Quiet Day
Finally we have been able to take it easy and relax a bit today. We still had some work to do, of course, but it wasn’t the non-stop-dawn-til-dusk-and-then-some work.
We anchored over by Okinawa today to wrap up a few things, so while we were in cell-phone range I put my Pocket WiFi to the test. From inside Mount 5-1 I was able to get a signal and I used that to download Twitter’s app into my iPod Touch. And then I made a quick tweet to make sure that it worked. Pretty awesome stuff if you ask me. (^_^)
The rest of the day’s been pretty chill. I’m gonna try and make an early night of this so I can catch up on the sleep I’ve been missing.
Busy Day
Today started out kinda rough. S’wat happens when you only get a handful of hours of sleep. Argh. The tempo quickly picked up after we got a surprise 5″ Gun Shoot sprung on us. The pre-firing maintenance checks take about four hours to do. Try doing them in less than two.
Today was special, though, because we had some Marines over. They’re going to be our spotters for our Naval Surface Fire Support exercise. NSFS is kind of a big deal with Gunner’s Mates because it is one of the most traditional roles we play in the Navy – supporting our Brother Marines with our big guns from the sea.
Sure, everyone likes to talk about how wonderful these new unmanned vehicles are. But they’ll never be able to hit a target with the same ja nai se quois as a Battleship’s 16″ guns. Just ask the Iraqi people that were around for that in Operation Dessert Storm.
Anyhow, we’re going to shoot for our score sometime soon here. I hope we do perfectly as we have in the past – if we do, we get to put an Ace of Spades on our gun to show that we are The Shit(tm).
After the gun shoot it was just one thing after another – myriad little things like making sure we had mooring lines flaked out on the forecastle to keep the ejected powder cans from the gun from marring up the deck too badly, presenting some spaces in the ship for inspections, and squaring away the gun’s loader room and magazines for some visiting officers to tour.
The satisfying part? Having these Officers and Marines eating out of our hands. It is awesome being a Gunner’s Mate sometimes.
Lost in Japan 