Ponder this....

OK, so first let me give you a little background, before I tell this story, which I find highly amusing. My underway watch team consists of myself as Officer of the Deck (head honcho for you non-Navy types), our JORG Ensign as my Junior Officer of the Deck (Junior officer requiring guidance- basically our most junior officer), and a prior enlisted Seabee who I happen to like quite a lot as our Conning officer (the guy who actually gives the rudder and engine orders). The JOOD is one of those guys that has to make EVERYTHING an explanation, and sometimes he's a little too smart for himself. He is going nuke, though, so it works out. The Conn is an engineering officer, and hasnt spent a whole lot of time on the bridge, so things are still a little new to him.

Now the setting. We're up on watch last night, from 5-10pm, its foggy to the point that we can barely see the bullnose (very very front of the ship), and there is absolutely NOTHING going on. At one point, my Conn looks up at the fathometer (thing that measures how deep the water is) (I know most of you know what Im talking about here, but for the benefit of the few...) anyways, so he looks up at the fathometer, and it says something like 1076 fathoms of water, or something equally deep, and says "Wow, thats a lot of water, I wonder how long it would take to sink to the bottom." I'm pondering this thought, and thinking about it a little, and here comes the JOOD... "Well, actually, you'd never really sink. As the water gets deeper, it gets denser, and so at some point your body would reach equilibrium with the water and just hover." We both kind of stop and are like "Are you serious? Who thinks of things like that?? But that wasnt even the end. He started talking about bone density, and body composition, and downwards momentum, and all sorts of things. All I was thinking was how long it would take to sink to the bottom.

Well, I thought it was funny. And at the time it was.