[strela]

I like the cheap rooms at the bottom of the boat - they're always nice and dark so you can sneak in a good nap anytime that you wish.

At least there will be no steam catapults on this "bucket." There's nothing like trying to get some shuteye between watches while air ops are underway, when your berthing area is 30 feet below the catapults.

[Taxman]

LOL!

I will never, ever, ever forget the first time an H-8 hydraulic cat fired at night while I was asleep in the JO bunkroom in the USS Kearsarge (CVS-33) during my first at-sea period in the spring of 1966.

The bunkroom was one deck below the flight deck and was between the #1 and #2 cats, roughly midway down the cat track. Every time a cat fired, it sounded like a 200 mm howitzer going off, followed by the 100++db roar of two unmuffled R-1820 engines passing overhead (the dopplar effect was kind of a neat sound, actually) and other loud mysterious noises.

The worst part of a launch was not the noise though; it was that all kinds of crap fell out of the overhead every time one of the cats fired!

After a while, the launch noise became just background noise, and I conditioned myself to sleep through it.

But that first night sure was memorable!

Thanks for the memory!