Deployment, Day 34 - Here comes the sun

Today I started my new daytime watch section. I have been standing watch in the middle of the night since we left for deployment, and it is nice to have a normal workday for a change. With the midnight watches, I had to get two hours of sleep before watch, stand 4-5 hours of watch in the middle of the night, then sleep until mid-morning. My sleep was really disjointed and I got tired during weird parts of the day.

Now I have watch from about 7am until noon, so I have a somewhat regular workday. There is usually more going on during the day watches as well, so they go faster and there is more chances for me to actually learn something about standing the bridge watch.

I have also been moved over to the Junior Officer of the Deck (JOOD) watch position. Until today I stood the conning officer watch. The conn is the primary lookout on the bridge and also gives all the commands to drive the ship. It is an important watch, but it is not a particularly challenging watch and can be boring at times. As JOOD, I am the OOD’s primary assistant on the bridge. The OOD is the officer in charge of the safe navigation of the ship and the daily schedule, and qualifying as OOD is the ultimate goal of my tour on this ship. Being JOOD is a more difficult watch, but will allow me more opportunity to learn the OOD watch, which is a good thing.

Yesterday I conducted another safety standdown. This one was not for the ship, only for the ship’s aviation-related departments. There have been so many major mishaps in the naval aviation community this year that the admiral in charge of all the Navy’s aviation units mandated a safety standdown for all the units under his command. If you don’t know what a safety standdown is, see my blog entry from February 16.

For those of you who read my blog entry about my last safety standdown, then you know what a disaster it was. This one was not. This standdown actually went very well. I broke all the departments up into groups to discuss what they believe would cause the ship’s next mishap, then debriefed the results with everyone together. It was a logistic and planning challenge that sounds a lot harder to plan than it sounds, considering how difficult it is to get a meeting together on a busy U.S. Navy ship underway. Everyone came up with good discussion points, and we came up with a lot of ways to make the ship’s aviation operations safer.

All in all, a couple of pretty good days. I am really ready for a port call, though. It’s been a while, and I’m ready for a cold beer and some non-ship food.