Troy’s Random Ramblings

Well it’s been a busy couple of weeks. First we had a week of maintainance and then a week at sea doing helicopter operations. Basically we spent the week with the helicopter doing touch and goes on our flight deck. Gave the helo crew, our flight deck team and the helo flight deck team plenty of quality practice. Thankfully we had excellent weather out there for the whole week. One day it was that flat I thought we were floating around in the South China Sea again - magic stuff.

Now all that is over we have just over a week to get all of our preparations for out upcoming trip away complete. Since we are going to be away from Sydney for nearly four months there are quite a few things to get organised.

With any luck this week we should have some support brackets for the televisions that are ear marked for the various Junior Sailor sleeping spaces. The brackets, along with some extra power leads and cables will allow us to set up all the Junior Sailor sleeping spaces with their own television and home theatre systems. Just the thing to keep people entertained during our 8 week stint floating around off Christmas Island.

Also the end of this week means that I can have a week off. So I’ll be home in Melbourne and I’ll rejoin the ship just after the Melbourne Cup and the Melbourne Navy week. I think Katie will have a few things for me to do during that week in Melbourne, but it will be good to be home.

Well, the URE is over. We passed first go so it’s all good.

Now we are getting ready for our deployment. Lots of maintainence to do before we go away. Our first stop will be Melbourne for the Cup. Should be a good weekend, and I get to see Katie again!

Oops, looks like a week went by and I missed it. Well not really, it was just a busy week and didn’t end until Saturday afternoon.

Well it looks like overall the ship is heading in the right direction to pass the Unit Readiness Evaluation (URE). We’ve got this week at sea, hopefully we’ll be able to stop somewhere to watch the AFL Grand Final on Saturday.

URE is next week so that will be a fun 36 hours. In the mean time we are practicing, practicing, practicing.

Workup week 3 starts tomorrow!

Shouldn’t bee too bad of a week. Fleet think that we are “On Track” for our Unit Readiness Evaluation so that’s a good thing. Looks like we are going to be sailing at action stations though.

With any luck we might get the coming Sat night and possibly Sun night back in Sydney, all depends on what happens with our ammunitioning next week. Fingers crossed

Toxic Hazard, Toxic Hazard. Two words that conspire to interrupt the sleep that I was so enjoying.

Ah, the joys of a work up. We all know fleet is back on board. They have been on for less than a day and already we’ve had fires, toxic hazards, man overboards and a whole range of other incidents and surprise defects.

Luckily we are not doing too bad with most exercises and fleet seem pretty happy with our progress, I suppose we’ll see how happy they are on Friday.

Well that’s the end of the first week of workups. All in all not too bad of a week. A little tiring here and there and we finished it off with a bit of an annoying exercise in Eden that turned out to be more of a watchbill proving evolution than anything else.

Had a BBQ tonight for dinner and the POs Mess prepared and cooked. Hopefully we didn’t make too many people crook

Back to sea tomorrow for Week 2 of the workup, shouldn’t be too bad this week either. We have fleet onboard Tues & Wed, then out assessment on Fri. We should pass without too many problems.

Yippeee!! Workups have started. What a fun day and a half we’ve had so far. Fires, toxic hazards, defective equipment, man overboards, all good fun (not).

At least all the activity means that the days are going fairly quickly. We’re having a brief stop in JB tonight and then heading back out for a shoot.

More later…

Well, that was Brisbane. A pleasant 4 days spent in Brisbane. Good weather for the entire time (as the ads say “Beautiful one day, perfect the next”).

Didn’t get up to too much, had a few drinks, watched a couple of movies and picked up some books to read. Looking forward to getting back to Sydney on Thursday.

Another week at sea begins… nothing spectacular this week just a bit of a gun shoot followed by a visit to Brisbane.

I haven’t been to Brisbane in a long time so it will be intersting to see what has changed since the last time I was there.

Another week at sea, bobbing around in the big grey (it’s not blue at the moment!).

Bit lumpy on the way north and it doesn’t look like it’s going to smooth out in the near future. Had a bit of Replenishment At Sea (RAS) practice today, we all got well and truly soaked, but it’s all good fun.

More RAS practice later today and probably a night one too. The next one we should actually take on board some fuel, just to prove that the stokers know how to drive their system.