Henry

Just home from seeing ‘Uncle Henry’ as he has been referring to himself. It was a great show, just under 3 hours of his rambling entertaining style of spoken word performance. He ranged from old stories of Black Flag, the current political candidates, his travels and work with National Geographic channel, getting older and a hundred things in between.

All in all, a great night of entertainment and being with others like me.

Now I need sleep.

Tattooed

Old School Sailor Jerry style pig and rooster. Freshly done. Now I’m unsinkable.

Tattoo time

made an appointment for my next tattoo. Doing up the feet with some slightly modified old school Sailor Jerry flash designs. A rooster on my right foot and a pig on the left.

It’s an old sailor tradition and superstition about staying afloat and finding your way to shore. It seems that neither animal can swim, but they were often the survivors of shipwrecks due to being in crates and floating to shore.

I need to stay afloat.

My travels on the ocean.

so, after doing some searches of distances, I can tell you that it is roughly 7,357 nm from San Diego, CA to Abu Dhabi, UAE as the crow flies. We didn’t go as the crow flies and spend a lot of time backtracking and stopping for ports of call and the like. I made that trip, and back again, twice so that would put it at least 30,000 nm. I saw another post that put the journey to the Persian Gulf at around 12,000 nm and that would put me at at least 48,000 nm.

So, I’m guessing it’s in the neighborhood of 50,000 nm with all the deployments, drills, time on station and various trips to and from ports of call. Of course this is just a slightly educated wild ass guess.

In that time I visited: Phillipines (multiple times), Hong Kong (x2), Singapore (x2), Australia (x2), Abu Dhabi, Korea, Hawaii (x2 and later stationed there), Thailand (x2), Diego Garcia.

That’s a lot of miles

...speaking of old sailor traditions

my friend Candlejack wants to get some swallows to represent his miles of driving across the country and it occurred to me that I really should look up how many NM I’ve actually done while in the Navy. The tradition is a swallow for every 5000 NM traveled.

The problem is, I don’t really know how to go about figuring that out. I know I went on 2 full Western Pacific deployments and one was in support of the Desert Shield/Desert Storm so we spent a lot of time churning up the ocean. I just don’t know the exact distance or even a reasonable guess.