Navy speak for Shore Intermediate Maintenance Activity, or shore duty for engineers. There are some more colorful names, but those are not appropriate here. The workers here will do some of the maintenance to a ship that the ship board people cannot handle. This can be anything from calibrations to removing a LM2500 Gas Turbine engine.

There is a SIMA building at every major port the Navy has. The engineers here are mostly senior enlisted sailors on one of their shore duty rotations. Every once and a while a junior enlisted sailor will get orders to SIMA for their first duty station, this is very rare, but it does happen.

SIMA has all the special tools to do complex jobs and the sailors here also receive extra training to do the more difficult jobs. Sometimes even if the ship has the tools and equipment to do a certain job, SIMA will be called to get it done. SIMA will do pretty much anything to a ship, other than take her to a dry dock. Once that happens a whole new level of Naval support begins.

Some ship board engineers have a dislike for those stationed on shore and will try everything in their power to keep them off the ship. It has been known for some engineers to pass the hat so they could buy special tools for the ship, just to keep SIMA engineers off. It is a pride thing more than anything else.

When we had three of our engines changed we were swamped with SIMA workers. They normally would do one at a time, but we needed ours done in a short period of time, so they prepped all four at once, pulled them one after the other, and installed them the same way. Then three separate teams hooked each engine up and we were back up to full power in under a week. Without time constraints that would have taken 3-4 weeks.

When we headed back to sea our Captain wanted to see what type of speed the old lady had, we ran 33.4 knots for 36 hours straight. We still had a little PLA left to give her, but we kept that for reserve. He was very happy with the SIMA crew and they did get a Letter of Appreciation from him. So in the end they came through and saved the day.

That is not all a SIMA will do. They also run a program called NOAP, but that is another story, as is PLA. Until then, carry on sailor!