Warships and radio checks

Taking your boat through Norfolk harbor and Hampton Roads is an interesting experience. Up to this point we have been transiting through the Intercoastal Waterway. Fishing boats and the occasional tug/barge combination use the same waterway, but mostly what you see are other pleasure boats. In Norfolk you are in the middle of the largest naval base in the world and in a very busy commercial port. You share the water with some very large vessels. This container ship we met as we were leaving Norfolk.

You also pass a bunch of naval vessels of every type at the docks. I counted seven aircraft carriers of various vintages. Some were clearly being worked on, others were just sitting there. With all of them lined up together you could see that some were older and smaller than the others, but even the smallest of them are very large.

Warship 84 (a destroyer?) spent the night anchored in Hampton Roads and left at the same time we were leaving Hampton, VA. The Hampton Roads channel is so big warship 84 leaving passed a container ship coming in and they weren't even close to each other. We felt very small indeed.

But we did have the opportunity to do the U.S. Navy a service. Boaters, when they first leave the dock, often use their VHF radios to broadcast a call for a "radio check." Basically what they are asking is "Can anyone hear me using my radio?" Usually another boater will respond with "Loud and clear in [whatever the receiver's location is]." Twenty years ago when we started boating in Biscayne Bay, the radio checks would drive us crazy, it was the only reason anyone ever used the radio. These days there are far fewer radio checks because most folks use their cell phones on their boats. Even the Coast Guard sometimes will ask you if you can call them on your cell when you use your radio to contact them. When you do ask for a radio check, it is very bad form to call more than once.

As we were leaving Norfolk, US Warship 103 was broadcasting a radio check request about once every 5 minutes. The guy must have been working on his radio. Now you would think if a naval communications officer was working on his radio, he would make arrangements with someone else to help him check his work, but no, he was just broadcasting on the common boater band. Sometimes he would get a response from the port pilot, but apparently even they got tired of him and stopped responding. So Jim gave a radio check response to a US warship. I feel the country is safer for our contribution to naval operations.