Quote:
Originally Posted by 3catcircus
Now compare that to a dependents cruise to the Big Island when one of the sonar techs missed movement, called ahead, and was on the pier to handle lines. At XOI, he indicated that he had met these two girls who *really* wanted to experience him together... Needless to say, the XO let that one slide.
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In some ways, the Bremerton was the Rodney Dangerfield of the 688s.
We were still in dry dock when we got the ship's anchor and chain back from the shop. My TM buddy says "Look at the chain, something isn't right". He was right, half of the chain links were Canadian (metric). Well, the shipyard would figure it out, wouldn't they?
Flash forward to after sea trials, ORSE, and half-way thru weps certs and the Skipper gets this bright idea, why not do a dependent's cruise to Maui?
I could think of at least 40 reasons why we shouldn't, but I wasn't the Skipper. Sure enough, we set off with the crew's mess stacked with wives and kids. Wives who got bored and kids who liked to play with things like valves while the grown-ups weren't looking.
If that wasn't enough, our crew's "Baby Huey" brought his wife along (who married him for his good looks
) and they figured it would be fun to christen fwd berthing. Right about then I ran out of smokes and went to my bunk to grab a pack...
NO ONE should have to see that, it was like the opposite of porn. If I ever wind up with PTSD, that would be what caused it.
Meanwhile, we're running behind schedule so the Skipper decides to dive below caveating depth and crank the bells.
With a load of civilians and kids on board.
Yes, Timmy, this was why you couldn't play with your friends
before you got debriefed.
So, we finally make it to Maui where we have to anchor out in the bay. I started this story with the anchor for a reason. It wasn't bad enough we had to anchor out, or we couldn't shut the reactor down. No, we had to drop that flipping anchor which normally went "chunk-a-chunk-a-chunk-a" for about one minute. What we heard was "chunk-a-chunk-a-WHUMP" then silence.
We reeled the anchor back in and tried it again. I looked at my TM buddy and said, "Hey, you don't suppose.." "I do! I most certainly do!" and we knew the chain was getting jammed. Just like we knew we were screwed for the next four days while the wives and kids were taken off by small boat to go ashore and we goofed around in the channel between the islands.
