Southern Seas pt. 4
St. Lucia
Fortaleza, Brasil
Salvador, Brasil
Montevideo, Uruguay
Bahia Blanca, Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Puerto Montt, Chile
Puntas Arenas, Chile
Coquimbo, Chile
Callao, Peru
Panama City, Panama
Willemstad, Aruba
St Nicholas, Curacao
Santa Marta, Columbia
It’s finally that time, back in my parent division once again working on stuff I originally
enlisted to work on. I did my 120 straight days of hell in the supply division performing
my ‘mess duties’, and it feels spectacular to have my hands back in gear and getting the
gears in my mind turning. Unfortunately with the shift in my actual work type comes
a big shift in schedule, instead of working from 0500-2000 every night I do a typical
workday of 8 hours plus my watch (which is normally 1800-00). I’ve definitely been kept
quite busy trying to catch back up on my required qualifications as well as getting my
head back into comprehending how electronics work (or don’t work, in most cases).
It’s been quite a blast looking at that list above of the places we’ve visited, stories to be
told, and experiences to never forget (whether good or bad).
Panama City, Panama
We really didn’t get much of a chance to check this place out, unfortunately. We had
quite a bit of things to have tended to but we did get the opportunity to transit the Panama
Canal. The transit was supposed to take around 12 hours or so, we broke the fucker down
into nearly 3. Its an amazing feeling when you’re sitting there on the flight deck watching
the whole transit evolution take place and seeing out across the canal where a hundreds
of men were once slaving away trying to accomplish the impossible man-made wonder it
is today. Its pretty neat in how the canal works, and how advanced it was for its day and
still how advanced and full-proof it is to this day.
Willemstad, Aruba
I called my dad the minute we got to the little strip of hotels and told him I was in Aruba,
his response was “get the fuck out, fucking Aruba?!”. Yeah, fucking Aruba is that
awesome. The island is really small, absolutely beautiful, no humidity whatsoever. We
ran into a guy that could get us 3 ATVs for $20 USD an hour with nothing down but
our last names and where we were staying. Apparently there was a trail all around the
island that was right off the coast and was all types of terrain and passed by a dozen or
so landmarks. All along the coast was a neat assortment of pumice and other stones that
people had been stacking in neat little stacks (single rock on top of each other) all over
the coast for decades, it gave a kind of erie feeling kind of like the people were still alive
in spirit there.
The island was absolutely beautiful, with a good assortment of locals and dutch visitors it
really gave a good atmosphere and really made me have a fever for dutch women. Mmm,
dutch women.
St Nicholas, Curacao
All I can really say about this place was that it was a total disappointment. There wasn’t
much to do and really reminded us of the visit to St. Lucia. It was all way too touristy and
didn’t have much to do outside of sitting in the hotel or doing some lame tour of a mall.