You’re in the Navy now, Charlie Brown.

(NOTE: I edited the post date of this post to reflect when it was written rather than when I managed to get online.)

Well, I’m finally in Victoria (actually I’m in Esquimalt…) at the lovely Naval Officer Training Center. The building where both divisions are is old and a bit run-down, and the water is questionable, but it’s adequate. We have two lounges, one of which has a big-screen TV, and the other has a regular big TV. I’ve somehow scored a single room, while pretty much everyone else is in quad rooms. The problem is that there are no jacks for the internet, and we can’t pick up the internet from other buildings.

The food is good. (Of course!) The portions are somewhat small, but if you take every item you’re entitled to, it makes a whole lot of food. For example, for dinner, we’re entitled to:

Soup
Main protein dish (not meat, protein dish)
Starch item
Cooked vegetable
Salad bar
Bread product (is that like how Cheez-Wiz is a cheese product?)
Dessert item
Two beverages (tiny)
Condiments (good thing I don’t have to pay for the ketchup on my fries!)

The main protein dish is small, as I said, but if you just throw in everything else, I’m not even sure you’d be able to get out with just one tray. Anyway, the galley is a good place to be. Too bad they don’t have alcohol—having a beer at lunch would kick some serious booty.

Other than that, we received our course-specific stuff today. A whole bunch of books—COLREGS, the Seaman’s Guide to the Rules of the Road, two manuals on etiquette and customs, the seamanship manual (a huge binder) and the NETP-O handbook—as well as flashcards to learn the flags. Oh, and we were issued laptops. We don’t have accounts set up yet so even if we had a way to get online from our rooms we’d be unable to, but eventually we’ll be able to go to a few places where there are internet jacks and we’ll just plug in and go at it.

The course itself looks pretty sweet. We have a lot of death-by-powerpoint-y stuff, but we have a week (or was it two?) of damage control (flooding and fires) and two weeks at sea. The damage control sounds like a lot of fun, especially the firefighting part. They have new simulators that run on propane and are controlled by an operator who can throw things at you. The two weeks at sea aren’t two weeks of always being at sea, however. We stop at the end of the day and go around, hence the name Booze Cruise. We don’t, from what I understand, come back to NOTC, though. For the weekend between the two weeks, our CTO (Course Training Officer) said we might go to Vancouver, though courses usually stop over in Nanaimo. What’s odd but cool is that there is some sort of qualification while we’re on the ships—from the sounds of it, it’s a “light” version of the quals for submariners… without the cool hardware at the end.

We also have several visits to warships and museums. Later this week we’ll visit the HMCS Regina, and I think I recall reading we’ll visit the HMCS Athabaskan. We’ll also visit the HMCS Victoria, which is being worked on and apparently doesn’t look like a submarine right now as it’s covered by scaffolding. Still, I can’t wait! We’ll also be going onboard the HMCS Calgary at some point to practice some evolutions and see how the real Fleet does things—the Calgary will still be tied up, but it’ll still beat the YAGs and Orcas we’ll be using for our sea phase.

Another thing we get at NOTC is being the OOD and 2/3OOD once in a while. It doesn’t seem to be that hard, but it’s probably one of those things that get annoying.

I think that’s it for today. We started at 0800 and finished at a bit after 1400. That day included 90 minutes for lunch and a few breaks. Let’s just say this course is starting off a lot nicer than the two previous summers. Besides, the schedule is, even on bad days, limited to 0700 or 0730 to 1550. Nights and weekends are ours, though I guess a bit of reading and studying will take place once in a while. It’ll leave me with more time to work out, which is good, considering I need to get a lot of that done.