To sea, after a long time home

After a sweaty half-year of maintenance and a departure delayed for several months, the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson will leave Friday morning for an extra-long deployment to some of the world’s trouble spots.

The San Diego flattop, a floating home for nearly 5,000 people, will be gone for nine and a half months — not a record for the Navy, but longer than today’s norm of seven or eight months at sea.

It’s a bit of a reversal of fortune.

Both of San Diego’s aircraft carriers spent a good chunk of time at their piers in 2013 and early 2014, following deployments that were postponed or scratched. The reasons: fewer defense dollars and reduced demand for carrier presence as the war in Afghanistan winds down.

Now, with only 10 active carriers in the U.S. fleet, the Vinson will get an extended turn at the wheel amid a resurgence of violence on the international stage.

The carrier George H. W. Bush is launching jets for air strikes against jihadist fighters in northern Iraq. The Vinson may take over that mission when it arrives in the Arabian Sea, said Capt. Kent Whalen, commanding officer.

“We’re just at a spot here where Carl Vinson has got to carry the water a little bit,” Whalen said this week.

The ship’s path will also take it to waters off China and North Korea, as is typical when a West Coast carrier deploys.

“I couldn’t ask for a finer crew. I know that the day we get underway will be a tough day,” Whalen said. “But it will be a fantastic day the day we pull back into San Diego. They will be so proud of what they’ve accomplished.”

Four San Diego-based warships will accompany the Vinson — the cruiser Bunker Hill and the destroyers Gridley, Sterett and Dewey. Also, two San Diego-based helicopter squadrons, the Battlecats of HSM 73 and the Red Lions of HSC 15, go with the carrier group.

Altogether, more than 6,000 San Diego sailors will depart Friday mid-morning.

It’s been a long couple of years for the Vinson crew.

Sure, they’ve been home since summer 2012, following two nearly back-to-back deployments.

But six months were spent doing maintenance. The Vinson got a $245 million overhaul from August 2012 to February 2013 at its North Island Naval Air Station pier.

The project included dirty tasks: stripping paint to the metal, pulling out old bunks, ripping up tiles. Sailors on the Vinson performed a lot of the grunt work.

One of them was Chief Petty Officer Barbara Lynch. Was she glad when the overhaul was completed?

“I think everybody was,” said Lynch, a 17-year Navy veteran.

She and the other crew members received word of their lengthened deployment early this year.

“It wasn’t a big surprise. I know that deployments are getting longer,” said Lynch, who will leave behind a Navy husband and three daughters.

“It’s going to be a long one,” she added, “but I think pretty much everybody has accepted it and is willing to make the best out of whatever we do out there.”

San Diego’s other carrier, the Ronald Reagan, will remain a fixture on San Diego Bay for a little longer.

Returning from a Puget Sound drydock in March 2013, Reagan didn’t see much action until this summer, when it sailed to Hawaii for the Rim of the Pacific naval exercises.

The ship is scheduled to permanently leave San Diego next August.

In a big reshuffling of flattops, the Navy will send the Reagan to Yokosuka, Japan, to replace the George Washington. The GW is slated for a four-year overhaul of its nuclear core.

Congress has debated whether it will fund the George Washington’s refueling, given sweeping defense cuts in recent years.

If all goes as planned, the Theodore Roosevelt, a carrier now stationed in Norfolk, Va., will swap coasts and make San Diego its home starting in November 2015.

For now, the sailors of the Vinson, Bunker Hill, Gridley, Sterett and Dewey know their fate, at least for the next nine and a half months: To sea.

Lynch, the chief petty officer, said her husband will drop her off at North Island early Friday morning.

She said her long absence from home will likely be hardest on her youngest daughter, an 11-year-old softball pitcher.

Lynch will miss the whole softball season, not to mention Christmas, New Year’s Eve, the Super Bowl and the World Series.

She doesn’t plan to have her daughters at the water’s edge today, as it makes goodbyes too hard.

“It’s a little more tough for me to leave when I see their faces out there on the pier,” Lynch said.

jen.steele@utsandiego.com (619) 293-1030 Twitter: @jensteeley