Photograph of the USS Lexington Chart Room, December 1943.
(NARA RG 80: General Records of the Department of the Navy, ARC ID 520800)



Welcome to the Deck Log Project, a collection of U.S. Naval deck log entries made during the mid-watch (midnight to 4 a.m.) each New Year's Day. USN deck log entries are regulated by OPNAVINST 3100.7B, Preparing, Maintaining and Submitting the Ship’s Deck Log. Section 2 details the types of information that are required, including: the ship’s type and hull number; date of entry; ship’s position; time; order; course, speed, depth; record of daily events; navigational/operational entries; and specific personnel entries. Working within these constraints, the Officer of the Deck often crafts this information into the form of a poem. Some are well written, some not, but in most cases an effort has been made to respect the tradition. How this tradition began is unknown,[1] but sometime between World War I and World War II this practice emerged. Some poems are co-authored. Some follow the pattern of more well-known poems, such as The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas , or Paul Revere's Ride by Longfellow. Others are short and to the point.  In most cases the requisite information has been conveyed, often with a sense of humor or wistfulness (such as when the author’s buddies are on shore leave New Year’s Eve, and he is left behind to man the watch).

The Deck Log Project is a collection of these New Year's entries. The project will be conducted in phases, with the first phase comprising mostly poems written during the Vietnam War. The National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) deck logs are found in the series Logbooks of the U.S. Navy Ships and Stations, 1941-1978 (ARC identifier 594258). Naval deck logs are kept at the Naval Heritage and History Command (NHHC) until they are 30 years' old. After that, they are transferred to NARA. To request copies of deck logs, as well as pricing information, contact NARA at Archives2reference@nara.gov, or NHHC at (202) 433-3643.

Special thanks go to Nathaniel (Nate) Patch (Naval archivist, National Archives and Records Administration) for his copies of deck log entries, which helped get the project started, and Seth Smith (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, The Catholic University of America) for setting up the database.
[1] R.W. Connell and W.P. Mack. Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1980, p. 202.