Roy and his toy

 Some of you may know that while I was stationed at the Oak Island Coast Guard Station it burned down. Right down to the ground. Luckily, I was on leave at the time. Well, with it went our medical records and those needed to be replaced. This meant we all had to go get a physical at a Coast Guard Health office about an hour drive away. We went in groups of 5 and the first group was myself along with the usual suspects, Billie Ward, SN Roy, Hartfield, and another guy. This is a great example of how troublemakers aren't out causing trouble, we walk into it blindly.
    We get to this clinic and all sit down in the waiting room which is directly across from the only exam room in the clinic. The doctor, a women in her mid to late 70's, with hair so grey it looks blue, announces to the group that she'll see us one at a time and we should all be done in about an hour. First up is Seaman Roy, a short guy who can be a little up tight and professional at times, he was a reservist who was placed back on active duty as the Iraq war was getting started which put on hold his job at a local grocery store. He is led back to the exam room and the door is shut behind him. We wait patiently. After about fifteen minutes we hear someone fall to the floor. It's loud, like, someone really ate shit in there. A few minutes pass as we silently wonder what happened. Roy walks out and sits down in the waiting room with us. He says nothing, looking straight ahead and his face is beet red. Something definitely happened in there. Billie and I lean in and discreetly ask the question that's on everyones mind. "What the fuck happened dude"? He immediately becomes very animated as he describes the situation involving a hernia exam. For the sake of those who don't know what that involves, basically the doctor holds your balls and asks you to cough. In this case the elderly doctor had Roy stand up on a very small step stool and pull his pants all the way down to his ankles. He said her hand was so freezing cold that it jolted him, causing him to lose his balance and with his feet tied together by his pants down and the small area in which he was standing caused him to fall to the floor taking the doctor to the ground with him. Naked from the waist down with his sausage flopping all over this poor women as he rolls around on the floor trying to pull his pants up and regain control of the situation. Both Roy and the doctor were very embarrassed. There was a good half hour before the next person was brought back. The small stool was kept in the corner during the following exams which were notably awkward.

K1000

Sitting on the bookshelf behind me is a Pentax K1000. It’s a 35mm film camera that was made quite a long time ago. I bought the camera while in photography class back in high school. My dad took me to a camera swap meet where I paid a hefty $65 dollars for it and with an otherwise D average, I was proudly earning an A in photography. All of these years later and the camera is still working just fine. Where’s all these great photos you ask, well, I brought the camera with me to my first unit in the Coast Guard. I joined the Coast Guard for an adventure, as many kids my age had, but I had a passion for photography and a genuine desire to capture the next four years. I quickly earned the reputation on the ship for being the guy always taking pictures. Looking at this camera now I can recall so many times I was told to put it away. So many eye rolls and the all too often “Not now” as it was heard through the passageways of the USCGC Mobile Bay. A 140’ tug boat built for breaking ice on the Great Lakes. It also had a barge with a large crane used for pulling buoys out of the water every fall and replacing them with much smaller buoys that could handle the harsh environment of a frozen Lake Michigan, 173 in total. I began documenting every aspect of life aboard the ship.

      There was so many incredible moments that unfolded on that ship that I’m grateful that I had that camera in my hand. Like the time I smuggled it on a CG helicopter by stuffing it in my drysuit where I was able to photograph the entire training day from the back seat. Reaching out over the airman as he hoisted the basket from the water and hanging it from the ceiling of the helo while it was my turn to get in the water. On another occasion I would document several crew members chainsawing out a 20ft square in the ice, several feet thick, and then as the tug boat, tied to it, would pull it out of the water. The entire ice shelf shook violently as it lifted out of the water and slid away scaring the shit out of us as we stood on the ice, mere feet away. The ice block weighed over 5000 lbs by a later estimate. We went swimming in the fridged waters and called it “training”. When an icebreaker stops in the ice the water freezes so fast that it's immediately safe to lower a ladder and walk out on the ice. Of course with the serious events also came the less serious, like, the time we went clay shooting off the stern smack in the center of Lake Michigan and then jumped off the 03 deck (the highest point on the ship) into the water as a morale outing. Once I snuck out on the bridge wing to get a shot of the captain while we passed beneath the famous Mackinac Bridge. I, to this day, believe he knew what I was doing and waited until the shutter snapped to yell at me thus satisfying the Executive officer (the bad cop in all situations). The Coast Guard used one of my photos in a training aid, it was of a lone seat cushion floating in still waters far from land. The fishing boat it belonged to was never found despite our surface search radar and a week of an expanding circle search pattern. The ships radar could locate a toilet paper tube 3 miles away and that was all that was found. I was shooting a roll of film a week for two straight years on that ship.

      My photo collection along with all my negatives were lost when my second duty station, Small Boat Station Oak Island, burned down. I walked away from photography for almost 5 years after that. There were so many opportunities for me to mail home or drop off the negatives, or copies of everything, but I didn’t.

Watchstander

The song "Hanging by a moment" by Lifehouse reminds me of my time spent on the USCGC Mobile Bay. It's not because I was listening to it a lot but because while on the Mobile Bay, when I had to stand a watch from 12-4am, which was often, I was supposed to do an hourly round of the ship but instead would sit on the mess deck and watch VH1's show Insomniac, a four hour long show of nothing but music videos, and during this show I would not do a single round. Unfortunately, the songs music video was being played in heavy rotation. A round is an hourly walk-thru of the ship with the purpose of preventing fires and flooding, and whatever else might happen to a 140ft tug boat that might as well be welded to the fucking pier. The funny thing is, none of us were very honest about our watch standing and really how could you expect us to be. Not a single person on that ship could honestly see the importance of walking through every room in the ship every hour perpetually. Things you had to check on and write down included refrigerator temps, a few electrical gauge readings, and what the tiny dial said on every fire extinguisher on the entire ship, i.e. Full or Fill. Needless to say we would simply not do it at all and just make it look like we had in the log book. Once I forgot to fake it in the log book entirely and didn't realize it until I was already in bed. I got up out of my rack and went down to the mess deck to fill it in as if I had done something other than watch music videos and soft core porn but Dena, another deck dept loser who was on watch from 4-8am, got all pissed off about it as if she ever does any of her rounds. Ha! Ridiculous. She was one of the biggest skates on the ship, next to SN Jennifer Bauer of course. I talked her down and she never told on me but it was close. Dena was in an intimate relationship with the junior officer, LTJG Tom Crane, so she didn't have much room to talk and everyone knew it. We especially knew it when Dena almost got into a fist fight several months later when Cranes new girlfriend and her met at the aforementioned SN Bauer's wedding. Oddly enough, SN Bauer's marriage lasted a mere 6 months. What a circus.