The Photo of the Week for this week was taken from my room last semester. This is a RoRo (Roll-On Roll-Off) vehicle carrier ship, passing the Mass Maritime campus transiting the Cape Cod Canal. Notice how, even from my elevated angle on the 04 deck, it towers over everything on campus, including the Bresnahan Building (the one with the glass front), with a height of more than 3 stories!
We had a helicopter land on the parade field today, and do some low altitude flying over the campus. It was doing surveying and research for a new experimental low-power RADAR system to integrate with the wind turbine. The system is intended to automatically control the aviation indicator lights on the top of the windmill, so that they can be turned on and off depending on whether aircraft are in the area.
Today I had my whaleboat qual (short for qualification). We’re tested on the boat and line handling procedures we’ve been learning for the past couple of weeks, on a points system for various stages of the operation. The procedure was the same as it’s been while we’ve been practicing - undocking, maneuvering outboard of the Enterprise, making an approach, and docking again. This time, however, we were making a starboard landing (starboard side of the boat against the dock) instead of a port landing, which was how we’d been practicing.
This week’s Photo of the Week is out of my archives from Sea Term 2008. I took this photo while on board a similar vessel doing snorkel tours of various points of interest, including a sunken German freighter.
I’m going to start a new segment called Photo of the Week. Every Friday, I’m going to post a photograph of something MMA-related that either I or another cadet has taken. If you have a photo you’ve taken of something at or relating to MMA that you’d like me to post, please e-mail me to let me know.
Today was the annual Spring Career Fair here at MMA, where dozens of companies come to try and recruit this year’s graduating class, as well as some of the other cadets for internships and cooperatives. There were close to 100 companies represented, from all over the country and the world. I only stopped and talked with a few companies, since the main focus of this career fair was to help juniors and seniors line up jobs, so underclassmen were a lower priority.
I found this video, I’m guessing put together by a parent, of the Enterprise going through the Miraflores locks in the Panama Canal on our return trip. I’m pretty sure that I have photographs looking right back at that camera. I’m really glad that somebody recorded these shots, so thank you to whoever posted this!
Today was the Welcome Aboard event at the Academy. This is a day specifically for high school seniors who have been accepted into next year’s freshman class. It allows them to get a more in-depth sense of some of the things MMA has to offer, such as firefighting, cold water survival, small boat handling, and basic engineering. I was one of the cadets running the Semester at Sea seminar, where future cadets got to see pictures and videos from previous Sea Terms, get information about life as a freshman on the Enterprise, and have a question and answer session.
I found this video while surfing YouTube, and thought it would be interesting to share: Looks pretty awesome to me! It certainly provides motivation to do well here.
