Sea Story Thursday, where I tell you a Navy related Story, just because.

How Sea Story Thursday was born:

My Uncle & Dad. That’s the plain and simple reason. While on leave they both kept bringing up stories I had told them over the past few years at sea. My Uncle told me that he loved to tell my stories to anyone who would listen. hmmmm… I’ve got plenty more where that came from, maybe I’ll make it a weekly rendition. Done!

This week I’m going to tell you about how I almost got poop dumped all over my body. To start, we were anchored off the coast of Thailand with the big deck amphib. What does this mean? Always at their beck and call, that’s what it means. Whatever they want, whenever they want it. Which is how I ended up in the small boat on my way over to pick up a few people that needed taken into port.

They had been anchored in the same spot for the past couple of days. Let’s just say there were approximately 5,000 people on board. So think about it, that’s 5,000 people on a ship that’s been sitting in the same spot for the past couple of days. That’s also 5,000 people going to the bathroom a couple of times a day each. Where’s all of that waste going you ask? I’ll just say there aren’t tanks big enough on any ship for all that. As a safe bet, you wouldn’t want to be in the water anywhere in the immediate vicinity for probably up to a week after they left, and that’s being generous.

As we approached I could see that they had not secured the overboard discharge . I could physically see the contents of humans being discharged overboard. That is not a chute you want to be beside… everrrrr. On most ships it is a requirement to secure this discharge because when you come alongside in most cases your boat would be right under it. If you don’t secure the discharge your hoping NO ONE flushes while you’re under there. In this case, with this ship, we wouldn’t be right underneath the chute so therefore it did not seem a big deal to secure.

We waited until told to come alongside, and once signaled we approached ready to catch the lines thrown down to us. As we approached a CH-46 Sea Hawk helicopter came flying inbound. They were having helicopters land on the flight deck right above us as we were coming alongside! In the span of 1 minute this is what happened. The CH-46 blew us into the side of the amphib, we missed all of the lines as they were being thrown down, and we started moving aft (back) right for the “poop chute” in question. Lord. Have. Mercy.

All I could think of was to yell at the coxswain and frantically point at the discharge to ensure he knew to steer us clear of there. I’m pretty sure that didn’t help the situation whatsoever, but its all I could think of to do in the moment. If we somehow did end up underneath that discharge then it would be a boatload of poop for the 5 of us. I don’t know what I would have done if that had happened, probably vomit.

As it were, the boat engineer, who went by “Deeds” was an engineer in my division. I knew him pretty well. Enough to know that he had this huge OCD about cleanliness. As engineers my guys were always dirty for some reason or another but Deeds would always be scrubbing the dirt off of his hands, arms, and face with orange goop. I’m sure any mechanics or construction workers know what I’m talking about.

Well I watched him turn pale as a sheet because he was going to have to stick his hand in the water to get the line that we had missed, and let’s be clear, we could all see what was in the water. He gagged about 2 times and I knew it was going to get ugly fast.

In the end, the guys from above pulled the ropes out of the water and thew them down to us (I don’t think they saw what was in the water). We still gagged when we had to grab them and I think I saw Deeds washing his hands every 20 minutes for the rest of the day, when we got back to the shop onboard our own ship, but we survived it all, poop free. Looking back, its the closest I’ve ever come to being shit on.. literally.

At this point, we are just trying to get the hell out of there!

This article appeared first on Dynamic Soarer