The Island of Misfit Boys

Another day underway, but already you feel the gentle uptick in the energy as we get ready for the next country we’ll be operating in. Planning meetings are in full swing, gear is being staged, and everyone is doing the little things needed to get ready to work.

Some relief came yesterday with a badly needed peanut butter shipment via UNREP. As I write these words, though, I realize that shipboard life is a foreign concept to many of you reading, so I’ll do my best to guide you through a bit of it.

First, there is no gmail (sorry if you’ve been emailing me), or any web based email. All the sites are blocked, so if you didn’t set up your email to forward before you left (See: Me), you don’t get it. Internet is ridiculously slow and unreliable. Sometimes you will lose all communications (email, internet access, phones) for a day. For a while there we lost them for parts of most days.

The living conditions are tight, and I don’t know the worst of it. The berthing spaces have 100 beds or “racks”, two or three high. I’m in a (relatively spacious) 8 man stateroom, which is common for the junior officers onboard. 8 people in bunkbed like setups. We share a table, a sink, and lockers for our clothes and personal effects. It’s small and dark, but it could be a lot worse.

Supplying a ship is a constant issue. In the middle of the ocean, it’s impossible to run out to buy things that you’re running low on. We’ve had no mail in a month, though it should start arriving shortly. We run out of things (as previously mentioned), Diet Pepsi (which apparently we will NOT be getting resupplied with), peanut butter, cheese.

An UNREP is one way to replenish supplies, as we did yesterday. An UNREP is an underway replenishment. A supply ship pulls up 150 feet away from your ship, and they sail ahead parallel to each other (note: 150 feet is an extremely small space, especially when you’re dealing with ships upwards of 900 feet long). Lines are run from ship to ship to provide fuel, and helicopters take pallets of goods from ship to ship.

Food onboard the ship isn’t great. Large amounts of it are items that can be frozen and then made later. Saturday nights are often pizza and wings night, which is a treat.

The days are long. While operating, the radio calls for personnel start at 0500. If you can sleep through it, reveille is at 0600 (the call over the radio to wake up). My first meeting is at 0800, so if I can sleep through the early calls I can generally rest until about 0700 when the people in my stateroom start to wake up.

The rest of the day goes like this: meeting, work, lunch, work, meeting, work, dinner, work, meeting, work, sleep. I try to work out, either between lunch and dinner or after the meetings have ended for the day, and rarely get to bed near midnight.

So the days are long, but you get into a rhythm. On quieter nights you watch movies with friends and hang out. On busy nights you look up and realize that any chance of calling home and not waking anyone has passed.

Life on the sea is exciting and romantic, but the daily grind can be grueling and exhausting. That’s the best summary I can manage.