9/8:

18 Days until I leave this ship. Looking forward to a change of pace. These next few weeks will be spent studying hard for my Engineering Qualification which I am required to receive before I leave the ship for my next job. I have 2 big binders full of notes and pubs to read through. My qualification has 40 pages of signatures to get. I just finished this so now it is time to buckle down and study. Lucky for me I have another LTJG who is leaving the ship when I am and she is going up for her board too. So we will be in it together and can study together if we have time.

Watch last night on the bridge from 17-22 was very crazy. All of a sudden we had about at least 6 alarms going off from the steering console where the helmsman was steering. It ended up that we lost a generator and because of that we ended up loosing our power conversion from 60hz to 400hz. We lost all communications with other ships around us besides bridge to bridge, all but 1 radar, all power on the ship, and steering. We still had 2 engines that stayed online out of like 4 total that were online. We had to man aft steering so that someone could drive the ship locally where the propeller was by listening to sound powered phones with the helm on the bridge. It ended up that we drove from aft steering for about 40 minutes!! It ended up getting really hot too since all the ventilation cut out. It was about 100 degrees outside. This time of night it was already pitch black too. Basically every major casualty that could happen besides a fire or flooding to the engineering spaces happened when I was on watch. Luckily the only other contacts that we had out here with us were two other navy ships. We were far enough from the field of oil platforms and a few small boats in that direction. We were however about 2 miles from Farsi territorial waters which would have been bad to enter. It is a good thing we got steering back.

This entire string of events ate up about 2.5 hrs of my watch so that was good. If this all wasn’t enough though toward the end of my watch right we were giving a contact report to the CAPT about a merchant ship that we were going to be coming close to and a wooden fishing dhow was right in our way. What ended up happening was that the merchant that we thought we were looking at about 5nm away was really a smaller contact that was closer. I guess lesson learned, the visibility isn’t that great here and is only about 5nm. So, if that was the merchant ship it should have been much duller in color. So as one of my Junior Officer of the Deck was on the phone with the CAPT, these two small boats turned on all their lights…. I was like,, uh.. uh.. “right full rudder” and we sounded 5 short blasts on our ships whistle to indicate the danger signal. We must have missed hitting them by about 150yds or so. So, that was another fun event.

Other exciting news.. I saw glowing algae in the water last night that the XO pointed out to a few of us after these incidents.

Well, back to studying for my Engineering board…