Greetings! Welcome to my little blogging project. If you’ve clicked around a bit and read the About section you’ll know more or less why I’m writing this, and if you got that far I sure hope you know why you’re reading it.
With this blog my goal is to streamline the process that is, “Keeping up,” with people. I just got back to Norfolk after taking about 2 weeks of leave, and it dawned on me that I was having the same conversation over and over again. Not that I don’t love all of you, but I just figured that there must be a better way. So this is it!
It’s currently about 3:30am and I’m on duty, and on watch. I like to discribe my life as a series of layers. In port there are the layers of duty, work, and watch. At sea it’s just work and watch.
Duty is where I’m stuck on the boat (yes, it’s a ship, I know) for 24 hours. The crew is split into 6 (usually) duty sections, and they rotate having duty. Today is section 1, tomorrow is section 2, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, we stand duty on the weekends as the rotation dictates. Duty sections (in port) provide the watchstanders that operate the ship, and monitor its condition. We respond to casualties (fire, flooding, medical, and so on), perform colors (raising and lowering the flag, or ensign), and just generally hang out for 24 hours. Duty sections are made up of personnel from each division on the ship. So my duty section chain of command looks something like this: Command Duty Officer > Section Leader > Duty Department Head > Me. It’s not quite that simple, but close enough.
The next layer is watch. Like I said earlier, watchstanders stand watches, which monitor the condition of the ship, and operate the ship. Watches in port consist of things like the quarterdeck (think of the greeter at church), various security rovers, damage control watches, and so on. Watchstanders are drawn from duty section personnel to form a watch rotation. I stand Damage Control Central Watch Supvisor, and I share the watch rotation with 1 other person, so between the two of us we have to stand this watch for our 24 hour duty day. Confused yet? Just wait, there’s more…
Final layer: work. This is the job you think you’re getting when you get recruited. In port we work a pretty normal schedule, usually around 7:30am to 3:30pm. Usually it’s a 5 day a week kind of thing. I spend my time most days doing weld jobs, fixing toilets and sinks, and managing about a dozen other people.
Got all that? Ok, example time. Today I got up at 6:30am (since I live on the boat now, I get the luxury of sleeping in.) I went to Duty Section Turnover at 7am, to assume duty. At 7:30am I went to my shop and started working. (Today we played with toilets.) At 11am I went to lunch, then at 12:30pm I went back to work. At 1:30pm (or 1330) I assumed the watch. I got relieved at 7:30pm (1930). At that point I finished up a couple projects, showered, and went to bed. I got up at 1:15am, to assume the watch again at 1:30am. I’ll be on watch until 7:30am. Cool? Cool.
Well that’s probably enough for now. I’m thinking I’ll probably try to post weekly, but honestly I’ll probably run out of things to say after about a month. Time to get back to my watch…
The Adventures of The Red Hats 