Destroyer Life at Sea, Pt. II: Off-Watch

The other day I decided to start blogging about how things are out here, out at sea, and start a series on here called “Destroyer Life at Sea”. You can check out Part I here. I’m not sure how many of these I’ll write, but whenever something pops into my head that sounds like a good idea, I’ll take a stab at it.

So, the first thing I went over was watch standing. I figured I should now go over what we do when we’re not on watch. As you would assume, being on a 509 1/2-ft. ship, there’s not a lot of space to do things. The Mess Decks, a small library that is typically used as a lounge and a classroom are essentially the only common areas for people to hang out. And, on the Mess Decks, they have to clean it and use it for all the meals (obviously), therefore that’s not somewhere that “hanging out” typically happens. The Classroom is used primarily for meetings/trainings/church services, so that’s not frequently open either.

Don’t get me wrong-some people are allowed to hang out and watch TV, play video games, whatever they want like that in one of their divisional spaces. I let my guys watch TV on Sundays (when we are at Holiday Routine and typically don’t have a lot of events going on). As a Chief, I can go into the Chief’s Mess and watch TV or hang out whenever I want to. And, by “TV”, I mean the few channels we get that movies get played on throughout the day. We don’t have any sort of Satellite TV on our ship. Once we pull away, we are left to what we have onboard. There’s a good selection of movies, but when you’re away for 6 months at a time, even several hundred movies get repeated ad nauseum. I swear, on last deployment, I saw Hot Tub Time Machine at least 20 times. Not that I’m complaining, because it’s a funny movie and I laughed my ass off all 20 times.

Other than that, we have a gym and another cardio area. The gym has weight sets, machines, pretty much everything that we need to stay in shape/get in shape. The Forward Pallet Staging Area (where the cardio machines are), has a punching bag, three treadmills and some elliptical machines and stationary bikes.

And, of course, there are a few computers on the network that people can use to browse, so we have a lot of people checking out sites like Facebook, The Chive and ESPN. As a matter of fact, people browsing Facebook (prior to our Admiral mandating that access be denied) on last deployment was so prevalent that we joked about calling a “Facebook Casualty” anytime we lost our satellite connectivity and could no longer peruse the Interwebz.

When I came into the Navy and did my first two deployments, things such as laptop computers and portable DVD players weren’t commonplace. My, how times have changed! It seems that everyone has a laptop/tablet/portable DVD player now. I’ll write about our living conditions in a later blog, but essentially our “racks” (beds) are 6ft. long and about 2ft. wide. For E-6 and below personnel, they are just high enough that I could lay in my rack with my 8-inch screen portable DVD player on my chest and it would just barely touch the top of my rack. As a Chief, ours are have significantly more space, I can lay with my 17-inch screen laptop on my chest easily.

So, that’s what I do, that’s how I wind down. Practically every night, prior to going to bed, I watch at least an episode or two of television shows that I’ve downloaded. Right now I’m alternating between The Wire (Season 5) and Oz (Season 4); next up is Breaking Bad (Season 2).

That covers everything I can think of.