United States Merchant Marine - Radio Electronics Officer
The term Merchant Marine simply means the profession of sailing on commercial and military auxiliary ships. We are civilians, sometimes working for the military. In my case, I have been going to sea for a little over 15 years, and have spent the last 12 on the same ship, the United States Naval Ship Richard
G. Matthiesen. The US Navy designation is T-AOT-1124, an auxiliary oiler/tanker. Our mission is to carry fuel (mostly Jet and Diesel) all over the world in support of the Navy. This takes us to some interesting places from time to time. I'm sorry that I couldn't include pictures of all of them. In 15 years I have been lucky enough to have sailed around the world several times, stood on every continent , sailed in every ocean and sea (except the Black Sea) and been through both the Suez and Panama Canals countless times. I have been to Thule Greenland six times, within 800 miles of the North Pole, and to Antarctica twice, within 800 miles of the South Pole. The ship has spent years in the Far East (Japan, Korea, Singapore, Diego Garcia, Guam...), the Med & Northern Europe (Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugual & the Azores, Belgium, Holland, England, Norway...), The East and West coasts of the Americas; you get the idea. Of course, many of the places we go are not as exotic as they sound, they rarely build fuel terminals in the nicest part of town. But that is generally not a major problem.

There is high adventure. The weather can be a big problem in some places at some times. Going to Greenland, we always know there will be three days of awful weather as we bash our way north (and south again). Similarly, some of the worst weather in the world lives in the Southern Ocean on the way to and from Antarctica. The Indian Ocean during monsoon season is no picnic either...

Occasionally we refuel ships at sea. Normally this would be an oiler, a ship that stays with a task group and keeps the other ships topped up. The Matthiesen is minimally equiped to refuel combatants directly and we have done so. Riding a ship loaded with jet fuel running at 13-knots 50-feet away from a Navy warship loaded with who-knows-what on the high seas carries a "high pucker factor" as we say.

My job is communications and electronics. I send and receive messages, keep the radio, radar and other electronics gear working as it should and work on electrical and electronic systems all over the ship. One of the most important parts of this can be TV and radio reception for the crew. When the Captain is a baseball fan and the World Series is on, he had better be able to follow the game. While along the US coasts,
we were able to pull in TV with a home-style dish out to about 80-miles.  Satellite radio works well within several hundred miles of the coast. This is supplimented with of-the-air TV using a welded stainless steel antenna that I designed and the Chief Engineer and I constructed. The commercially available TV antennas would last a couple of weeks in the "marine environment". Our stainless model has proven up to the task.

There are opportunities to truly see the world in the Merchant Marine. As usual, this is as much luck as hard work (and requires both).

Click on the thumbnails to see my pictures and use "Back" to return.
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