69 and 73
Thursday, August 12, 2010
It's a ship just recently off the assembly lines, so it's very modern and also aesthetically pleasing. This, of course, matters when you're holed up in narrow quarters with 71 other crew members. At some points of time, when the exercise had included the lock on of anti-ship Harpoon missiles, the Frigate sped up to its top speed of 28 knots, whereupon the ship shuddered intermittently. It also tended to do evasive maneuvers such as sharp turns, where the water dispenser revealed tilting of the water by more than 10 degrees.
The CIC room, the digital eyes and ears of the ship, is a room about thrice the size of my bedroom, equipped with 47 LCD screens, most of which are touchscreens. The rest are laptops and desktop monitors. They are accompanied by touchpad modules. In the middle of the room are two oversized seats larger than all the rest, elevated on a platform for the CO and PWO of the ship.
Wearing a watch on a warship can be a bit disorientating. One knows what time it is, but without daylight, it never really feels like day or night. The wobbling is something your body quickly adjusts to without you actually knowing. You compensate a right tilt with a left lean like second nature.
While the whole experience was thoroughly interesting, and also slightly tiring, the best moment without any dispute would have to be the moment when we disembarked.
Having been up on the deck early, I ran into a ship crew who asked me casually if I had seen the aircraft carrier. As I stepped out onto the open helo deck, there it was, CV-73, the USS George Washington aircraft carrier.
It's length is about 3 Formidable class frigates placed end to end, and it's deck was literally littered everywhere with strike aircraft, most probably FA-18s. It hadn't entered the harbor, it was outside probably because it's beam was far too wide. It was complemented with two destroyers, all of which were on their way back from their stop over at Vietnam recently to stir trouble in Asia.
I've been told many times that the US carriers make frequent visits to our base, apparently partly because the crew finds Singapore 'full of cheap stuff'. Whatever the case, my seeing of the carrier was a moment I had been waiting for for 4 months now, and seeing that hulking and enormous vessel was a jaw dropping moment for me.
Those gweilo crew from the ship have been enjoying liberty in the hundreds, every so often there's a bus load of them going by our institute. Many of them, women and men, are pretty darn portly.
posted by joseph at 2:27 PM
Thursday, August 12, 2010
I'm still feeling the occasional wobble, especially if I'm doing things like bending my back when I brush my teeth. The Frigate, Intrepid, (69) a big ship but not big enough to mitigate the tilting effects of the sea waves on the ship, was home for one and a half days.
It's a ship just recently off the assembly lines, so it's very modern and also aesthetically pleasing. This, of course, matters when you're holed up in narrow quarters with 71 other crew members. At some points of time, when the exercise had included the lock on of anti-ship Harpoon missiles, the Frigate sped up to its top speed of 28 knots, whereupon the ship shuddered intermittently. It also tended to do evasive maneuvers such as sharp turns, where the water dispenser revealed tilting of the water by more than 10 degrees.
The CIC room, the digital eyes and ears of the ship, is a room about thrice the size of my bedroom, equipped with 47 LCD screens, most of which are touchscreens. The rest are laptops and desktop monitors. They are accompanied by touchpad modules. In the middle of the room are two oversized seats larger than all the rest, elevated on a platform for the CO and PWO of the ship.
Wearing a watch on a warship can be a bit disorientating. One knows what time it is, but without daylight, it never really feels like day or night. The wobbling is something your body quickly adjusts to without you actually knowing. You compensate a right tilt with a left lean like second nature.
While the whole experience was thoroughly interesting, and also slightly tiring, the best moment without any dispute would have to be the moment when we disembarked.
Having been up on the deck early, I ran into a ship crew who asked me casually if I had seen the aircraft carrier. As I stepped out onto the open helo deck, there it was, CV-73, the USS George Washington aircraft carrier.
It's length is about 3 Formidable class frigates placed end to end, and it's deck was literally littered everywhere with strike aircraft, most probably FA-18s. It hadn't entered the harbor, it was outside probably because it's beam was far too wide. It was complemented with two destroyers, all of which were on their way back from their stop over at Vietnam recently to stir trouble in Asia.
I've been told many times that the US carriers make frequent visits to our base, apparently partly because the crew finds Singapore 'full of cheap stuff'. Whatever the case, my seeing of the carrier was a moment I had been waiting for for 4 months now, and seeing that hulking and enormous vessel was a jaw dropping moment for me.
Those gweilo crew from the ship have been enjoying liberty in the hundreds, every so often there's a bus load of them going by our institute. Many of them, women and men, are pretty darn portly.
Labels: navy
posted by joseph at 2:27 PM