Reporter's Notebook

Downtime

PORT HURON, MICH. – The chemical plumes from the Esso refinery across the Saint Claire River looked lovely this morning from the flight deck of the Freedom, framed against just a touch of sunrise pink on the eastern horizon. The sky above still is a permanent layer of steel wool, however, and the wind off the river still hits you like a razor.

Clusters of technicians in Carhart jackets and baseball caps have been coming aboard the ship this morning to help repair the generators and main propulsion diesels. We now have a replacement valve and four spares from Fairbanks-Morse to fix the one that cracked on the port engine late Monday. Two men in denim shirts from Isotta-Franchini are at work in Auxiliary Room 1 on the generators, tiptoeing over a thousand tiny disassembled parts laid out on the deck.

The skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, came on the 1MC this morning to try to set straight the mess-deck intelligence about what would happen today. I’d heard that we would be underway by dawn this morning, which didn’t happen, and I’d also heard the ship wouldn’t sail at all. The real goal, Gabrielson said, was to get two generators operating by 1300 and then cast off. The diesels are operational again, he said, and a pair of working generators would give us one to power the ship’s hotel load and one to keep on standby. The speed limit down the Saint Claire River is only about 10 knots, so the Freedom probably wouldn’t use its gas turbines anyway, although it could. Other 1MC announcements this morning have extinguished the smoking lamp as trucks come up the pier to deliver fuel.

The crew can’t relax much, even with the ship tied up. Everyone swept or mopped or polished during Cleaning Stations earlier, which, as our gouge sheet calls it, “is an all-hands evolution.” The interior spaces on the Freedom gleam like an operating room. I know it’s a new ship, but the sailors seem to have really taken to the all-hands-keep-it-clean mentality, because they realize there aren’t extra people to do the job.

When sailors do have down time, the Freedom has the nicest accommodations in the Navy for a ship this size. Rob and I saw them last night when we were hanging out in an enlisted berthing space with some engineers – who were extremely cool, by the way, about showing us their stuff and being patient with Rob’s TV camera. (Nobody likes dealing with reporters, and I don’t blame them.) The sailors have roomy racks, with enough space to sit up and use a laptop computer, as well as their own head, shower and sink. The berthing space also has its own plasma TV, which, we learned, displays Dallas Cowboys football games.

We saw the ship’s gym, which is a dedicated space, unlike the makeshift workout rooms on many surface ships. It doubles as the barber shop. We also saw the crew’s lounge, which, for my money, is the nicest relaxation area on board the Freedom. It has a full rack of consumer-electronics goodies bolted to the deck, including a giant Sony Bravia plasma-screen TV; an XBox360; a Blu-Ray DVD player; and surround sound, complete with stereo speakers wired above the overhead pipes and cables. A retired sailor in Milwaukee with consumer electronics connections donated all the gear, we learned: the crew got the XBox; the chief’s mess got a PlayStation 3; and the wardroom has a Nintendo Wii.

But we’ve heard over and over that nobody has had time for video games.