Thursday, October 19, 2006

Tiger team continues...

Well into week two of tiger team. I've learned a LOT so far about the equipment on the boat. Lots of work, and long hours, but I'm enjoying it anyway. It's actually really good to not be on crew for a while. We're split up into a days and a mids tiger team, and we overlap each other by about an hour on either side, so it ends up being 13 or 14 hours a day, which isn't all that bad. No time to get anything done outside of work, but enough to get a decent amount of sleep once I get off work. Today we start installing new flash arrestors on all the battery cells, which is going to be very cramped, awkward, itchy work. The battery well is pretty small, and there's lots of fiberglass to work into your skin while you're working. The whole job will probably take about 48 hours, so I get two shifts of it...

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Tiger Team

We just started a month-long maintenance availability shutdown at work yesterday. I'm on the tiger team for this one which means that I'm working for EOD instead of my crew for the next month. All the big-item repairs and replacements that can't be done when we're critical and steaming get pushed off until a shutdown, and then tiger team tries to get three months of work done in three or four weeks. So for the next month or so, I'll be working 14-18 hour days at all kind of wierd hours, doing maintenance around the clock, and not doing any student training. I'm kind of looking forward to it for the experience, but I'm not sure yet how tough it's going to be. We'll see