Quartermaster The Dean made it back to Yankee Station with two new QMs. I was in love with working on the bridge. This was where the action was, and I quickly became adjusted to my new job, the long watches, and my new GQ station at the emergency helm. I had requested to stay at my old station in mount 51, but reportedly, Dogget would have none of it. I formed a deep friendship with my leading Petty Officer, QM1 Pastor, a weird bird who read Hornblower and who, seeing my genuine interest in my work, set out systematically to try and teach me everything he knew. From then on my routine was to work an eight hour day taking care of routine navigational duties, with an underway bridge watch schedule of 4 hours on, 8 off. The watches were dogged, that is, one watch every day was only 2 hours long, so the Nav team could rotate through the watch schedule. The worst combination was to get the 4 to 8 in the morning watch, then work for eight hours, followed by the 16 to 20 in the evening. Sixteen straight hours on the job. But this was made up for by having your day watches fall during normal working hours, so you could get a break from work while you were on watch. My favorite was the midwatch, from midnight to 0400, because you could always look forward to a relaxed and leisurely tour, followed by an extra hour of authorized sleep in the morning. The watches involved keeping the ship's log, taking frequent fixes (electronic or visual sightings), and plotting them and the dead reckoning of the ship's course on the chart. Other duties involved filling out coded weather reports, making sure that the appropriate charts and pubs were available to the officer of the deck, and advising and consulting with the OOD on matters of signals, right-of-way and buoyage. It certainly beat swabbing decks and scraping paint. We finished our tour of duty in the Far East and returned home via the Panama Canal, and soon we were back in Norfolk where I took some leave. My best friend Roger had graduated from Stevens with his Bachelor's in chemistry, and was now at Columbia University working on his Master's. I took some time off to go up to Manhattan and see him. No doubt we were both startled at the changes in each other. Roger had grown his hair long, very long, and had learned to play guitar. He was quite good, and I was quite jealous. It seemed ironic: Roger was now the rebel, and I was the straight dude. He also introduced me to the pleasures of smoking marijuana, which I had been meaning to try for some time, since my own research into the subject had convinced me it was a benign weed with no negative consequences to the user. I have learned nothing over the last thirty years to make me think otherwise. I still had over a year left in my active duty, so I resigned myself to trying to get it out of the way as painlessly as possible. The Dean was underway again, first with a short cruise to the Caribbean, what the crew liked to call a booze run, since we were allowed to stock up on duty-free liquor there which was kept under lock and key in the ship's stores until our return. Our next trip was a North Atlantic cruise, a few months knocking around Iceland with other NATO navies, pretending to invade Norway while the Russians that always shadowed our units pretended to defend it. The North Atlantic showed us the worst weather I had seen yet, even worse than the small hurricane we had been ambushed by during our Caribbean exercise. It was during one of these howlers, just north of the Arctic Circle, that I was awakened by the messenger to go up and relieve the 2000 to 2400 duty QM. He suggested that I stop by the Combat Information Center on the way to the bridge and check out a radio message we had just received from fleet HQ which might affect me. He would not tell me the contents of the message. Sure enough, there were a dozen sailors huddled about a radar repeater passing around a wrinkled and dogeared copy of the radiogram. After plowing through the acronyms and other administrative jargon, the message was clear: all reservists with more than one year of active service, but less than eighteen months of active service by 1 November 1968 and not on active duty with the Seventh Fleet would be authorized for early release from their two-year commitment on 1 December. I just qualified, and the Dean was not scheduled to go to the Med until next spring. I had always enjoyed the midwatch, but this was especially sweet. But it didn't actually hit me until the next morning, while I was shaving. I had to ask the messenger, who was shaving next to me, if it was for real, or if I had just dreamt it. It was no dream, I would be home by Christmas. My last foreign port was Her Majesty's Dockyard at Rosyth, Scotland, not far from Dunfermline, from where Sir Patrick Spens last sailed. PREVIOUS    NEXT       Back to Sea Story page