Excerpt…
October 22, 2004
Slime Banks, north of the Alaska Peninsula
“I say we use him to troll for orcas.”
“That’s a little harsh, PO, don’t you think?” Sara said, trying not to laugh.
“Already tasked anyway,” Chief Mark Edelen said from the conn.
“Tasked how?” PO Barnette said, raising one skeptical eyebrow. Or so Sara assumed, as it was eleven p.m. of a Bering Sea winter’s night and there was nothing blacker this side of hell. The bridge had red filters duct-taped over the navigation and radar and fathometer screens, dimming their readouts and allowing everyone’s eyes to adjust to see out the windows. Except for Orion looming large on their starboard bow, there wasn’t a lot to see, and wouldn’t have been much beyond an endless green ocean even if it was daylight.
But even in the dark Barnette sounded skeptical, and also thwarted. Seaman Rosenberg, an eighteen-year old typically twirpish adolescent fresh out of boot camp had managed in only fifteen days underway to step all over the senior crewman’s toes.
There was a smile in the chief’s voice when he replied. “They duct taped his bunk shut, poked a hole in it, and sprayed it full of Right Guard.”
“Ouch,” Sara said. “Why?”
“Because he hasn’t had a shower since he got on board,” PO Barnette said, “and when you’re sleeping forty-two to a room it can get kind of rank. Plus he’s been puking his guts up ever since we left the dock. You can smell him coming a deck away.” A brief pause. “Ma’am.”
The smile in the chief’s voice was wider this time. “They also stuffed all his clothes into his duffle and filled it with Scrubbing Bubbles Basin Tub and Tile Cleaner.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Well, you know.”
“No. What?”
“It’s a disinfectant.”
Sara couldn’t help it, she let loose of the laugh that had been building for the last five minutes. She pulled herself together and cleared her throat. “I mean, this must stop, immediately.”
Dana sez–
In February 2004 I did a Bering Sea ridealong on USCGC Alex Haley. Sixteen days at sea, the first morning of which I woke up, sat up, and threw up. Yeah, baby. But it was an amazing experience, nothing at all like anything I’d ever done before, and inspired Blindfold Game. One of too many to count fascinating things I learned on patrol was that the US Coast Guard was the first US service to promote a woman to command at sea, and of armed ships, too. I wrote the character of Sara acutely conscious of the history and pride of the women of the US Coast Guard. She had to be someone worthy of them.
I will be forever grateful to one of the most hospitable and hardest working services in the world, the United States Coast Guard. My price for the trip was to write a daily blog on my website so that friends and families of the crew could ride along with us. I have collected those blog posts in an ebook, On Patrol with the US Coast Guard.
Chatter blindfold game On Patrol with the US Coast Guard us coast guard