darwinsjoke

I finally got around to resizing a few of the pics I took while I was on deployment. So here they are.
First off, this is me chilling in front of one of the many marinas in malta:


Yours truly pretending to work:


Yours truly again, this time lighting up while we were all getting trashed on the pier in Jebel Ali. The guy in the foreground is Casey, one of the guys that works for me.


Another shot of us drinking in Jebel Ali. Casey is on the left, the guy on the right is another one of my guys, Jeff.


This is Jeff. Hard at work trying to fly away from the Oil Lab (our shop). For some reason he never quite managed to achieve lift off.


Here is everyone chillin' in the lab after returning from a night out on the town in Malta. From left to right: Jeff, Chris, Cab, and Kal.


Everyone is hard at work. I don't remember when this one was taken.


Steph also works for me. She's still learning how Uncle Sam's canoe club works but she's coming along quite nicely.


The end of Wog Day. Everyone is quite happy that they're no longer wogs and are now trusty shellbacks. I went through the ceremony myself on my first ship back in '95.


Rog here is another one of my guys. He's definitely got a great career ahead of him if he chooses to stay in. I had to fight like hell with my chief to get him back from the forward pit. We had sent him down to get some experience and he did so well down there that chief didn't want to give him back up.


This is my buddy Alex fucking off on the smoke deck. He works down in the forward pit.


Speaking of the pit, this is an example of how warm it gets down there. Bear in mind that this pic was taken in January while we were on our way home. While we were in the Persian Gulf the temperature was routinely 10-20 degrees higher.


This is just a random pic down in the pit. It's one of the two turbines in each space that drive the ship. It's heavily insulated because the steam that runs it is around 700 psi and 900 deg.


This is one of the ship's distilling units. We use it make drinking water while we're out to sea. Each one can crank out 100,000 gals. of fresh water a day.


My department head, CDR Evans. He's the ship's Chief Engineer. He's one of the few guys in my chain of command that actually makes it bearable to work there. He's a hell of an engineer and and definitely a good leader.


This is Jeff snowboarding in Dubai. They actually have an indoor ski slope in one of the malls there. It maybe 120 deg. outside but it's always -1 on the slope.


Finally these two shots are of freighter taken over by pirates off of the coast of Somalia and the destroyer that shot the shit out of the pirates as they tried to make it back to their camp on shore. Later on that night the destroyer's boarding team captured the remaining pirates. The burned out hulk in the background of the destroyer was one of the pirates' previous captures.