Navy DD-711 Part VIII

 
It's one thing to be on board a ship in port. It's another to be at sea. A few things change - like always hearing the drone of the engines, water is conserved so you shower in seawater and just do the final rinse in fresh water and you stand duty on the bridge. 

And when you have the duty, you get to steer the ship, not somebody else, just you. Yes, piloting like a million other sailors before you. I'm sorry I don't have any photos of me on the bridge, but this is a close approximation.

And even though radar and sonar work really well, we still watched the air and sea with binoculars and unbelievably, sometime we spotted things the advanced technology missed. It happens.

And at night, the stars come out. Lots of stars. Different stars. Blinding stars. Stars enough to read by. More stars than you thought there were.

Heading south from Portsmouth, we were going off to make a circuit around the Caribbean and the Captain wanted to see how the engines were doing so he really cranked it. Gearing-class Destroyers could do nearly 37 knots which is about 42 miles per hour. That's speed-boat speed, friends. The fan-tail sank and the focsule rose and we zipped right along. No showering at all for a time while that was going on.

Running into a little weather, I learned why there were windshield wipers on the bridge windows even though they were four levels up. 

Not just for the rain, but the waves and bow-spray. That whole mess would go right over everything. Yes, I was sea-sick, everyone was sea-sick. Whee!


And that's why there are water-tight doors! They keep the ocean from coming in and drowning us all. That was good thinking because it wouldn't take long.

So we went all over the Caribbean to Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, you name it. I've been to most of those places since, but it's not the same when you're not sailing up in a warship.

Our last stop was where we would be doing our weapons testing - Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.