Second Sortie

Sorry, I have not added much to my blog lately. My ship has been extrememly busy on an extended deployment and I wanted to make sure this record is far enough in the past to no longer matter.

The mission started with the second sortie I have had the misfortune to experiance. Our goal was to find and trail a Chinese submarine that had already been detected and tracked from the air. I was told that these kinds of assignments could last anywhere from a few days to a month at sea.

Shortly after pulling out of the harbour, our mission changed to something very different. As it turned out a large group of Chinese surface ships had pulled out of their harbor at relatively the same time and we were best positioned to intercept and monitor their activity. That was when ship life started getting interesting. The goal was to sneak up on the Chinese warships without being detected. That ended up being acheived quite effectively. We joined several Japanese destroyers already monitoring the formation. From that point on we spent the next week documenting the activity of the Chinese group (SAG), while playing cat and mouse with the Chinese destroyers.

We were able to document the daily actions of the SAG and report back anything unusual. The Chinese Navy is becoming more experianced with each passing year. During our observations we witnessed a RAS (refueling at sea), this may have been the first ever completed for the Chinese. It has important ramfications in that the ability to RAS increases the distance a ship can cover without returning to port for fuel.

The other major event to take place was the launching of a UAV. This was the first documented case of the Chinese using unmaned aircraft launched at sea. Our radars tracked the flight and recorded data for scientists to examine at a later date.

We were relieved on station by another destroyer and were then able to proceed with our original mission, Tailisman Saber. This was the first interaction I had seen with an unfriendly ship. I had seen and talked with the sailors on an allied ship and now had witnessed the interaction between two possible foes.