Shellbacking

A letter from Dave, (From last week)

We had our Shellbacking ritual today, where all the people who have not crossed the equator get hazed. It was pretty tame compared to stories of how I heard the ceremony being done in the past. We just got PT’d a lot and yelled at for no reason. It was all in good fun though. I’m now a shellback instead of a pollywog and will get a cool certificate that I’ll be able to show you later. We were basically woken up at 5am, and brought to the ready room. All officer pollywogs had to wear a white t-shirt with our name written on it and the word Pollywog on the front and back. Then for about 3 hours all 80 of the 192 wogs were in the ready room just having people yell at us. The prior shellbacks could draw buttons on your shirt, and then push the buttons to have you do things. I had a button that whenever it was pressed I had to say “pull my piggly tail” and another that when pressed I had to sing Barbie Girl. It was pretty funny, some people get way into it.

After the Ready Room stuff, we get taken to the Hangar bay where you have to do PT and crawl through smoke filled tunnels and whatnot. Then they bring you up onto the flight deck using one of the big elevators, which was a neat thing, because normally no one is allowed to ride them. On top of the flight deck they spray you down with firehoses full of saltwater. Then you have to swim through a trough filled with seawater and neon green dye before standing before “King Neptune’s Court” and they determine if you are fit to be a shellback. By the end of it, you’re covered in dirt and grease and soaked with saltwater. Whatever, it’s a Navy tradition so I’m happy to have done it.

After all the shellbacking stuff, I took a shower which felt great, ate some lunch, then came back to the room for a re-rack (going back to bed after having woken up in the morning).