Seafaring officers jazz up New Year's logs with poetry and wit

NEW ORLEANS -- In the first hours of every New Year, the nation's seafaring officers take up an endearing naval tradition: writing wordplay, doggerel and poetry in their log entries.

Each new year, officers get down to business and try to find ways to pull a ship's location, ammunition, engine status and speed into a poem that flows with rhyme and wit.

"You usually try to put in some line, or verse, about the commanding officer, and you have to mention when the boat was commissioned," said Senior Chief Boatswain Mate J.P. McGowan of the U.S. Coast Guard in Honolulu. "If you can pull that off and make it rhyme, you've done quite a job."

The tradition of dispensing with the standard log entry goes back to at least before World War II, but its origins are unknown, said Thomas Cutler, an editor at the U.S. Naval Institute.

In a way, the custom is the midwatch officer's way of getting revenge for having to pull the least desirable of watches -- while everyone else is partying.

On every other watch, log entries are strict affairs.

"It's kind of cool to mess with something that is so perfect otherwise," said Third Class Boatswain Mate Maria Arriaga at the South Padre Island Coast Guard station in Texas. "If one word was misspelled [on the regular log], you had to rewrite the whole thing."

What goes in the New Year's log varies from ship to ship and from station to station.

Coast Guard Chief Andrea Martynowski wrote hers in rhyme when she had the watch on the Cutter Tahoma in New England, and she is adamant about keeping up the tradition at the station she oversees on South Padre Island along the Texas coast.

"I've never seen it in writing," she said about the tradition, "as with most customs and traditions, you don't."

Some midwatch entries have made it into naval lore for preservation, and the tradition has earned a spot in such manuals as the "Naval Ceremonies, Customs and Traditions," said Cutler, of the Naval Institute.

"There would be a hue and cry, especially among the old timers, if you tried to take away this kind of tradition," he said. "Today's Navy is more busy, more modern, but there still is idle time."