Originally Posted by CX500T

I did a couple of those 11-13 monthers.

Port maybe 3 days every 4-6 weeks. Half the time it was beer on the pier or "no beer, here's the pier"

Basically the more likely the Carrier CO was to make Admiral the less fun your port calls were.

Beer on the pier basically means you can get off the boat, in to what we call the "sandbox" in Jebel Ali (Dubai) where there's some vendors, shops and fast food but never more than a couple hundred yards from the boat.

https://photos.wikimapia.org/p/00/02/87/36/30_big.jpg
see that square area with buildings in the middle next to the carrier? For a 5 month span that was the only dry land I touched. We had a port call in Oman in that window but I was confined to the ship because I was passed over for promotion and those who were passed over MUST be liberty risks since they were substandard officers according to the CO. Probably the only reason I didn't go longer without a port visit was because I got medevac'd off the boat when they changed a med I was on because of unavailability at "reasonable cost" and we had only brought 7 months of the medication and my body started rejecting pretty much all my implants and I was so sick they thought I had a hyper aggressive cancer.

Fun times.