We've got yellow, red, blue and white. I guess I'd be brown then, but I think a "plane captain" in the Navy is different than one in Coast Guard. I talked to a guy who'd come over from the Navy, and he was telling us he was a plane captain on an F-18...as an E-4 or E-5. And this guy was a friggin rock. Dumber'n hell I tell ya. Out here, it's my plane. I give the plane to the pilots, and manage all the maintenance, inspections, QA's, maintenance release from grounding discreps, everything. I am the maintenance department out here. The helo, and the $1.5 mill support kit are my all my baby. I'm enjoying this trip because I get to run things my way. This is my first deployment as an E-6, and I'm enjoying that aspect of it too. When I talk, people actually listen. I've done this job before, as an E-5 out of Kodiak a few years ago when the E-6 on the trip had a melt-down and I took over. Man, I couldn't get shit done on that boat as an E-5. I was excluded from planning meetings, everyone second guessed my call and on it went. Here I say the sky is green, and half the boat agrees with me without even asking a question.
That bass trip was a hoot. It was the funniest thing ever when we got there, and there's these little ass POS boats that they want to cram us all in. I thought to myself, "yeah, this oughtta be good!" I added some pics. In one of them you can see the boat we took out. It's the blue one with the little canopy over it. They had five of us in that thing. And the fish in the pics are the average we caught that day. They didn't get much bigger than that.
I'm countin the days now. It's either 17 or 13 depending on where they drop us off at. But it's OK being underway. My mustache is so far out of regs it's stupid. I'm half way to a full-on fu-man-chu!
Later,
Jeff
AMT1 Jeff Breidenbach
Plane Captain 6514/CGC Mellon
"I am the Walrus...Coo-Coo-Ca-Choo!"
Gary
Sounds like they had a blast despite the boat!
