The task group staff consisted of those
who would be my representative in the
operations room in the command ship so
they were keeping track of what was
happening every minute basically.
I wasn’t always there. I was there quite a bit.
Most of us worked.
Personally I worked about twenty hours
a day for almost eight months.
I had eleven days off in eight months.
No government can pay you for that.
Nobody. Most sailors worked at least
twelve to twenty hours a day for the
time they were on.
We took out of the three ships,
every three weeks they would get
four days ashore and we would transfer,
if it happened to be Athabaskan,
we would transfer our whole task group to
Protector and we had a mini command
set up in Protector to keep the
control of everything going so…
And we did it with Terra Nova.
I took a small staff to Terra Nova.
It was pretty cramped and they didn’t
have all the same kind of information
but it was close.
And so we just kept, my staff just kept
going the whole time.
I likened it to being on a treadmill,
and once you step on, you’re on and
it took eight months to step off so…
I know a lot of them,
it took me about a year,
a good year before I felt that I was
back to some kind of semi-normality.