Just try to lean against a lifeline in the US Navy sometime and see what happens next…
CARIBBEAN SEA (Sept. 2, 2007) – A visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) team member attached to Columbian frigate ARC Antioquia (FM 53) takes a break from training during PANAMAX 2007. Civil and military forces from 19 countries are participating in PANAMAX 2007, a U.S. Southern Command joint and multi-national training exercise co-sponsored with the government of Panama, in the waters off the coasts of Panama and Honduras. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Todd Frantom.
Do you end up swimming or do they let you live and make you scrub out the sewage system from the inside?
As I recall they just make you wish you were dead, rather than actually kill you.
But the experience never leaves you. And you don’t lean on the lifelines.
Lex,
When did that sillyness come about? That was one of the few pleasures we had to look out over the waves when we had a chance. They never used to care about leaning on the lifelines.
As long as I’ve been about, Richard. I got hollered at as a mid, then once again as a lieutenant junior grade and I guess I learned my lesson at last.
Never lean on a lifeline. When there’s a bosun’s mate around
… or sit on a bit, chock, VLS launcher, et al. While your at it, don’t go topside in weather, at night, or with the girls they put on Destroyers these days… day OR night. That is unless she’s the XO duly pointing out the inability of the DCPO’s in setting Dog Zebra.
I was a QM during my prior active duty life before becoming an HM in the reserves. Like the Bosun’s, the QM’s have their own weather decks to maintain. Doing so, you quickly learn the various weaknesses of those railings, especially as they’re all made of fiberglass these days.
I’d lean on them occasionally, but never in a manner that placed any real weight or force on them.
Thanks to the swaydo-anonymity of the intertubes, I can say that that fella is posing like a girl.
I hope that my next-door neighbor is not reading this, he being a Colombian and, unlike the short biddable Mexicans who mow the lawns here, right protective of his honor. And maybe proactive about it, too.
Just sayin…