December 29 - Questions

1. What does a typical day entail? (Wake-up, breakfast, work, shift rotation such as 12-5, etc., watch, leisure time, sleep).

Reveille is at 0600, muster at 0700 and I work until 1800-1900 depending on the day. There's roughly about 8 hours of watch a day broken up into 4 hour segments so usually at least one of the segments is during working hours. Leisure time is when I can make it.

2. Describe all the stations that you have on watch in more detail. How often do you drive, how many and who are on the bridge? What do you look for on watch? How do you stay awake?

I can't do this TOO much due to OPSEC. There are few lookouts, messenger of the watch (aka coffee boy), helm, lee helm (throttle) and aft steering (sit in engineering as backup in case they lose steering at the bridge (you’re basically the backup of the backup of the backup). I drive maybe once every other day. There's a few on the bridge, helm and lee helm, the Quartermasters (QM), the Conning officer and Officer of the Deck (Con and OOD, respectively). There's an operations specialist (OS) looking at the Nav radar and with whom the lookouts check into. And behind is a room where there is a bunch of OS’s looking at our many sensor systems. Captain is always up there during flight ops and the ship’s navigator usually is.

3. Have you met the Captain or CMC from being on-watch?

The Captain is up there a lot, CMC never.

4. Food: When are meals served? How do you eat when you have watch at night? Is the food any good?

The meals are at the normal times plus mid-rations (midrats) s at midnight to 0200. Food stinks some times, is better during others.

5. Can you hear the planes taking off and landing below decks? Do you hear them in your quarters?

Yes, you can hear them launching in our berthing 7 decks down (we're at the bow). You can hear them landing back aft.

6. Do you get any time to workout?

When I make time, yes. The watch rotation makes it so there is about every other day I can squeeze in an hour.

7. What are the best things to send to you? What can't you buy at Ship's store (if you had money)? What can we NOT send you? Can we send zip drives back and forth with pictures, music or e-books?

Food is good. There are a lot of uniform items, like coveralls, that I need but you wouldn't be able to get them. You can send zip drives. I cannot use them on the government computers but on mine it’s ok. I can then unload them then load them back up with pictures.

8. Who are you hanging with? Where are they from?

There's a group of guys who all dropped from special programs. It's a long list, I'll describe everyone a little later.

9. How did you celebrate Xmas? What did you eat? Didn't they give out stockings?

I slept. They had a nice turkey meal that was better than normal. We all got stockings filled with random stuff that the USO put together.