Today is Friday, May 10th, 2024, day 5 of our planned tropical cruise to the Mediterranean. We are still anchored in Searsport, however, morale is high. As I woke up to my alarm at 0550 this morning, I was greeted by an orange sunrise lighting up my stateroom. This is the first time we have seen the sun since departure day. It was definitely needed. Delta was on Utility today, meaning that most of the day was free, apart from cleaning duties after morning muster and lunch.

In preparation for the Palfinger representative (the individual coming out to inspect Lifeboat 4), utility was tasked with cleaning and making up two spare rooms onboard. We also cleaned the stairwells, both in the morning and after lunch. There isn’t anything interesting about cleaning, but it needs to get done. Charlie had their second training evolution today.  On the deck side of training, they were doing line handling practice, which is always a fun activity. Cadets are taught about line handling as well as safety when handling lines. The fun part, however, is the stopper knot race. The stopper knot race is a race to see who can tie the fastest stopper and is a competition between the freshmen and juniors.

After lunch, we had a demonstration of the inflation of one of our demo life rafts. These life rafts are designed to either be manually released or hydrostatically released (meaning they inflate after submerging a certain depth). Each raft is designed to hold twenty-five persons. The ship’s crew inflated the raft and then we filled it with the freshman. All twenty-five of them fit, and happily sang ‘Firework’ by Katy Perry while sitting inside. The Palfinger representative also arrived this afternoon, after being ferried out to the TSSOM by the Pentagoet.

We ended off the day with the smoke alarm in the ship’s store going off yet again, for the second day in a row, due to the popcorn machine. I can foresee 1700 popcorn turning into a daily smoke alarm and jump scare on the bridge.

Post by: 2/C Shail Leszkowicz, MTO Delta Company

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