Sea and Shore Tours | Navy Duty Rotations

Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor. Being on a ship, that is the reason you join the Navy. Within the Navy, sea duty is when you're attached to a ship. When they pull away from the port, you're pulling away right with them. The shore duty is your flexibility, so it's showing not only what you've learned, it's also kind of showing you how to adapt, how to maintain what you've learned. The best part about being on a ship, in my opinion, is that you're hitting the ground running. Everything happens kind of fast-paced, and I learned that I am fight, not flight. Sea duty is when you're out at sea showing force for the Navy. You're pulling into foreign ports. You're doing what you have to do to make sure that America is safe. Anywhere from three to five years is a typical sea duty. A big misconception about that is that we're going to be floating around in the middle of the ocean for the three years you're assigned to sea duty. Sea duty just means that you're attached to a command that does deploy. Even when attached to a ship, it doesn't mean that you're going to be stuck in the middle of the ocean waving at some seagulls. You're going to stop. You're going to enjoy the places you're at. During sea duty, you could be attached to an aviation squadron or even stationed overseas at an expeditionary command onshore. The cool thing about it is, if you do go out on a cruise, you're going to be out there from six to nine months, and once your mission's done, you come back, and then you're back for a long amount of time. Once you bring your ship back from a deployment, then there's a bunch of stuff that you have to accomplish, a lot of things that you have to get the ship prepared for next time it goes out in a year and a half or two years or however long it's going to be. You can work in an environment where you're home with your family. You go to work in the morning, you go home at the end of the day to your house, apartment, whatever living situation you have set up, and that's pretty much it. Once your sea duty tour ends, then you'll rotate to a command where you're stationed onshore, but you won't be part of the team that deploys. You have three to four years where you're literally just going into work. You're working in a building. There's rotations of where you could go. You could be working at a maintenance facility. You could be teaching a lot of different instructor options. Recruiting. You could be an inspector and inspecting the ships that are currently out. There's a lot of options that the Navy has that are also on land and they rotate you out so you don't get burned out. You're getting a lot of training. You're doing your job on a military installation, on a Navy base, and you're just making sure that the base is completely safe and taken care of and completing whatever mission you have at shore. Sea duty and shore duty aren't different, but each is necessary. I've been able to do a lot of things and been able to use what the Navy has given me throughout my career.