I tried the blogging thing and it didnt do much for me then, but with limited connections to the outside world, I think i'll just resort back to it for this deployment. or at least today. Anyway, this photo is the cover page of a liberal hawaiian weekly paper that came out over the couple days I was in Hawaii w/ the ship on our way to do a USW (undersea warfare) exercise. The timing is not a coincidence; there has been a ton of lawsuits all over the country (world?) about the use of sonar and its effects on marine life over the last year or so, and they literally had just come out with the latest litigation for the hawaiian opareas in time for our exercise. Without getting into too much detail, basically they just put out a bunch of ridiculous requirements for us to power down or secure sonar if we see any marine mammals (particularly whales... especially since it's mating season for humpbacks). Now I'm a tree-hugging hippie (or at least compared to my navy counterparts, so they tell me) and you'd think i wouldnt want to kill the whales, and, well, i dont. But I am also the ASWO, anti-submarine warfare officer, and for this particular exercise I was pretty much in charge for my ship, which meant I had to be in charge of all our MMM- marine mammal mitigation- measures. And man is it a pain in the ass to keep logs of every time you see a whale, how far away it is, its bearing, what it's doing, etc etc, and update every 5 minutes... all while stopping the exercise completely if it's too close. I mean, can we say poor planning? There are plenty of places out there, in the Pacific even, where there aren't a bajillion whales, so why did we pick such a heavily whale-populated area to do a sub-hunting exercise where we're using sonar the whole time? Not to mention I ended up spending more of this week dealing with whales, training lookouts, reporting sightings, drafting messages, etc, than i did looking for subs. Oh, and then when we did secure our sonar because we were in the middle of a big pod of minke whales, everyone up to the three-star admiral in charge of the eastern pacific fleet wanted to know why. It's this big catch-22, they want you to protect the whales, but then when you follow the rules and do it, everyone and their mother wants to know why. Sort of like how they tell you to shoot the guy in self-defense if you have to, but then if you do it, you get detained and questioned for a million years after. Or at least that's what i imagine it would be like. So anyway, I just wanted to share this funny newspaper cover and give everyone a sense of the crap i do that keeps me awake 20 hours a day. Now i'll just wonder if anyone besides me will read this? Well if you do, please comment, because like i said, I'm sort of desperate for contact with the outside world... and it's only been 2 weeks so far. Scary.
