En route to Costa Rica and the UNREP - July 24th and 26th, 2011

July 24, 2011

Adios El Salvador!  At this point, there is nothing standing between me and liberty in Costa Rica except for a 3 day ocean voyage.  Yippee!  Our liberty stop in Costa Rica has been long-awaited by everyone on the ship (just like Ecuador was earlier in the mission), and is even more so for me since Scott will be visiting!  

Since my last writing, I organized and attended another hospital tour, which went well, but the term “herding cats” came to mind several times.  I think I will restrict the number of participants in the future – it got a bit hectic.  After every tour we have managed to find a respectable restaurant for lunch.  This time, while I was asking the bus driver for recommendations, one of the senior officers said to me, “I think we can make it back to the ship for lunch.”  This was his first (and last, I’ve since decided) tour with us.  I just looked at him and said, “No, sir, I don’t think so.”  And then got an even more senior officer to agree with me. =) 

After that tour, I had another “worker bee” day at the MEDCAP site.  The heat index that day was “only” 109, but it was the hottest I remember feeling on our whole mission.  There were 6 providers in one classroom, and no breeze at all.  We were all sweating through our t-shirts and I drank over 3 liters of water.  It is not easy to muster up empathy for patients when you feel that miserably hot, until you remember that they have been waiting in those same conditions to see a provider, some of them for more than 12 hours.  That definitely put things in perspective.  Also, knowing it was our last day seeing patients before liberty helped quite a bit.  Not my most productive day at the site, but I was able to keep smiling until the end, so I consider it a success.

We are expected to get underway from El Salvador in the next hour or so.  I’m going to check on the preparations!

July 26, 2011 – The UNREP

Our big lament over the last 4 days was the fact that the ship’s communications system failed – or, in ship lingo, “comms went down.”  This happened abruptly on Friday and was apparently a failure of the “whiskey-8” (I have no idea what that is).  Once the site of failure was identified, the replacement piece was urgently shipped to meet us in Costa Rica, where we arrive in 2 more days.  (At least, that is the information we received originally – as it turns out, the replacement part arrived today, so comms is now back up – I’ll get to that later.)  The information technician was flown down to El Salvador, where he boarded the ship, ready to receive the missing part.  You can probably imagine that a complete loss of contact with the outside world creates some problems.  For the first 2 days of comms being down, we were still pierside in El Salvador, and some people were able to use 3G on their cell phones.  I was able to at least email home using this feature (on someone else’s Kindle) to tell Scott why I couldn’t call or send or receive emails from the ship.  However, once we left El Salvador, the 3G disappeared and so did every connection with the rest of the world.  The ship does have a limited number of satellite phones, which were available for 1-2 minute “morale calls,” basically enough time to tell our families we were safe and incommunicado.  After that, the only need for computer use was for intra-ship email, or use of the intra-net.  Since we finished our El Salvador mission on Saturday (the day after comms went down), there wasn’t a whole lot of intra-ship information to pass.  The people responsible for medical operations (Med Ops) were able to use the satellite phones to talk with the ACE (advance) team who are already in place in Costa Rica, but otherwise, not much got done.  I would never admit this to anyone except you, my loyal blog readers, but it was a teeny tiny bit liberating and relaxing not to have any outside communication.  Instead of everyone heading to the phones or computers after dinner, we all hung out and watched movies, played games, and talked.  As the days passed (4+ full days without comms altogether), the lack of communication got more and more frustrating, but there’s something to be said for complete lack of control over these things, and the fact that everyone (to include the Commodore and ship’s crew) was in the same boat (ha ha ha).  So how did the piece arrive early, you ask?

Well, today was my first (and probably last) Navy UNREP.  This stands for Underway Replenishment, and is actually composed of a COMREP (Communicating Replenishment? – not sure on this), and a VERTREP (Vertical Replenishment).  After much coordination, preparation, and briefing, as well as fancy maneuvering and velocity changing, the Comfort met up with the USNS Lewis and Clark (supply ship) at around 6am this morning.  I was sound asleep for this part, but basically, the two ships were connected by a fuel line (to take on fuel) and a zipline-looking apparatus.  After that, hundreds of pallets were transferred from the Lewis and Clark onto the Comfort via the zip-line (COMREP).  In addition, the helos that are stationed on the Comfort ran back and forth from ship to ship all day transferring additional pallets through the air (the VERTREP).  The very first item to come across the COMREP: the whiskey-8.  Within a couple of hours, the IT folks had it installed and outside emails came pouring in.  They kept the internet restricted to command and operational personnel, though, given the 4 days of backlogged work that needed to be accomplished.  However, by late last night, we were back to full-speed (i.e., slower than dial-up) internet ship-wide.  A huge morale booster, since Scott would be coming to visit me in Costa Rica in 2 short days, and we had no way of communicating!

In addition to the whiskey-8, the UNREP provided us with a fresh food supply, real ice cream (a fantastic treat which we already enjoyed last night), more paper towels (we were completely out), and a number of pharmacy and lab supplies that were badly needed.  Overall, there were over 600 pallets transferred over about 10 hours, so I’m sure there was other stuff delivered, but food, ice cream, and paper towels have been the most obvious replenishments so far.  I was able to watch the UNREP from the bridge (the control area for the ship) and talked with the ship’s Master (a civilian mariner) during the process.  It was wicked cool. =)

I mentioned that with no communications, people were sort of forced to spend time together.  These ended up being some of the best nights we’ve had on the ship.  It has been weeks since the sky has been clear enough to see stars at night, and the first 2 nights we were at sea (after leaving El Salvador), there was not a cloud in sight.  On top of that, there was no moon, and we were in the middle of the Pacific with not a single light around us – even the flight deck and upper weather deck were completely pitch black.  This made for some amazing stargazing.  I have never seen so many stars, and the Milky Way was unbelievably bright.  We saw 15-20 shooting stars over a few hours – and all around the flight deck you could hear people laughing and shouting when one crossed the sky.  It’s surprisingly easy to have deep conversations when looking at millions of stars and nothing else.  In an interesting coincidence, when comms came back up, a cloud cover set in and no stars were visible at all.  Maybe the communications failure was strategically planned…