the water.

We went to a little beach just to the north of the power plant on the west side of the island. We were just sort of floating around out there watching the fish about 50 to 100 yards off shore. The water was only about 3 or 4 feet deep. It was clear and warm water with plenty of cool fish to see.

Most of the sounds around us were the soft rush of light waves on a shallow sandy beach. There was another sound out there though. Plunk. I'm not sure how long this one particular sound had been going on before it broke the threshold of my consciousness. Plunk. It wasn't so loud as to draw immediate attention to the sound, but over the course of time, gradually worked its way into the back of my brain. Plunk. I said to myself, "Self, that's an odd noise. I wonder where it's coming from?" Plunk. "Now that I think about it, Self. That sound has actually been going on for a while now." Plunk. It still wasn't very loud or threatening, so I just kept drifting along with my two shipmates. Plunk.

Meanwhile, about five feet away from me in the back of Jake's brain, the noise crossed his "What the Heck?" threshold, and he stood up suddenly to see what was going on. Remember the water was only like 3 feet deep, so his entire torso is now sticking up out of the water. Suddenly, there was a new, intense sound that immediately broke the threshold of all of our brains: It was the scream of a grown man on the beach who had just been scared out of his wits.

AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!

JR and I then also stood up in the water to see what the heck was going on. It took a few seconds for my brain to analyze and decipher the scene before me. There on the beach stood a man. In his hand was a golf club. There was a big bucket of golf balls on the ground next to him, and there was a look of horror on his face at the three men who suddenly stood up in the water where he was hitting his golf balls. He was immediately profusely apologetic and swore up and down and sideways that he hadn't seen us in the water and he really honestly was not trying to hit us with the golf balls. I think his vision might not have been 20/20, but I believed him.

The three of us snorkelers-turned-targets had been out there a while and decided it was time to go in anyway. We got up on the beach and found the guy had his pickup truck backed-up to the beach where he was hitting the golf balls. On the tailgate of his pickup, he had a cooler of cold beer, a ginormous slab of extremely fresh, rare ahi tuna, a knife, and a bowl of shoyu (soy sauce). He genuinely felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for having hit those golf balls toward us, and he insisted that we have some of his beer and tuna.

Now, I will say that eating raw tuna off the back of some stranger's pickup truck in a far away Pacific Island is probably not the smartest thing I've ever done. However (comma), that was absolutely THE BEST tuna I'd EVER had.

...until tonight.

We have some friends visiting from the mainland, and we went to dinner at Duke's down in Waikiki. I was a little apprehensive about going there. I expected a LONG wait for a table and the potential for a typical tourist trap with horrible service. Because our visiting friends are still dealing with the jet lag and the six-hour time difference between here and the east coast, we went to dinner early at 4:30 and got a table within 20 minutes. At first, it seemed my apprehensions were confirmed by the rude bar waitress who came to take our drink orders. I'm happy to report it all changed from then on. Our server, Dave, was awesome. The prices were pretty reasonable (I'm still recovering from the restaurant sticker-shock in Maui I guess). The food was really good. They have a huge salad bar with a very nice selection of fresh veggies and tropical fruits, plus a few different choices of rolls and muffins.

I've had seared ahi at many restaurants all around the world, and the seven-spice seared ahi I had for dinner tonight at Duke's was just to die for. [Cue sound effect: Angelic choir singing the hallelujah chorus.] THE BEST I've ever had.

BT BT (Shifting topics)

Follow-Up WRT aiming at things in the water and in response to Amy's comment on my "pee and poop" post, maybe blinders aren't necessary after all. Maybe we should try some of these.

Things we missed on vacation...

Things we missed while we were on vacation... (in no particular order of importance).

- KLOVE. Riding in the car yesterday, it was so refreshing to have KLOVE on the radio again. One of the first songs I heard in the car on the way to go scuba diving was Mercy Me "Here with Me." KLOVE was on a roll yesterday and just kept playing one song after another that made me want to turn the volume up on my radio.

- Spicy toothpaste. Normally, at home, YB uses a training toothpaste and ES uses regular toothpaste. While we were on vacation, we just used ES's tube of regular toothpaste. YB called it the "spicy toothpaste" and took a big slurp of water after each brush past his teeth. Wednesday night getting the boys ready for bed, YB was SO excited to have HIS toothpaste back and not use the "spicy toothpaste" anymore.

- Traffic on H-1 and Kam Highway. Oh wait... no, I didn't miss that. In fact, I totally forgot about it and didn't take it into consideration at all when buying our plane tickets home. In other words, I didn't think about the fact that if our plane landed at 4:30, then it was going to take us like an hour to drive home in the rush hour traffic.

- The Neighborhood Kids. Man... when we drove down our street, it was like a ghost town. I half expected to see a tumble-weed go barreling across our driveway as we pulled up to our house. Human reflexes could not push the buttons on a stopwatch fast enough to measure the time in between me putting the car in park and the doors flying open and the boys' feet hitting the ground. They ran across the street and started ringing the doorbells. It was as if there had been some sort of large-scale game of hide-n-go-seek, and they just announced "olly-olly-oxen-free" on a bull-horn. The kids came out of the woodwork. Within moments our front yards were total chaos with screaming playing children running in and out of our house and the house across the street.

Aside: I've reached a new phase in life. I have un-learned the conditioned response of going to the door when the doorbell rings. I was telling LW the other day that I think it would be interesting to hook up a monitoring device that would measure how often and how many times per day our doorbell rings. I doubt it's anything less than a dozen times a day, and it's never for me or LW. LW chastises me for not even getting out of my chair when the doorbell rings. I just figure why bother? We live in Navy housing with a gate guard controlling access (well... as long as you smile and wave and look like you belong , you're good to go, right?). On those rare occasions it's not for the boys, then they tell us. Then I'll get off my butt and go to the door.

Anyway, returning to my original line of thought...

- DVR. If we ever go on a trip longer than a few days, we definitely need to bring DVD's of the boys' favorite shows off the DVR. They're so used to just picking up the remote control and turning on their favorite shows whenever they want. Every time we walked into our hotel room on vacation, they would turn the TV on and say, "I want to watch ________" and we would have to explain to them that ________ wasn't ON at that particular day and time. They just didn't get that. "Why noooooot? Just use the remote!"

- Now LW and I are catching up on our favorite shows that recorded while we were gone. LW was just watching Dancing with the Stars and I had a total flashback...

Teleportation Song: Kylie Minogue "Can't Get You Out of My Head." Suddenly, I'm back on deployment in Westpac, in a dance club in Brisbane, Australia. Most of the wardroom and chiefs' quarters are there and wearing our summer whites because we were invited out to this welcome to Australia social function. Some gorgeous blond Australian girl got the Eng and I to make fools of ourselves dancing up on one of those raised platforms in the middle of the dance floor. (We were just a novelty to draw attention to her - her boyfriend stayed close by watching us like hawks). I think the rest of the town heard all the U.S. Navy guys were going to THIS dance club and decided to join us. It was PACKED. I don't think any of us could have bought a drink that night. It was like we were celebrities!

- Crocs. Another one bites the dust... We were in one of the souvenir shops in Maui and saw these cute little decorative pins that are designed to poke into the holes of Crocs. The boys thought they were really cool and wanted to get some. Keep in mind at this point only YB had Crocs. So after we got back home, LW now had to take ES to get his very own pair of Crocs so that he could attach his new decorative pins to them. Take a wild guess what color Crocs ES picked out. Those of you who know him know that his favorite colors are yellow and orange.

Here he is in his new outfit (he wasn't cooperating with my requests for him to get dressed until I asked if he wanted to wear his new shirt from Maui).

ES in his new Maui T-shirt and Crocs.

This is the gecko pin ES chose for his Crocs.
(He picked out a yellow gecko of course...)

p.s. I went back and added a few photos to my last post from one of the other guys that went scuba diving with us yesterday.

Carne Asada Burritos

Our neighbor across the street gave us some intel on a taco shop down Kam Highway that she said was really good. Since she's a fellow San Diego native, I took that as a high-compliment for a taco shop and went to check it out for lunch.

I walked in the door to Diego's Taco Shop, and...
[Cue sound effect: Angels singing Hallelujah Chorus.]

I felt like I had been instantly teleported thousands of miles across the ocean to San Diego.

Anyone who has lived in Southern California and developed and appreciation for the hole-in-the-wall taco shops you find on every street corner. Around San Diego, they come in every variety of _____-berto's. There's Roberto's, Adalberto's, Umberto's, Yourberto's, Myberto's, Wouldn'tchyaliketobeaberto's-too... It's hard to tell one from another.

Without even tasting the food, I felt right at home in Diego's, because the decor precisely matched the standard San Diego taco shop. The strip-mall store-front... The painted cinder-block walls... The pressed-wood, formica veneer, curved bench seating... The white plastic menu board with the individual black plastic letters pushed into the slots... The little clear-plastic cups with lids that contained the toxic-waste-sludge-style hot sauce in both the green and the red varieties... Things like "carne asada" and "horchata" on the menu... One person at a simple cash register taking orders and writing them on a slip of paper at the counter, then handing them through the window to the short-order cook at the grill in the back... Your order handed to you in a brown paper bag with your food and some paper napkins inside.

I had a carne asada burrito, and [cue sound effect again: Angels singing Hallelujah chorus] it... was... awesome! Their version is slightly different than in San Diego, but I just asked them to hold the sour cream and add the guacamole and it was perfect.

Flashback to when I first left San Diego and moved to the east coast, I went through some serious withdrawal symptoms (even more so than for the Henry Weinhard's). I seriously craved carne asada burritos and could find none. One of my parental units forwarded me a newspaper article a long time ago that said some types of chilis used in cooking Mexican food really ARE addicting, so it was understandable that I was having such cravings.

My mom gave me a real treat just before I left on my first deployment. She packed up a Roberto's carne asada burrito in a box with some dry ice and shipped it to me overnight.

As a department head on a boat out of San Diego, we had a standing order from the Captain: If anybody went off base for lunch to Santana's or Adalberto's (the two closest taco shops on Rosecrans) , they weren't allowed to return to the ship unless they brought the Captain a carne asada burrito. While we were on deployment, if you looked at our JMCIS / GCCS-M screen (geographic display of where you are in the world), we always had a waypoint saved for Santana's that kept us up to date on how many miles we were from home. During our transit home from deployment, we had a posted countdown of miles-to-go to carne asada burritos.

Anyway, done with the flashback and returning to the present.

For anyone else from socal living in or just visiting Oahu, if you want your carne asada burrito fix, go to Diego's!


Update 8/21/2008: While I do love carne asada burritos, at some point I decided to branch out and try something new. The rolled tacos at Diego's are also really good, and my new favorite is the carnitas burrito with guacamole.

Dining In: A Lesson in Uniforms

This one almost qualifies for the Stupid Kevin Tricks files.

We had our submarine squadron Dining-In on Saturday night.


I clearly failed my JOs and did not provide adequate guidance to them to prepare them for this event. Shame on me. I forget that over the years, I've learned a few things the hard way about preparing for formal functions like this, and I could have saved my guys some heartache if I had shared some of those experiences beforehand.

So for anyone else headed to any formal functions in the near future (like, say, the Submarine Birthday Ball in one month), allow me to offer a few words of advice. Actually, here's a little thought-provoking quiz to help you start thinking ahead:

You are going to a formal function that requires a uniform you have not worn in a long time, not to mention the fact that you have had a PCS move since the last time you wore it. You should:

a) Wait until 1 hour before the event begins, then discover that your pants and/or jacket don't fit, and you're missing your shirt studs and suspenders.

b) Wait until 1 day before, then try them on to find out they don't fit. Hurry to the uniform shop and beg, plead, and pay the tailor "rush" fees to have your new pants hemmed.

c) Try them on at least a week before the event so you have time to buy a pair that fit and have them hemmed without any groveling or "rush" fees (because those darn dress uniforms are expensive enough as it is).

Oh yeah, new thought just came to my mind from reading the first couple of comments from Sam and C: If you are stationed someplace like, oh... say... around Dulles in Northern Virginia, then that "quick dash" to the uniform shop may involve a 45 minute drive (or much worse in traffic) to either Bethesda Naval Hospital or to the Washington Navy Yard to pick up your missing items. If you live someplace with NO Navy bases nearby like, oh... say... A2, Michigan, DRIVING to a uniform shop might not even be an option for you - so add on a couple of weeks for shipping from the NEX website.

One of my JO's got fined at the Dining-In for trying to "hydro" his uniform (he looked like a stuffed sausage). One of the master chiefs commented he was afraid one of the JO's buttons was going to pop off with enough velocity to kill somebody.

In my case, I said to myself, "Self, I just wore my dinner dress uniform to the Submarine Birthday Ball in Norfolk, so I'll be fiiiiiine." Okay, kids, I want you to go back and circle the key words in that sentence that should have caused alarm bells to go off in the back of my head.

1) Key words that should cause alarm: "Just" and "Submarine Birthday Ball." Um... the Submarine Birthday Ball (in APRIL) was ALMOST a YEAR ago. Try the stupid pants on!!!

2) Key word that should cause alarm: "NORFOLK." Hello, you're in Pearl Harbor now. There was this little thing called a PCS MOVE in between then and now. Things tend to get LOST while moving HALF WAY AROUND THE GLOBE. Inventory your pieces and parts so you don't have to make a mad dash to the uniform shop!!!

There are many benefits to living in Navy housing. Not the least of which is I didn't have to make a mad dash to the uniform shop. LW kindly made a mad dash across the street to our neighbor's house and asked if I could borrow his shirt studs and suspenders, and he hooked me up. :-)

I have to give a shout-out to my LW here, because she was WONDERFUL in helping me get ready last night. In addition to straightening my bow tie and cumshawing missing uniform parts for me, she also reminded me that I had TWO pairs of dress uniform pants in the closet - the pair I got as a JO (that were cutting off my circulation) and the pair I got more recently that fit rather comfortably.

One more tidbit of advice:

My first port call in Chin Hae, Korea was downright painful. Every time we have a port call there, you go out to "dinner" with your sponsor Korean submarine's wardroom. The first time I did this, I thought "dinner" meant food would be involved, so I didn't eat before we went. Then I suffered the consequences the morning after that drink-fest. Someone then explained to me that before a night of heavy drinking like that, you should eat the greasiest burger or pizza you can get your hands on, or take some pepto-bismol. The reasoning was that the grease or pepto-bismol will coat your stomach lining and reduce the rate of alcohol absorption into your blood stream. I have no idea if there is any scientific fact behind that explanation, or if it's just an "old wives tale," but I tell you what. The next time we pulled into Korea, I used that trick, and it worked. I was much better able to hold my liquor and we drank the Koreans under the table.

Life in Decom

Decom is a sad time for a warship.

Standing at the door to AMR (Auxiliary Machinery Room) I can look all the way aft and see the forward bulkhead of the Reactor Compartment. I'd say that's about 30 feet of open space. All the atmosphere control equipment like the CO2 scrubbers, the oxygen generator, and the CO-H2 burners have been removed.

Forward crew's berthing looks like a cavern with all the racks removed. There's enough space in there to set up a pool table and a foosball table.

I spend most of my time nowadays in the Engine Room, but when I walk through the forward end of the boat, it brings back a flood of memories from when this great warship was at sea on the pointy-end of the spear, thousands of miles from any friendly bases for support.

The ship's once soft, cool, homogenous fluorescent lighting is secured, and light is now provided by these harsh, hot, bare incandescent bulbs dangling every several feet from a shipyard temporary services cable.

As I sit down at what used to be my seat at the wardroom table, my mind doesn't see the bare walls dimly illuminated by the shipyard temporary lighting. My mind sees the rack that used to be there with all our personalized coffee cups. My mind sees the walls that used to be decorated with framed photos from wardroom outings we had in various ports. My mind sees the smiling faces of the other officers sitting around the table at lunch or dinner, laughing and sharing sea stories about past adventures or predictions about future adventures to come. I can see Admiral Donnelly kicking back on the bench when he paid us a surprise visit during our port call in Kings Bay. I see the cribbage board out on the table. I see the bright smiling faces of midshipmen eager to learn about what a career in the silent service has to offer. I see the Weps coming in and putting his can of wasabi nuts out on the table for us to share while we burned a flick. I see the blue and white checkered plastic table cloth the cooks always put down for breakfast (easier to clean up syrup spills).

As I walk up the middle level passageway, I see the firehoses and remember the dozens of times I got to don my SCBA and go fight imaginary fires. I also remember how close I was to winning the MSP Derby before the sonar chief's car ran my car off the track. (I was robbed!)

The control room isn't as cavernously empty as the berthing or the AMR, but still... the Dive, Helmsman, Planesman, and Chief of the Watch chairs are all gone. The periscopes are gone. The sonar and fire control screens are black. I remember many-a-midwatch at PD or on the surface when those screens were the source of light in the control room. [Other memories from the control room censored - I could tell ya, but then I'd have to kill ya].

It's quite a paradox being on a submarine. The best part about being a submariner is being at sea doing the cool tactical steely-eyed killer of the deep stuff that submariners do. Unfortunately, that comes with a sacrifice of time away from your family. So while I miss our time as an operational warship at sea, I am trying to focus on the positive aspect of enjoying the time with my family while we're in the shipyard.

Sailor Mail Sea Stories

My previous post about colors brought to mind a couple of quick sea stories.

Sea Story #1: Lilac.

During my previous sea tour, the Eng's wife and my wife were known for going nuts with their paint brushes around our houses. Every time we'd go out to sea for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, the Eng and I would come home to find our LWs had painted one or more rooms of our house a different color than it was when we left. [Aside: In our case, this was the first house we had owned, so LW was really excited about getting to paint the walls instead of living with the plain white walls in previous rentals and military housing.]

One day, we went to PD (periscope depth) to clear the broadcast and download our email traffic. Eng was sitting in his stateroom and I was sitting next door in my stateroom. As the email started to flow into the LAN, I suddenly heard a panicked yell from the Eng's stateroom, "WHAT COLOR IS LILAC?!?!?"

Eng had received an email from his wife informing him she had painted their master bedroom "lilac." We took a poll around the wardroom table at dinner that night, and nobody had any clue what color "lilac" was.

Sea Story #2: Our New House.

Before I tell this story, I have to explain the Sailor Mail system for any of you that aren't submariners and haven't used the system before. Sailor Mail is a system that enables us to send and receive unclassified internet email via our classified LAN on the submarine and our routine satellite communications circuits back to the shore. The limitations are:

1) It's slow. There can be a time lag of a couple of days between it going through filters that search for bad news or classified information, and then it depends on how often and how long the submarine is going to PD to download the email traffic.
2) You can't send file attachments or forwards. The Sailor Mail system automatically strips any inbound emails of any attachments or text marked with the carrot symbols to say it's forwarded text.
3) Lastly, we have no ability to browse the internet or use any internet links that someone emails to us.

Okay, so, rewind to the end of my last sea tour. I was going to spend the last three months of my tour out at sea before transferring to DC, so we decided to sell our house while it was a strong seller's market and send LW and the boys off to DC to find us a place to live.

Aside: Back then in San Diego, houses went on the market and got multiple offers within the first week. We put our house on the market and got two offers in the first week. We were in the process of counter-offers on those two when a third buyer came into the fray. Their realtor told them that we were already in counter offers with two other buyers, so if they wanted the house, they better bid fast and bid BIG. So the third prospective buyers rounded UP from our asking price, and we said $OLD! Now, our neighbors back there tell us our former house is on the market again, but listed for over $100k less than what we sold it for. Cha-ching! We made out like bandits when we sold that house, but it turned out to be a good thing. We took a loss on selling our house in VA, but we're still in the black from selling our San Diego house.

Anyway, getting back to the story. LW and the boys are off in the DC area house hunting, and I'm out at sea. We go to PD and get a download of email. I get this email from LW that's addressed to a bunch of our family and friends, and says, "Check out this house that I just put an offer on!" with a link to the Realtor.com MLS listing. Um... Sweetie... I can't use the link... How about telling me something about the house? That was all I got that PD trip. So I strolled into lunch in the wardroom and had a conversation something like this:

Me: "[LW] put an offer on a house!"
Wardroom: "Oh yeah? Where is it?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How big is it?"
Me: "I don't know.
Wardroom: "How many bedrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How many bathrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."

Before I continue the story, let me just stop and ask the question: If you wanted to know what a house was like, what information would you want? In systems engineering terms, what are your evaluation criteria? I think the discussion with the wardroom above reveals what a man would want to know - location, square footage, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, asking price... These are simple terms that enable you to compare from one house to another house.

I figured it was just a case where she sent out the link to everyone for the MLS listing and that email made it through on the last Sailor Mail download, and there was probably another email still waiting in the buffer that was addressed specifically to ME with details about the house.

Fast forward to our next PD trip. I open up my computer and I'm VERY excited to see another email from LW. LW wrote to me that she really loves this house and that it just "felt right" to her, and she really liked that it had a jacuzzi tub in the master bedroom, a partially finished basement, and a swing set in the back yard for the boys. Okay, okay, this is good, right? So I walk into the wardroom for lunch and have a conversation that went something like this:

Me: "I got another email from [LW] about the house she put an offer on!"
Wardroom: "Oh yeah? Where is it?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How big is it?"
Me: "I don't know.
Wardroom: "How many bedrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "How many bathrooms does it have?"
Me: "I don't know."
Wardroom: "What DO you know?"
Me: "It's got a jacuzzi tub in the master bathroom, a partially finished basement, and a swing set in the back yard for the boys."

Ahhh, the challenges of time-delayed communications with your spouse. :-) Luckily, we pulled into port soon after that, and I was able to get on my webmail and see all the pictures LW took of our house and read the MLS listing.

Palm versus Blackberry

You don't have to know me for long to find out what a gadget-fiend I am. I always have to wear pants with lots of pockets to accomodate the gadgets, especially when I go out geocaching - the wallet, the palm pilot, the cell phone, the GPS receiver, the camera...

I've been through four generations of Palm Pilots now. I can still remember the first time I saw the original Palm Pilot in a magazine ad and then the first time I saw one in a store at the Crystal Mall in New London, CT. I needed to hold a cup under my chin for the drool.

That original Palm Pilot Professional carried me through my JO tour out of Groton and our time in Monterey. Then, when I went to SOAC, that was back in the days when they ISSUED all of us SOAC students a Palm Vx. I used that for most of my department head tour.

During my pre-deployment shopping spree to get everything-I-never- knew-I-needed-but-you-never-know-what-you-might-need-thousands- of-miles-from-nowhere, I decided I really wanted a Palm Pilot with a COLOR screen and some more memory. I went browsing through Best Buy, and they had JUST received and put up the display for the NEW Palm Zire 71. It had a color screen, an SD memory card slot, it could play audio music files, and it had a built in camera! SWEET! I bought it, and we headed off for WESTPAC.

WARNING: Tangent Ahead - one quick sea story to tell...

Two weeks into deployment, we had our first port call in Chin Hae, Korea. I had that awesome Palm Zire in my back pocket. (Note, for those of you non-literary types, that is called foreshadowing). It had been raining topside. I don't remember why I was topside, but I came down the ladder (this one was an actual straight-up-and-down ladder) through the Weapons Shipping Hatch (the one forward of the sail that puts you into the Command Passageway between the CO and XO's staterooms), and turned to go down the "ladder" (a steep set of stairs) from the Command Passageway to the Forward Compartment Middle Level (FCML) passageway. As I started to put my foot out to take the first step, BOTH of my feet went FLYING out in front of me. I felt like Wile E. Coyote in that moment between running off the edge of a cliff and plunging to his demise. Why is it time seems to slow down in those terrible instances? During those long moments that seemed like hours as I tumbled down the steps of the ladder into FCML, I had a conversation with myself that went something like, "Self, is this the end? I wonder if you'll break your neck and this'll be "the end." Or, if not, I wonder which bones will be broken and which hospital they will take you to? That medical clinic on the American section of the base looked pretty darn small, and your injuries are bound to be more than they can handle... I wonder what South Korean hospitals are like. I hope they're not like the karaoke bars..." and then I landed - OOF! MUCH to my surprise, it WASN'T my demise and I DIDN'T even break any bones. I was battered and bruised and really sore for a while, but the only irreparable damage was that darn Palm Pilot that was in my back pocket. It shattered the screen, KAPUT!

While thankful for my health and lack of serious injuries, I was devastated without my Palm Pilot. I quickly went to the internet cafe and wrote LW to ask her to get me a replacement Palm Pilot as fast as humanly possible. I forget the exact logistics of it, but LW and my stepmom teamed up to get me a replacement in the mail that same week.

We had subsequent port calls in Chin Hae, Okinawa, Guam, Yokosuka, Guam, Brisbane, Guam, Saipan, Guam... mmmm... I think we might have gone to Guam once or twice in the middle there, too. Each port call, I got mail and care packages from my family, and almost always about one week after they had been mailed, but no sign of the package with the replacement Palm Pilot. After about two or three months, I gave up hope and assumed some postal worker in Guam had himself a new palm pilot.

Two weeks before we returned home from deployment, we had our final port call in... can you guess? GUAM! After running some errands around the island, I came back to the boat and found a package waiting on my rack. It was my replacement Palm Pilot!!! It only took 5 MONTHS and missed all but the transit over and the transit back, but it made it.

Picture taken with my NEW replacement
Palm Pilot on the day we returned from
deployment in 2003.

Anyway, whether it was my original Palm Pilot, my Palm Vx, or my Palm Zire, I always had my Palm Pilot. If my CO wanted to know what the tides and currents would be in the channel if we delayed our underway by 4 or 6 hours, I would whip out my Palm and with a few taps tell him the answer. I used my Planetarium program to predict when we would spot the Southern Cross on our way south to Australia, and by golly I found it with the periscope that night on the midwatch. When it came time for me to transfer, my CO wanted me to include the Palm Pilot as part of the turnover process. How could my relief POSSIBLY function without the Nav's Palm Pilot???

During my last tour in DC, I discovered geocaching, and I started doing a juggling act with all my electronic gadgets. I had to carry the GPS receiver to find the geocache. I had to carry the cell phone in case of emergency. I had to carry the palm pilot for the geocache description and hints. If I wanted good pictures, I had to carry the camera, too (the Zire camera was only 0.3 megapixels). So I decided to upgrade to my fourth Palm: a Palm Treo 700p.


The Palm Treo 700p wrapped my cell phone, palm pilot, and a 1.3 megapixel camera into ONE device, and it enabled me to check my email or search the internet on the fly. I chose the 700p (Palm O/S) over the 700w (Windows Mobile) because I was so familiar with the Palm O/S, and the Windows Mobile version came with a lower-resolution screen.

So you're saying to yourself, "Self, why doesn't he get to the POINT already?"

My point in telling you all this is that I want to set the stage by explaining my long history with Palm Pilots. I have been very pleased with them overall.

Having said that, I have not been very happy with the Palm Treo. It's slow. It frequently locks-up. The BlueTooth didn't work. The email was difficult to set up and frustrating to use. The thing that really drove me nuts was whenever it lost the Verizon signal and regained the signal, then it had to stop everything and do this lengthy process of logging back onto the Verizon network, and it wouldn't let me do ANYTHING ELSE while it was doing that. So I couldn't use the Palm side of the device as a Palm Pilot and write appointments on my calendar and I couldn't use the camera side of the device to take a picture of a fleeting moment if it was in the process of logging back onto the network. Whenever I tried to make an urgent or just a QUICK phone call, I NEVER could. Inevitably, the phone would lock up then. I was convinced that if I was ever in a car accident or needed to make a life-and-death emergency phone call, the Treo would lock up and I'd have to remove the battery, put the battery back in, wait for it to start up, wait for it to log onto the network, and finally dial 911 ten minutes later.

My first Treo died on me and I had to get a replacement from Verizon under warranty, and I have had the same problems with the second Treo.
It's like in the process of cramming three gadgets into one, they gave up a lot of the functionality and robustness of those individual components, so all three suffer.

Enter the BlackBerry.

Well, I continued using the Palm Treo anyway, until we entered the shipyard and I couldn't take it to work with me because it has a camera in it and cameras aren't allowed in the shipyard.

Aside: One of the paradoxes of the submarine force is that everyone on the submarine has a siprnet computer right at their desk (secure classified military internet). The detailers at Navy Personnel Command (NPC) in Millington, Tennessee, don't have access to siprnet. The detailers have to use the regular unclassified internet (a.k.a. "niprnet"). On the boats, we have limited access to internet email. We can send and receive emails, but no forwards and no file attachments. The "Sailor Mail" we use for unclas email is sort of like a webmail program on the siprnet. It takes a few days for the emails to go through, and sometimes they get lost in the cyberspace shuffle and never show up. It's neither reliable nor fast to communicate via Sailor Mail.

Between the need for email access (without a built-in camera) and the desire for a local Hawaii cell phone number, I picked up a BlackBerry 8830.


Being such a long-time user of Palm Pilots, it took me a while to get used to the user interface and nuances of how the BlackBerry works. Setting up the email was not-at-all intuitive nor explained adequately in any of the documentation that came with it.

However, I have quickly grown to REALLY like this BlackBerry A LOT. It has MUCH better functionality and ease of use than the Palm Treo had. The device is about the same size, but they keys feel bigger and it's easier for me to type messages using the keypad on the BlackBerry. It hasn't locked up on me at all yet. Once I got the email set up, it has worked like a champ and is much easier to use than the Treo. The BlueTooth works GREAT in my car. It doesn't prevent me from using the date-book or the task list when it's lost or regaining the network. There are a lot of little things that just make me say to myself, "Self, why didn't the Treo designers think of that? (or just copy it?)"

I was worried that going from the Palm Treo with the touch screen to the BlackBerry with NO touch screen that I would lose functionality and it would be difficult to move from one display to the next without being able to just point-and-tap. The little roller-ball in the middle of the BlackBerry keyboard is AWESOME. It's VERY easy to switch from one application to another, to make new entries, or to switch between the day, week, or month view. I'm curious to see how long the little roller-ball thing will last before it needs to be replaced, but for now, I REALLY like it. How did I ever survive without a BlackBerry before this??? Why did I put up with that darn pain in the butt Treo for so long???

In summary: TWO BIG THUMBS UP FOR BLACK BERRY!

I miss winter.

Will wonders never cease? It actually looks like we're going to make it into drydock "on schedule" on Tuesday (4 December). I say "on schedule" because it has been postponed a few times. We were originally supposed to go into drydock on 27 September. The first problem was that the submarine already in the drydock was behind schedule and didn't get out of the drydock until a couple of weeks ago. Then the shipyard had to do repairs to the caisson, but they couldn't do it until Congress approved the budget. I was not holding my breath that this would go down on schedule. Luckily, the SY commander found another source of funds to pay for the caisson repairs without waiting for congress to approve the budget.

I hope by writing this, I'm not jinxing us or counting our chicks before they're hatched. Every time I have gone into drydock on each of my previous boats, I have always ended up saying to myself, "Self, you'd think this is the FIRST time a 688-Class submarine has EVER gone into drydock before." It just boggles my mind how many things come up last minute that you would THINK someone would realize, hey, they're going into the drydock in 3 (or 2, or 1) day(s), maybe we should _____________. There's always something. (Aside: That brings to mind stories from the last week in port before deployment, but I'll save that for another blog post).

We did have a Hawaiian priest come down with the CO and Project Sup and say a blessing on the bow of the submarine though. I was glad he said the prayer both in Hawaiian and in English so we could tell what he was saying. I thought that was cool though. It was something new I hadn't seen on previous drydocking availabilities.

So I was cleaning my stuff out of my stateroom on the boat, and came upon all my cold weather gear in the hang-up locker. I love my cold weather gear. You see, growing up in San Diego, I was accustomed to a summer-time-year-round climate. When I joined the Navy, I knew I would be moving around every couple of years, and I wanted to experience life in other parts of the country (and the world). So I volunteered for a boat out of Groton for my JO tour, and the detailer was only oh-so-happy to oblige me (nobody asks for "Rotten Groton"). I loved living in the historic district of Mystic, CT and the changing seasons in New England.

Reminiscing of winter as I cleaned out my hang-up locker on the boat.

When I reported aboard my first boat, all the other officers told me I had to go to the mall and buy a headsok. I did, and I love it. I've used it ever since. When we moved to the DC suburbs for my last shore duty, I upgraded and got a new headsok with the Polartec. By the end of my JO tour, I had the headsok, the UVEX goggles, the polar snow boots (I got them on sale at EMS in the spring! I love EMS!). I even found a pristine pumpkin suit for sale on eBay for 20 bucks.

Me and ES hiking in Northern Virginia, January 2006.

I was very proud of ES that day. We hiked 4 1/2 miles and it was 17 degrees out!

That brought to mind a sea story... Wait, how do sea stories start again? "Once upon a time..." No, that's not it. Oh, I got it. "So there I was..."

Being on a boat out of San Diego, I rarely had the occasion to use my cold weather gear, but I always kept it in my hang-up locker just in case. There were a couple of times when I was really glad I had it, like the time we had to surface near the Aleutian Islands during a transit to Westpac and I was tasked to man the bridge. (The great circle route from San Diego to Yokosuka takes you way up along the Aleutian Island chain).

We pulled into Esquimalt, British Columbia for a port call (it's the Canadian Naval Base right next to Victoria). On our way inbound, it was miserable, cold, and rainy up on the bridge, and I was very glad I was warm and cozy in the Control Room for the maneuvering watch. When the Captain came down from the bridge all cold, rosy-cheeked, and wet, I made the mistake of laughing and commenting on how nice it was in the Control Room. The Captain said, "Congratulations, you just volunteered to be OOD when we drive outta here."

Fast forward to the end of the port call and the morning of the underway. All the JOs (whose only experience had been on this boat out of San Diego) were laughing at me as I "suited-up" for the maneuvering watch. I went to the bridge fully decked-out in my cold weather gear. It was cold and drizzling wet as we got underway, but it... was... AWESOME! I had a BLAST! I love driving the ship. Even better, I love the winter and being suited-up against the cold. I was nice and cozy warm and comfortable. The other guys on the bridge had very lightweight gloves and jackets on and were freezing their butts off and complaining their hands and faces were numb.

I had to laugh a short while later when we were getting ready to go up the Behm Canal into Ketchikan, Alaska, and the guys who were going to man the bridge came and asked me if they could borrow my cold weather gear.

Quick aside: Don't get me wrong when I talk about how cold it was during our port call there. Esquimalt was one of my favorite port calls in my Navy career. LW and ES flew up to Oregon and then drove up to Victoria with my wonderful step-mother. We had a great visit. I could write a whole 'nother blog post about that, but I've kept you staring at your computer screen long enough. I'll save it for another post.