On Sat, 14 Jan 2017 21:33:31 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 1/14/2017 7:54 PM, wrote:
On Sat, 14 Jan 2017 13:34:48 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 1/14/2017 12:27 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 13 Jan 2017 14:01:54 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

I've been on enough cruises to last me, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

It is not quite the same but I understand the sentiment. When Judy was
in the AC biz, cruises seemed to be the sales prize of choice and she
won a bunch of them.



True. The only time I had an authorized drink aboard ship was when the
Captain ordered "Splice the mainbrace" following an arduous underway
replenishment and refueling in the middle of the winter.

On the CG ocean stations they roll out a keg of beer on "hump day" the
middle of a 4 week patrol. It ends up being just about enough for
everyone to get one of those big navy coffee mugs full.



The cutter my grandson is assigned to just returned from a drug
interdiction patrol during which they seized 90 million dollars worth of
cocaine. The drugs were confiscated from four, high speed outboard
powered boats. They launch a helicopter from the flight deck that goes
out and fires on the outboard engines, disabling them and then an armed
boarding team takes over.


Yup the CG is back to being policemen now. That was not in our scope
of work when I was there.
They were originally the revenue cutter service, catching smugglers
(circa 1790) and that continued up until the end of prohibition. At
the end of WWII they were back to lifesaving and a small contingent of
"weather cutters" that also doubled as sub hunters once the Soviets
started getting frisky in the North Atlantic. By the mid 60s we had
"weather men" who never seemed to look at the weather much and they
lived and worked with the Sonar Men in separate quarters. They were
certainly not part of the ordinance department or the RM/ET gang.
Guys on the "white ones" were basically in the navy.
I got back to the small boats in the DC reserve unit. We had a 40
footer that we rode around but politics kept us from actually
"patrolling".
The CG regulars were afraid if we started doing their job the might
end up in SE Asia and the DC cops didn't want anyone but them north of
the Wilson Bridge. There are lots of turf wars in DC. If the chiefs
had not negotiated the boats themselves we would have never got them.
We were still working on a virtual zero budget but 2 of the guys
worked at International Harvester, fixing the same 6-71s the 40 footer
had. They managed to come up with all the parts we needed and get the
engines going. There were several handy guys around to fix the rest of
the broken stuff. I got my "ride" by rewiring the boat.