Suez Transit

Well, we've now left Cyprus, and what an expensive time that turned out to be!! We arrived on Monday the 2nd at about 0930. We finished work at about 1500 and had a bus ride to Akrotiri Air base where we used their facilities to have a Junior rates Vs Senior rates football match. This had been organised for quite some time and was eagerly awaited by all concerned. Me, being a junior rate, was hoping for an easy victory over the old farts that adorn the senior rates mess!!! Well to cut a long story short, we won 8-2 and the game was enjoyed by all, there was only one unsavory moment when one of the JR's went through the back of one of the SR's. On completion we went back to the ship got changed and went out in Limmasol (I'm still not sure of the spelling). We had a great night and i ended up rather socially confused!! There were a few nasty incidents on the town but nothing too serious, people having wallets stolen and such! There was one lad who had strayed off the beaten track , and he earned himself a beating. He's OK, lucky, but OK. The following morning i was up at 0730 to go and play golf, eh, it's a hard life sometimes!!! There were 12 or 13 of us and i was so surprised that I'd actually managed to drag my hung over bum out of bed! We played at Secret Valley Golf club, and my word, it was awesome. The course itself was being re-seeded, so we had to T up on the fairways, which was a bit weird! But the Views, well, they were spectacular to say the least. We'd hired buggy's because 90% of us were still suffering and couldn't bear the walk. The course did have a few nasty looking hills. Well, my four ball consisted of Me, obviously, my boss WO2 "Ginge" Harvey, one of our tracker queens (that's an affectionate nickname for our targeting radar maintainers) PO Andy Beatie, and the ships Copper RPO (Regulating Petty Officer) Cozy Powell. I was driving our buggy, i was with Ginge. He's never getting in any kind of vehicle with me again!! I've always driven like i stole it! What can i say. We got back onto the ship at about 1900 and i was that tired I pretty much went strait to bed, as i was duty the next day. The duty is sitting in the ships control center monitoring alarms! really boring stuff, but someones got to do it. The duty lasts for 24 hours and in that time i cannot leave the ship, and i work 6 hours about with another lad or lass. The duty was uneventful and when the following day we sailed for the Suez canal. Yesterday we had some rapid rope training for the Royal Marine lads that had joined us when we left Souda Bay. This is where the guy's jump out of the Helicopter onto the flight deck/forecastle of another ship for boarding. All was going well, and then the OCRM (Officer Commanding Royal Marines) jumped from the helo and descended a little too quickly, landed funny and has been flown back to Akrotiri because he's in such a bad state, he'll live though and the injury is not life threatening. It does just go to show that this sort of thing can happen to anyone, not just jolly jack!! We're now preparing to go through the Suez canal and have closed down to action stations (our highest alert status) and then settled into what we call state 2, where all the ship, apart from the boarding party work 6 hours or 12 hours about, so half the ship is awake and able to man weapons in a very short space of time. Well, i think that's enough for now. I'll speak again soon. TTFN.