There is a school called Chapman College on the ship. I studied mathematics while out to sea. We also had a nice library, a real good weight room, a camera / music store, barber shops, and a lot of things to look at to keep your interest. On the media side, we had several TV stations which covered movies, music, and flight ops. That's right! Every aircraft launch and recovery were video taped and you could watch it live with a sense around system like you wouldn't believe. When a plane took off you felt the whole ship shake. The afterburners were not only on tv, they were ten feet above your head creating the sound of the God almighty.

This was something that you had to experience yourself because there is no discription, no movie that can make it real for you.  One minute you're looking at a beautiful sunset, the next second a jet fighter lights its afterburner and cranks up over 42,000 lbs of thrust. This is the sound of the God Almighty. The ship shakes and your body vibrates from within. You can feel the power building more and more then suddenly there is a quick release. The jet shoots down the catapult and you feel the catapult shuttle come to the water brake at the end as the plane is launched off the deck. It's great! A totally fantastic experience and power rush, then back to the tranquility of the sunset as the jet disappears into the darkness of the night.

I miss going to the beach. In California, I used to go to the beach and sit and watch the waves coming over the rocks. There were some old ship wrecks that I found out were from Sir Francis Drake. There are so many wonders at the beach, it's at the edge of another world.

I used to live on a ship myself for a whole year. It was absolutely fantastic. We were in a Typhoon where the waves were coming over the flight deck. It was an Aircraft Carrier that I lived on, so the waves were very, very big, bigger than any that I have ever seen. One time we caught on fire and burned for three days. John saw a movie about the fire, but I never thought that they ever made one about it. One time we were down by Singapore and we were out to sea for thirty five days without seeing any land. The captain said that we were going to take a day off. So we stopped the ship and had bands playing all over the flight deck. We had a special picnic type of dinner and six thousand guys had a great time. I have pictures of this on my website.
I used to live in the Philippines and my friends and I used to go sail boating very often. We also went snorkeling. We weren't too smart though. One time when we went snorkeling, we didn't look at the tide charts. We ended up in such shallow water that we had to take a deep breath to get over the coral reefs. The bad thing was that there were stone fish in that area and they are very, very deadly. We decided to get out of the water and walk across the island. All we had on were our swimming trunks and flippers. So we started walking through the jungle. It's very dangerous to walk through the jungle in the Philippines. But we came upon some old 16 inch guns from WW2. They looked like they were new and the metal looked like it was new. It was incredible and fantastic.
Anyway, we walked out of the jungle on the other side of the island and there was a big open field. As we walked across the field I looked back and there was a bare trail. How could this be, was the question that went through my mind. How could this be, there was no trail in front of us. What it was, was that the field was not grass, but sensitivity plants. Whenever you touched them, they would move away and leave bare ground. That was a fantastic day.