Immediately following that week was graduation week, and during this week I was supposed to be doing range week (although I'm already qualified on pistol, they want everyone to qualify this summer in their respective range weeks). However, on Monday morning of that week the entire campus lost electricity. Now if you're like me this doesn't sound too bad. And indeed it wasn't, at least for the first day or so - it was like an adventure, camping, almost. But by day 2 it started to suck BIG TIME. In order to fully understand why, realize this: all our toilets are electrically operated, and the steam for hot water was dependent on one old generator that only ran for about a day. So for a few days there, we'd have to bring buckets of water into the heads and flush them "manually". For some reason, people wouldn't flush the toilets themselves, either. So when a few of us got selected to do it we'd have to suit up and go flush down a few people's worth of waste in each toilet. Eventually the academy command brought in a generator to power one of our annexes and we all moved to that annex until power was restored (about a week later).
The following week was CATP (Cadet Aviation Training Program). This was the best academy-related week I've had since reporting two years ago. A group of 16 of us travelled to Mobile, AL for a week of flying in our service's aircraft, and since they were super chill down there and let us leave just about whenever, it was basically a week of vacation with some flying thrown in (which was awesome), hanging out in the south with some of my best friends. I flew a helicopter for about half an hour, got hoisted into a helicopter out of the bay, went to the beach several times, went to New Orleans, it was a fantastic week.
This past week was TBoats week, where a group of 9 of us plus one officer took out 95ft tug boats into the river and learned about ship handling, taking the Conning officer position, taking charge of the deck, line handling, man over boards, anchoring, and mooring/unmooring. It was a pretty decent week, yesterday we were graded on our performance as a crew while doing a man overboard, anchoring, and mooring. To begin with, I love man-overboard drills. As soon as the man overboard is called we immediately throw the rudder over and gun the engines, and basically it's a race to get back to the person and get them out on the first run - a challenge, by any account. So for our graded exercise, we had my friend Hunter taking the Conn (he gave directions for me to steer), I was at the helm, and another friend Rick was in charge of the deck work. Our graded man-overboard drill was our best run of the week, as soon as the person was in the water I had the ship rockin to the side, engine blazing, rudder at 30 degrees right. We made one sweeping turn, lined up the dummy, shot the approach, and picked up the dummy. It was probably around 2-3 minutes, pretty respectable for a first timer crew like ourselves. All in all it was a pretty cool week and I learned a ton about shiphandling in general, which was the point.
Now it is the weekend and I'm probably going to spend it with some friends a few miles north of here. Also, it is now less than 1 month until R-day, when I assume the role of drill sergeant for the class of 2014. I am already getting ancy.
Until next time,
-Storm
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