An Update from Bobby

An update from the Caribbean, things are going well so far. The ship completed its first two stops in Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua and Santa Marta, Colombia. Our det did a lot of flying people back and forth from the ship. We were really busy because one of our aircraft was down (broken for those that don’t know the “lingo”) for quite a time. Fortunately the maintainers were able to finally figure out something that was causing the problems, after a ton of head scratching, enormous pressure from the ship folks and 2 engine changes. Nicaragua was a real eye opener. The area was really deserving of the medical and engineering services that the ship was able to provide. Colombia was a little more developed, at least around the port area. Colombia was more mountainous than Nicaragua, which made it much more scenic to fly around in. It was around this time that Hurricane Gustav had already done its damage through the Caribbean and well on its way to the Gulf Coast as well as Hurricane Ike was starting to look like it was going to wreak some real havoc in the Caribbean again. So as you know we were diverted from Colombia to Haiti. Our scheduled visit there in Colombia was cut short a couple of days. In addition to that, this diversion also cut our first port visit out of the picture totally. As anyone knows, the easiest way to make a sailor mad is to take away a liberty port. It actually worked out well for the whole crew. After a night of steaming Northeast we were off the coast of Haiti. Let the fun begin. Haiti really needed our help and immediately the ship started rendering aid and assistance. The helicopters, both our detachment and the USMC detachment started flying quite a bit. At first we started flying bags of rice, boxes of water, MRE’s and vegetable oil all over the northern part of the country. This was the hardest hit part of the country. In addition to that we flew quite a few passengers to assess the damage. I flew the US Ambassador, Congressional delegates from Maryland, New York, and Florida, the Forth Fleet Admiral, the Commodore and the Captain of the ship, so they all could see first hand the damage as well. We also flew some real world missions that included rescuing some American citizens that were living in Haiti. I think some of them might have been missionaries there, but I am not entirely sure about that.

With the amount of flying that we were doing, supplies were running short. The ship left about half through our time in Haiti and headed over to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It gave us a day and half of liberty there on the base. My roommate John, Jackie and Myself all went snorkeling and it was a blast, real gorgeous water and very clear. The ship hosted beer on the pier later that night. Unfortunately it was warm beer, but I don’t think anybody that was there really cared. Plus it was advertised as a MWR fund raiser with beers being $2 a pop; however, when people got up to the make shift bar it was actually free all night long. As I am sure you can image there were a lot of happy sailors, marines and others that night. Probably the rowdiest of all being our little family, the SARDET.
GITMO was a real nice base, I was pleasantly surprised.

Time to get back to business, the ship headed back to Haiti and continue with the Humanitarian/Disaster Relief mission. The flights continued with great gusto. We did lots of fling people here and there, but one of the good parts about it was that when we were on a return leg with no passengers in the back we would take the opportunity to do some fling up in the mountains and valleys. It really has lots of gorgeous landscapes, and few waterfalls. The dwellings weren’t much to speak of, but you could tell that people really lived off the land. There were also lots of Mango, Palm and other various tropical trees, in addition to a lot of rice paddies. One really neat area that we flew over had flocks of flamingo’s wading in the shallow water (at least I assume it was shallow). It was really neat and as we would get closer and the flamingos would hear our rotor noise, suddenly they would take to the sky. It was really quite a neat site to see.

Some of the area that was really damaged was in the north of Haiti, in particular a town called Gonaives. Even a week after the second storm hit, a lot of the town was still flooded. People were airing there belongings on their roofs. Cars were stuck in the mud, what cars there were. Lots a roads were washed out. The rivers were overflowing with mud that had washed downs from the mountains. The water was quite a chalky brown color. It was really neat to see that from the sky when it would mix at where the sea and the river mouths met. I hope you have enjoyed this “little” update. I will have to keep doing more from the next places that we go to help. Enjoy and Aloha, Bobby!!!