Hey, folks. As some of you may know, my brother Gascan is going to the California Maritime Academy to become an engineer on a full-size ship. He has completed his first year there, and recently set sail on his first training cruise. A few days ago, Gascan sent me this letter and asked me to post it online so you all can know what he's been doing. USTS Golden Bear Cadet's Log Star Date: Tuesday evening, 5-18-2010 It's been nearly three weeks since Cruise began, and I have can barely tell what day it is any more. Every day has new tasks for us to do day in and day out. At night I crawl into my tiny bunk, jammed into a room with 17 other snoring bodies. The upperclassmen and freshmen squad leaders have the 2-3 person rooms in the aft house, the rest of us got crammed into Lower Berthing, with 8, 18, and even 24 people in a room. The day we moved in, someone put up a sign that said "Purgatory" on the door to LB-8, the most tightly-packed room. The crew consists of cadets from three of the six divisions, and includes juniors, freshmen, deck, engine, and business/politics. I don't hang out with many deckies, so I don't know their schedule, but the engineers from the three divisions rotate through Watch, Day Work, and Practical Training, with a class on diesels every day. Each division spends four days on a task before rotating to the next one. Watch consists of monitoring the engine room equipment. The ship has two medium-speed diesels for main propulsion, three diesel generators, two evaporators, four different air compressors, two boilers, countless pumps for water and oil of various types, massive bearings for the shaft, and more. It has all the amenities of home: toilets, electrical sockets, lights, fresh-water showers, plus the power to move the whole ship across the globe... and all the stuff to make those things work is crammed into the engine room for us to look after. The upper class cadets, supervised by a licensed watch officer, are in charge of operating most of the equipment. Us underclassmen mostly just help out and tage regular rounds to make sure everything is operating the way it should. When stuff doesn't work right, Day Work is assigned to fix it. We spend these days taking apart pumps, replacing electrical fixtures, cleaning spare headers from the generators. One day I had to go bilge-diving to replace some lights under the deck plating. Today I helped reassemble some beatup old reverse osmosis purifiers that might be installed next year, and worked on the impeller of a pump for one of the evaps. It sure beats painting like deckies usually do: it can be fascinating work, and I've learned a lot from it. Most of the learning takes place in Practical Training and the daily diesels class. PT focuses on the theory of how everything works, while day work allows us to see everything for ourselves (and how it can all go wrong: one of the bunk lights I replaced had some burnt wires, and could have caused a fire if there had been anything flamable nearby). We've covered shop safety, done a review of the Marine Sanitary Device, and covered a bit of emergency power. The instructor for the first PT rotation liked my division, and gave us an interesting test on the last day. He told us that pirates had attacked the ship, kidnapped all the crew except our class (but including himself), and shut down the whole ship. We had two hours to write down how we would restart the plant before we ran aground, and most of us passed the test. The diesels class isn't too hard at all. Understand the basics of how an engine works, and the rest of it is all about meeting those requirements. Mr. Rigg, the instructor, also adds comments about how to maintain each part of the engine and why some engines are easier to work on than others. Having worked on so many different model ships, I have really come to appreciate innovations that reduce maintenance and improve reliability. When I mentioned this to him, he said he had visited a combat club down in Los Angeles, and was interested in getting involved. Once class is over, it's dinner time. The mess deck has all the same people from the school, so the food isn't any better. On the other hand, we're all a lot hungrier, so it we wolf it down all the same. The desserts are especially good. There is a woman affectionately known as "Mom" to everyone on the ship who cooks up all the cookies, cakes, muffins, scones, pies, turnovers, rolls, brownies, puddings, and all the stuff I don't know the name of. Yesterday she cooked up a chocolate cake with a giant chocolate ship cookie on top for someone's birthday, and she loves to take requests. I usually get a full tray of dinner, take a few samples of whatever dessert she just set out, then come back at the end of dinner to swipe any leftover desserts. If I'm not on watch, evenings are time to relax. Hang out with friends, play games, watch movies, write email. There are lots of movies available on the ship. Pirates Cove, the small store on the ship, has a huge list of DVDs for rent, and every cadet has packed along their own stack as well. Over the last few days there's been a Japanese marathon: Seven Samurai, Tampopo, and Yojimbo. I also find time to watch anime with my roommate from spring semester. Unfortunately, he prefers the english dubbing rather than subtitles, so I've had very little opportunity to practice my Japanese for when we arrive in port. There is also plenty of humor around. When young males are in close proximity, the brand of humor tends to include such things as comparing the size of crescent wrench we carry around (so far mine is the biggest, unless someone grabs one of the monsters from the ship's tool room). At the beginning of cruise, one cadet put a red tag-out tag hanging below his belt that said "do not use for 60 days." Not all jokes stray in that direction, though. One favorite whenever a business or deck cadet comes to the engine room for a utility watch (standing watch in another section to learn about their responsibilities) is to send them for Relative Bearing Grease. During a storm on his freshman cruise, one of the juniors called up the bow watch to ask for the sea temp after a particularly big wave. Laying in bed I can occasionally hear the ship crash through a wave with a sort of rumbling crash. Sometimes I'll hear a faint alarm from some tank or compressor demading attention in the engine room. The slight rocking of the ship is a constant reminder of where I am, but in bed they nearly disappear. Outside on the fantail, I can see the shimmering wake in an otherwise perfect blackness, broken only by the ship itself. For most of the voyage, we've had cloudy skies that block out any stars, and I've been too tired or too busy writing email to go out at night since we've hit clear skies. When the chief engineer came out to discuss day work assignments, he jokingly covered his face, asked what "that bright thing up there" was, and retreated to the shade underneath the quarterdeck. On our way out, I took a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge with my phone and sent it to Mom and Dad then went back in for work. Since then the horizon has been empty in all directions. The water turned from muddy brown at the dock at CMA to green at San Fransisco to a deep blue as we headed out. Up north, the grey sky added a hard edge to the ocean, knowing how cold it was. Now that we've hit clear sky near Japan, the sea looks a brighter blue. I finally saw signs of life outside the ship today: after lunch there was a container ship heading in the same direction. After dinner, there were a few more ships, and land on both sides. We are currently passing through the Tsugaru Strait between the main island Honshu and Hokkaido to the north. We'll soon turn south through the Sea of Japan and head for our first port of call: Busan, South Korea. Some of the cadets are talking about the various bars and strip clubs they intend to visit. I'm still looking for things to do and places to visit that don't necessarily involve getting thoroughly wasted. I'll only have one day for sure, and possibly one afternoon as well. Next on the list is Kobe, Japan, followed by Saipan, Guam, then a final leg to Hawaii. Walking around the ship feels like nothing has changed from Vallejo: instead of living in dorms we're all on the ship. Familiar faces every day, in the same mess deck, doing what we did in Plant Ops during Fall semester. Seeing a Japanese ferry going between the two islands shows that we've really sailed halfway across the world, and that there really is more than just the ship that I've seen for weeks. One of my biggest fears on this trip was seasickness. For the first two or three days out of San Fransisco I was pretty sick, despite the stacks of pills available. After that, I was still a little queazy as we hit 5-8' waves, but now nothing fazes me. I'm still wondering how well I'll do after hanging around in the calm waters inside port, but otherwise I'm having a blast. All the things I'm doing, all the people I'm with, all the places I'm going to go... Eric
