Salvador, Brazil

Our first real port call (multiple days, not just a few hours) is Salvador, Brazil. It’s a huge city. Salvador, like much of Brazil, has a large range of cultural influences. Salvador itself is broken up into different unofficial sectors. There are British, French, and Portuguese sectors, all with various influences from those countries. However, 80% of the population has African ancestry from slaves that were shipped here and sold. Unfortunately, much of the city is impoverished. Slums predominate the suburbs, and it’s amazing to see beautiful European architecture that’s been abandoned for years. You walk around and see one thriving building, followed by another that has huge holes in the walls, crumbling to the ground.
I didn’t know this, but Brazil itself is divided up into states, similar to America. Salvador is the capital of the state, “Bahia.” We went on a cool historical tour (hence my knowledge of the city) on Sunday, and got to walk around all the different city sectors. (I wish I had better pictures, but we can’t hook up personal cameras to the ship computers, because you could steal data or put viruses on the computers.) The tour guide talked about Carnival for half of the tour. The city revolves around it. They have a reputation for being very low-key and relaxed, and Carnival embodies that. The city shuts down for an entire week, and everybody takes to the streets to party. They showed us video of the event—it was very cool.
The city is over 80% Roman Catholic and the city itself has churches sprinkled all over the crowded city streets. One church, the most famous in the country, is atop a hill in a poor section of town. It’s thought to have mystical powers. People go and pray there for physical miracles—wounds healing, sicknesses overcome, etc. There is a room in there called the Miracle Room. When people pray there and their prayers come true, they put mementos in the room. The walls were covered with pictures and stories of people’s lives changing. Molds of peoples hands, feet, heads, etc. hang from the ceiling. If, for example, somebody needs surgery on their hand, the person will pray there and if the surgery is successful, then make a cast of the hand to hang on the ceiling. It was a very somber experience to see all of these human stories woven together in one central point.
In general, it was a fun port to visit and explore a bit. Lots of different people and cultures, as well as some good food and beer. As I write this, we should be getting underway to go to exercises with the Brazilian Navy, but there was an issue with the fuel barge, so we’re still waiting on fuel. Rumor has it that we won’t be leaving until tomorrow, which would mean another day of liberty, which is never a bad thing. Our real mission will really begin when we get underway. We have some Brazilian ship riders on our ship, and we sent some to the Brazilian ship. We’ll be doing some interesting war games out in the ocean before the highlight of our trip, Rio De Janiero, in less than a week.

Onward to Brazil

It’s been a while since I’ve written in here, but we have been busy since Martinique. Holiday routine again today. I had watch from 3-8 a.m., and decided to go back to bed after I got off. I was woken up an hour later to attend a meeting that nobody told me about, but I had to be there. It’s a big no-no to have meetings Sunday morning, but our new Captain doesn’t care much for crew morale, it seems. The meeting was about what we would do to conduct stationing drills tomorrow.
Ships sailing in station had their origins back in the age of sail, when big wooden ships had cannons on their sides and propelled themselves with wind power. Back then, ships would fight each other in close proximity, and tactics were largely based on how the ships were positioned. Ships would try to position themselves to have favorable winds, as well as exposing their cannons on their sides to shoot at the other ships. It required complex maneuvers to ensure success. The best admirals and captains in that time period could train their fleets and ships to execute formations by raising different flags on the Admiral’s ship (aptly called the “Flag Ship”—a term we still use today for ships where leadership is embarked). Back then, ships moving to station quickly was a life and death evolution, and something that navies practiced assiduously.
Nowadays, instead of raising flags, we pass code over radios, and we have to decode it to determine what the other ships want you to do. We still practice stationing to defend carriers in an attack situation—we position ourselves strategically around the carriers to protect them. It’s a fairly simple process once you understand it, especially how it will be tomorrow—with only 3 ships (instead of 15) and no carriers launching airplanes around you.
As Junior Officers, we’re accustomed to stationing ships and determining how to maneuver the ship to go where we want to go—we do it on a daily basis and are intimately familiar with how the ship moves, the same way you get to know how your car handles and responds after driving it for some time. For this new Captain, he doesn’t seem to understand the ease with which we conduct these drills. He even created a watch bill with every junior officer on it. We’ll each drive the ship for 18 minutes to “get practice.” Hopefully we end up doing something when I am driving the ship for those 18 minutes.
We pull into Salvador, Brazil later this week. I’ll try to make an update on the port when we pull in. We lost two more softballs today stupidly trying to play catch in the rough seas, and we’re out of baseballs and softballs. We're down to playing catch with apples, so if you have any baseballs, please send them our way.
Also, please e-mail me ( wrayj@ffg43.navy.mil ). I feel so out of the loop out here-it's hard to stay in touch with reality, the news, friends and family, so I like to hear from you!

Martinique, France

Yesterday, we had our official “change of command” ceremony. When a Captain leaves a ship, he is relieved by the new one in a formal ceremony. Since we were at sea, we had our ceremony on the forecastle (pronounced folk-sill, it’s the front part of the ship). The captain who is leaving was an awesome guy. He really knew how to take care of his people, drive a ship and be a leader. He’ll be missed. We now have a new captain, who is changing things a lot. Of course, people dislike change, so there is a lot of pushback. Only time will tell how he will fare as a leader.
His first challenge as Captain was to pull into Martinique, France—a tiny island in the Caribbean. As we were pulling in, I was standing up on the bridge to see the island. It looks simply remarkable from the sea. Rolling green mountains rising up into the clouds, houses etched into the sides of the hills, all surrounded by clear, cerulean colored water… It was a sight to behold. There is an old French fort there that was built pretty long ago as we were steaming into port. It’s still an active naval base today, with ivy-covered brick edifices jutting out of the water to shield the fort itself.
We had liberty last night to go out and explore the island, which we were all excited to get after a few weeks underway and after seeing the island from the sea. Unfortunately, it was a depressing port visit. The place was pretty destitute, with almost every restaurant and bar closed for lent. Apparently, in France, lent is a very strictly observed religious time, where many businesses just close down. I don’t understand how they can do that, but they do. The highlight of the night was getting food at McDonalds, even after I swore I would find a nice French place to eat at. It’s just that nothing was really open.
As I write this, we’re pulling away from Martinique en route to Brazil. The transit down should be treacherous—7-12 foot seas off of our beam (the side of the ship). To give you an idea of how much that throws a little ship like this around, if you’re sitting in a chair, the chair will still slide across the room from the force of the ship rocking. It will be seas at about the limit that our ship can take across her beam. Any higher than that, and we’ll need to pull into port. For my new Seaman Recruit who flew into Martinique to report aboard, it should be an adventuresome first underway at sea for him. If his stomach can take it, I’d be truly impressed.

Flight Deck Softball

As we steam underway for longer periods of time, the monotony of the days makes people think outside the box. One of the ways that we do that is by playing catch out on the flight deck. For me, playing catch is something that keeps me sane; I need to relax from time to time. Unfortunately, it’s a risky business. One bad throw, and your ball is gone. We’ve lost 5 balls now—2 baseballs and 3 softballs. We’re down to 5 left, and it’s getting to the point where we can’t let just anyone play because apparently people don’t know how to throw a baseball. We’ve found some netting and will try and rig it up next time to help prevent the attrition of our baseballs, but sometimes the ship will rock and the ball will sail, or the wind will take it away. We’ll look for baseballs in foreign countries, but the prospects at finding them might not be so great.
If anyone is sending a care package, throwing a couple of old baseballs in there would be appreciated. I’m finding we can’t have too many of them.