7/3/09 – alongside the dock, Long Beach CA
Today is the third day of my trip to South America. Here is the itinerary that we will be following:
Long Beach, CA 6/30 – 7/5
Catalina Island, CA 7/5 – 7/7
Balboa, Panama 7/18 – 7/21
Valparaiso, Chile 7/31 – 8/3
Guayaquil, Ecuador 8/10 – 8/13
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico 8/22 – 8/25
Vallejo, CA 8/30
The summer for me started two months ago. I was hoping to get a job at a tug company in Norfolk VA, but it fell through and I opted to work at the boathouse at CalMaritime. It ended up being a real fun 2 months, although I was ready for it to end. This cruise is an important part of my time at CalMaritime, and my career after school – as it will probably be pretty similar to a job I may get after school. Needless to say, I’m a little nervous of all sorts of things: getting sea sick (again), missing my girlfriend, not liking it, and just hating on the whole experience. Buuuut, it’s three days in, and I don’t feel like any of those things will be a bit of a problem. Or, at least they will all be within acceptable limits. So far life aboard The Golden Bear has been fairly regular. All the cadets on board are divided into three groups called “watches.” This translates into two days of ship work, and one day of watch, then we start at the beginning of the rotation again and around and around we go. Day work begins at 745AM with lining up and being counted and inspected. Immediately afterwards, we’re divided into smaller groups usually with some upperclassmen in charge of a group of lower classmen. Today I helped out a small team of four guys organize and clean out our paint locker. Judging by how many gallons are in the paint locker, and what color we’ve got – I can guess pretty closely as to what kind of painting jobs we’ll be doing.
Yesterday, we loaded 70 pallets of frozen, chilled, and dry food (called “stores” on board a ship) into it’s appropriate locations in the lower decks of the ship. Three big 18 wheelers from Sysco Systems showed up and began unloading the pallets onto the dock next to the ship. From there, cadets used a pallet jack to roll the pallet onto a cargo net. We then lifted the pallet off the dock and over the cargo hatches where we lowered it down to more waiting cadets to assembly line the individual boxes into it’s appropriate locations.
I haven’t had watch yet, only a few day work shifts – so I’ll save the description of that routine for another day. More later, drew