Sea Story
Am I the only one who thinks that 99 & 44/100% of what's been on this website over the past ... let's say, 4-5 days .... has been a snoozer ... ??? 
:sleep_125 Important to a few, perhaps ... a sleeper to the masses ... ???
Where's flyin' ... where's operational "stuff" ... where's cruise "stuff" ... where's sea stories ... where's history ... where's tradition ... where's the beef ... ???
I need a vacation.
Here's a sea story I have been debating on posting. Partly because I don't want any "extra" attention as I am not a chest thumping, "look at meeee" kind of guy, and partly because if I told the whole story it would be 10 pages long...
But A4s wants sea stories so here is one of mine, I have more, many many more:
Here's a story (sea story) from a rescue swimmers' perspective. I have not told many people this story, for whatever reason, but have decided to post it here for some of you aspiring helo pilots to read and maybe get a little in-sight from the swimmers point of view. I shared the short version of this with phrogpilot73 a while ago to explain how I ended up with .1hrs of flight time.
At about 2200 on a very dark and stormy night, I was assigned to the alert-30 crew on a CVN in the Arabian Gulf. Our squadron XO walks into the ready room and says ?I think they are about to call away a man overboard (MOB). I was sitting in a chair reading a magazine, and looked up thinking "perfect, I'm at my MOB station". I even went as far as to go grab the clipboard to get ready to check people off as they entered the ready room for MOB muster. Sure enough, MOB was called away and people started filing into the ready room. One of my fellow 'dubs entered the ready room, looked at me and said "get your shit on let's go". I looked back at him and said "go where? I'm here", he was my alert-30 hoist operator, and promptly reminded me that I was the alert swimmer.
I had all my swimmer gear in the ready room with me and proceeded to get naked right there on the floor. People help me don my gear and by that time both pilots and the hoist operator were already in the helo. I swim through a sea of people lined up in the p-ways to get up to the flight deck. As I run across the flight deck to the helo, I could see a strobe in the water directly off the bow of the ship. The engines are running and I wait outside the rotor arc until we spin up. As soon as the rotor head is up I run to the helo, take a seat in the door, don a gunners belt, crack a chemlight, and high five the chock and chain runner.
We lift off and fly directly to the strobe I had seen as I ran across the flight deck. Pilots make an excellent approach to a hover directly over the strobe and hit the spotlight. I will never forget the look on the guys face as he looked up at us and I remember thinking ?wow! There is a real live dude down there?. Down the hoist I go. In perfect precision my hoist operator and pilots drop me directly on top of the guy, who proceeded to wrap me up in a nice bear huggy kind of thing. (Supposed to be dropped one rotor-arc away from survivors so that doesn't happen). I disconnect from the hoist, wrestle away, and make my approach back to the survivor. I establish control, ask the required questions and proceed to check him for injuries. As I am doing a leg sweep, he spins and starts to panic again. I surface in the middle of some rotor wash and wrap him up. He calms down and I continue checking him for injuries and or stuff that?s attached to him that shouldn't. When I come back up he seems fine, but right then we get nailed by a wave and he tries to spin again. I maintain control and even slide down his back to hold his head up out of the water a little more, and as I come back up there?s more rotor wash. I learned later that the pilots were having a hard time maintaining a steady hover because the winds were shifting. When I was ready to be hoisted I gave the "move in for pick-up" signal. The helo passed over us about four times, and each time my survivor panicked and tried to spin. Another problem was the sea state, as the hoist operator lowered the horse collar down to me it seemed to "jump" back up out of the water when I was close enough to grab it. Reality was we were dropping down into the troughs of the waves. My hoist operator finally let enough slack out to compensate for the waves and we were successfully hoisted up into the helo. All in all I spent about 12 minutes in the water and the entire rescue from take off to landing was about 18 minutes.
Interestingly enough, I told one of my RSS instructors the part of the story where the survivor wrapped me up and spun on me several times. He asked if it was mentioned in the SAR report and I said no, it pretty much went like this- "dude falls off carrier at night, helo crew rescues dude". He was kind of pissed because, at that time, they were trying to tone down the life saving part of RSS. The part that teaches you to deal with panicked people in the water.
All in all it was worth the coin to visit such a fine ship. :thumbup_1