After lunch today, I joined three other bloggers for some fresh sea air. We walked through a series of three hatches that took us to a deck directly over the ocean and under the flight deck. It was beautiful. I have never seen water so blue. The deck houses a .50-caliber weapon of some sort. A cover prevented us from seeing the gun, but a sign near it identified the weapon as .50-caliber. A walkway runs behind the deck, and one of the bloggers discovered a ladder well that went down another dozen or so steps to a platform even closer to the ocean. Contrary to our counsel, Boston Maggie climbed down to the platform and shot some video. She went where no blogger has gone before -- and where one probably wasn’t supposed to go in the first place. We have been amazed at how much free reign we’ve been given on the Kearsarge. That’s been a blessing in one sense because we haven’t been forced to follow a tour schedule mapped by a military bureaucrat. But it has been a curse in the sense that we really aren’t sure what we are allowed to do. None of us wants to break any rules or violate any military protocols. We don’t want to walk through some door meant to be closed to bloggers. On the other hand, we want to absorb as much as possible about Navy life and see everything we can. Sometimes that means testing the boundaries. I’m just glad Maggie didn’t stumble and fall into the ocean.
