The first few days

Well, talk about an inauspicious start to deployment. We were scheduled to leave San Diego at 10 a.m. on Friday morning. When a ship gets underway, there’s a certain amount of fanfare involved. Families come to say a tearful goodbye to wave the ship off, sailors dress in our formal dress blues uniforms and go topside to stand along the edges of the ship (called manning the rails) to see the ship off. It looks pretty cool, and it’s a nice sight for families standing on the pier to see as the ship pulls away.
Unfortunately, none of that happened. About an hour before we were set to leave, we got word that the machine that started the engines was broken. No engines, no deployment. We troubleshot the issue all day with some shore guys, and finally got underway at about 4 p.m. This time, we had changed out of our dress uniforms and didn’t man the rails, since there were only a handful of loyal well wishers on the pier. So much for the pomp and circumstance of my first deployment.
With our engineering problems resolved, we set out to sea, where the problems only got worse. Essentially, our entire satellite communications suite went down. Our GPS was broken. Our internet was gone. Our phone, disconnected. T.V.? No way. Even our gyrocompass, the system that tells us what direction we’re going, broke. Then its backup did too. It took us an hour to realize it. The Navy had no clue where we were—and worse—neither did we. We couldn’t even check the score of the B.U.-Kansas game on the internet. After a couple days of that, the hardworking sailors on the ship finally started to fix the problems, one by one. First the GPS, then the gyrocompass, then the internet. Finally, we were back up and working as an operational warship.
Things have slowed down since the first 36 hours, and we’re finally getting into the groove of deployment: Standing watch, taking care of paperwork, working out, eating dinner, etc. Hopefully the ship stays this calm for at least a few more weeks, or at least until we chat again.