We are at anchor after a day allegedly spent at Holiday Routine. I had the midwatch and went to bed at 0430. Up at 0745 I took the 0800-1100 Officer of the Deck watch and listened as the world went crazy. I watched as USS Enhance led MV Gas Princess, Ocean City, USS Merrill, USS Joseph Strauss and two other tankers through the Q-Route to Kuwait.
Their helicopters reported that they were hovering over mines so we got underway, dropped a Mk-6 mine shape and continued on to USS Trenton where we waited for two hours for USS Inflict to finish refueling. The mines were later found to be fishing buoys.
We pulled alongside Trenton at @ 1500 and took on fuel and stores and got rid of 6 drums of 2190 TEP oil that aren't going to haunt me now. At CO's wish we were underway as soon as possible and went back to our anchorage area with Marine Recon divers to fish out our mine shape. The bozos in the Combat Information Center were unable to vector the ship back to the shape so we spent a fruitless 3 hours trekking around and finally delivered the Marines home dry.
Went to anchorage where it was Bob's turn in the barrel.
The good news was: yesterday I fixed the governor problem on #3 Main Engine that had baffled 5 of my senior engineers for hours. Today they fixed the #1 Main Engine after finding 4% fuel oil dilution caused by a broken rocker arm(?) It was a really good day for us engineers.
I think I'll throw in the previous couple of weeks starting tomorrow and cover my view of Operation Praying Mantis which was the last time I swept actual mines in the Gulf and we made war on Iran.
1 comment:
Always enjoyed setting Holiday Routine ,quickly followed by set the refueling detail or set the rearming detail. Good days
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