Reporter's Notebook

“The porta-potty light is on”

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ABOARD THE FREEDOM — The ship’s executive officer, Cmdr. Kris Doyle, was giving a safety brief for our small group of newcomers in the helo hangar when the bell sounded and the massive “garage door” opened to the windswept flight deck outside. Sailors in hard hats and coveralls began wheeling plastic portable toilets in from the flight deck, where they’d been landed by a shore crane. The Freedom is an open-ocean ship, Doyle explained, and so it doesn’t have the wastewater system of a Great Lakes boat. The Navy is trying to “do the right thing,” she said, and comply with rules that forbid the dumping of wastewater in the lakes. The ship’s showers and heads will be secured until it reaches the open ocean, she said, meaning that for our trip, “the porta-potty light is on.”

We have a cardboard pallet of bottled water in the cabin for hand-washing and basic drinking, and there’s a potential we could get “water hours,” for showering, at some point during the transit. The crew has been experimening with how much wastewater the Freedom can store before it needs to offload it to a barge on the pier, and so far, they seem to have struck a good balance; the sailors we’ve seen are no grungier or smellier than your average bluejacket.

The Freedom can push itself away from the dock without the aid of a tug, we learned, and as soon as the final preparations are made, the ship should cast off before lunch. Doyle told us we’ll be making a full-bore, high-speed run up Lake Michigan today “on full CODAG,” a.ka. at full speed, powered by the Freedom’s combined diesel and gas-turbine powerplant. Cutting this 3,000-ton ship at 40 knots through the lake should be a nice way to get this trip started off right.

But the Freedom’s relatively shallow draft — around 12 feet — has its downside, too.

“She rides nice when she’s going fast,” Doyle said. “When she’s going slow, not so much.”