What is the bloodhound award you ask? Well its pretty much the only award available to the sonar tech’s on board ships. And when I say only award, I mean only award for the sonar techs fleet-wide, so its obviously kind of a big deal. Since joining the navy I haven’t wanted to get any awards and I surely haven’t been seeking any accomplished letters. As far as my fitrep goes, its meaningless.  I do what I do because its what I want to do, not to make me better than people. But this award, given out once a year, allows you to say that you are the best sonar division on the East Coast for the WHOLE year. I’m really really really excited about it.

When I wrote the award for my division I took extreme care  and read through it like 20 times because I wanted it to be really good and very well written. I take a lot of pride in that stuff, I really believe that my division deserves it, and I really want them to get it, more than anything. We’ve been going through of stuff over the past year and I ran the division without a chief for 5 months and we were still doing great even when I didn’t have good direction, and also when I had to deal with the guys who have a problem if they can’t talk to a chief specifically. You’d be surprised how much weight that collar device carries between first class to chief.

So, I spent a good deal of time on it and luckily, I’ve been writing papers for a long freaking while, so I used every resource I had available. When it did go to the captain for reviewal he only made five changes and I was pretty happy with those results. We have submitted the award but it will be  a few more moths time before we find out who wins the award.

In the event that we do win, we get to raise a flag on our ship for the whole year with a bloodhound on it, showing that we have the best sonar tech’s on the whole east coast. And also, we will look very good because we haven’t been deployed yet.

I might not care about single awards, but I really take pride in awards received by the whole group, in fact, I’d say I’m more excited about it then my division is and I’m not even a sonar tech, I’m just the ASWO. ha.