26 June 2007
Channel Fever
HMAS Melbourne entering Sydney Harbor
There comes a point in a cruise when they cannot keep the ship at sea any longer, since it needs repairs or parts or something that is difficult to get while underway.
Sometimes the mission is over, or someone else has been ordered to go forward and do it for a while, and then there is the prospect of pulling into port.
I was indoctrinated into the mysteries of Channel Fever when I was on my first ship long ago. It was in the South China Sea, somewhere east and north of the Palawan Straits.
To this day, I do not know specifically what it means. I assume it is like Buck Fever for the hunting community, and related to the frantic feeling on opening day of hunting season. It would seem to have something to do with orbiting all night just out to sea, waiting for first light and the pilot boat to come out and guide the mighty ship up the navigable channel to the pleasures of the harbour.
It could as easily refer to the all-night movies they would show on the ship’s internal television station, and since we had a least two channels, it was a possible candidate.
I can feel it rising in me now, even though the television in the tourist hotel next to the bus station is resolutely turned off. Watching television during the day is the first stride down the road to damnation, like slipping just a little vodka into the orange juice at breakfast to cut the fog.
Still, I am at a break point on a two-day all-day-in-the-room attempt to generate a draft report before I fly out of here on Saturday. I was happy I did not have to travel out to the suburbs to the Ministry. It is cold and dank in Canberra- no fly swatting at the moment- and was below zero (centigrade) the last few days before.
It was of no small interest that one of the ships I used to ride is just a few hundred miles away. USS Kitty Hawk is operating with units of the Seventh Fleet and the Australian Navy in a major joint exercise off the eastern coast, and is reported to be pulling into Sydney for the Independence Day holiday that they will celebrate even if the Austrians don’t. They will be having a bout of Channel Fever here shortly, and 4,000 sailors will flood into the capital of New South Wales, berthed at HMAS Kuttabul, which supervises the dockyards at Garden Island and Potts Point.
The base is named for the converted ferry that was sunk in the harbour by torpedoes fired from one of three Japanese mini-subs that swam up the channel from the sea in 1942. Twenty-one sailors died in the sinking. None of the Japanese survived their mission.
I hope to survive this one. I am finishing, or at least hope to finish, my project before I go. I guarantee they will have something for my time here, though whether is meets the requirement is something I cannot tell.
I am longing for warmth and sweat, and days that go on past dinner time. I am looking forward to windows the open, and my own cozy balcony high above Big Pink’s swimming pool. I am looking forward to cooking my own food, to precisely my own specifications. Maybe this feeling of anxiety is simply the winter, or maybe it is the climate and the detachment from other people. The smokers are friendly enough, don't get me wrong, salt o' the earth, but it is hanging out at the Bus Depot, and I think I have had enough of that for the time being.
As you know, Canberra has a lot in common with DC. It is newer, so less further developed in terms of debauchery, and smaller and more rural than we are in the Capital of the Free World, but there is a bit of the prim smugness that goes along with displaying more virtue than people are supposed to have, and there is the cold rain in the middle what should be summer anywhere north of the equator.
Two and a wake-up is what it amounts to. Tomorrow I can start packing. Channel Fever will start on Friday.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com