We have now been at sea for over a week which has been good. It has been a busy and stressful week, but rewarding. The most stressful part of the week was when I found out my little girl was unwell and was having to go into hospital. Although we have email and welfare phones information flow isn’t guaranteed and waiting for news can be horrible. Anyway thankfully she is back home now, it turned out she had tonsillitis so she is on antibiotics until it has cleared up.
For the first time since I have been here I finally feel that I have broken the back of the information overload. I have even started getting the niff naff and trivia jobs out of the way. In addition I have had three or four ‘Well Done James’ from the CO in the last few days which is far better than ‘That’s a can of beer James’.
We have now started regular intelligence/Ops briefs onboard for the ship’s company so they are aware why we are out here. I gave the first one in the week and it had a really good reception and thankfully I didn’t get any questions at the end that I couldn’t answer.
As we are going to be at sea for a while I have started running a Sunday Service onboard, today was the first one and it was quite nerve racking as I am not used to leading services. Thankfully I wasn’t the only one there. Ok 3 people isn’t a lot but when I go to church at home quiet often there are only about 9 people so I don’t think we did to bad onboard. Hopefully in coming weeks more people will come.
For the first time since I have been here I took the time to go out on the bridge wing with a cup of coffee and look up at stars. The night sky at sea will never fail to amaze me and it was absolutely stunning tonight, although strange to see the stars in slightly different places compared to back home. I even had a look at the stars through the night sights, which was amazing as so many were visible, although it was strange seeing a shooting star through the night sights.
The bioluminescence, although weak tonight was beautiful to watch, it seems ages since I saw any. I just remember back in 97 I was on a ship and the bioluminescence was so strong it was magical, there were dolphins in huge groups all around the ship and all you could sea were streaks of light, like torpedo trails cris-crossing the ocean. Occasionally one of the trails would stop and then you would hear the plop as the dolphin entered the water and the trail would start again.
Well that is enough swinging the lantern for one blog, so I am going to leave it at that for this entry. I wonder what the coming week will bring?
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