Reporter's Notebook

The rooster tail, pt. 2

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ABOARD THE FREEDOM – The ship is settling into what passes for an underway routine, although nothing about this ship is routine, and even less so on its maiden voyage out of the Great Lakes. Rob and I served ourselves lunch in what could be the only Navy mess line in which the captain waits together with the ship’s most junior sailor, and then we sat down to eat in the crew’s mess. After the Freedom’s crew goes through the single serving line, which is about the size of a submarine’s, the enlisted sailors eat in the large mess, the chiefs eat in the goat locker and the officers in the wardroom. The chief’s mess and the wardroom both branch off the crew’s mess, but their doors are kept closed. We ate with disposable plastic forks on paper plates, to keep the ship from needing to dump its used dishwater in the lake.

Lake Michigan, though, was being dumped into the Freedom. Just forward of the mess, in the compartments under the forecastle, sailors bailed out the anchor windlass, the ship’s armory and the arms locker. As the ship crashed through the lake at 40 knots, it began shipping water up the hawser pipe, and about 5 feet of water was sloshing around a few compartments by the time the crew noticed it. An unlucky team of sailors in blue coveralls and gloves had to stand on deck handing up blue buckets and emptying them over the side.

Up on the bridge, the wind was carrying water from the ship’s bow wave over the port side of the superstructure, splashing onto the bridge windows. Trickles, then drops, splashed on the deck and the forward consoles. Navy tactical buckets and mission-focused garbage bags appeared quickly to protect the new ship.

A little later, I was sitting in the wardroom when one of the officers came in, laughing, with a paper plate of chow. One of the mess workers had just remonstrated a sailor in the mess line who had just secured from bailing water, but hadn’t taken off his cover before coming into the mess.

“I just scooped 9,000 gallons of water out of this ship,” he said, “and you’re yelling at me about my cover?”

The officers in the wardroom assured me the Freedom hadn’t shipped 9,000 gallons of lake water.

Blog note: Authored around 4 p.m. eastern time Monday, posted late because of network issues