A bit of background…my wife is a former flight attendant (AA and TWA) and was previously married to a USAF F-16 Pilot.
…so something about having lived with so many real aviation things for years in her life…and now, for the past 20+ years, living with my sim aviation stuff…yeah…she’s a Saint. 
Or she secretly loves that stuff 
The inflatable swam thingie is amazing
It truly is.
Yes, backflushing main seawater strainers was a frequent evolution during our port visit to Brisbane
So there I was…
[Sea Story! Sea Story! All Hands Man Your Sea Story Stations. This is not a drill.]
…on board the mighty ship GUAM (named after the island; not an acronym for “Go UA Man”) and we are headed up the York River to Naval Weapons Station (NWS) Yorktown from our “home”, Pier 5 at NOB Norfolk.
Our Skipper is a former S-3 pilot, CAPT Thomas Barnes…or as we liked to call him, “21 Knot Barnes” because he took the GUAM everywhere at 21 knots…which was her top speed…with the wind and current behind her…going down hill…
Stay with me, this story does relate to @Navynuke99’s post and is topical to this thread.
So up the York River we go…at 21 knots…that is fast in a river. A few days later, after the ammo on-load (during which we had a small fire incident, with our entire Marines ammo inventory staged in the hangar bay…and I was CDO…but that is another story …), we head back home to Norfolk, down the York River at 21 knots.
A couple days later the engineers notice something is wrong with the main condenser. We go cold iron and open up the seawater strainers. The are absolutely full of “river grass” and other plants that are evidently indigenous to the bottom of the York River. We must have scooped them up during our hell-bent-for-leather runs to and from the NWS. Now this mess has had time to decompose in place and is pretty much the definition of “smelly gunk” which had to be removed by hand. 
However, the snipes didn’t seem to mid all that much since they loved tuning the engine fast.
holy effing crap, that’s more than a little insane- especially since we had to offload ALL the fuel in our tanks and drive very, very slowly when we took Reagan up the same river for deperm (trying to find the spot on a map, not having any luck), and Guam’s navigational draft wasn’t that much shallower than ours was.
This is why you never leave a Border Collie to its own devices.
Good doggo.
When Combat Dogs get hurt they earn the “Purple Good Boy”.
Lol, that is so spot on.
Wheels
Even my wife agreed that was spot on lol.
Ranch dressing to the FACE!
Everyone’s an artist…
Face Slapping contest!
https://geekologie.com/2019/03/meanwhile-in-russia-this-years-winner-of.php
One step closer to having real-life M.A.S.K.!
What, you’re not?
Is anybody here in my age bracket and remember the cartoon MASK? One of the characters had a motorcycle that turned into a hovercraft. Reminded me of that flying motorcycle.
Yeah @Navynuke99 I remember that … just. Didn’t each mask have it’s own power to shoot stuff or whatever?
