Baltimore Sun reporter Robert Little and photographer Kim Hairston are aboard the USNS Comfort and are chronicling its rescue mission to Haiti.

ABOARD THE USNS COMFORT - - The U.S. Navy's East Coast hospital ship sailed away from its Baltimore home Saturday, steaming toward a desperate and uncertain mission in Haiti that could last months.

Tugs, draped with white sheets to keep bumper marks off the vessel's white hull, started pushing the ship into the channel around 9 a.m. The Comfort is expected to arrive in the harbor of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, next week.

The 894-foot floating hospital, with 12 operating rooms and 1,000 treatment and recovery beds, deploys every year or so on humanitarian tours or training missions, and a skeleton crew stays onboard year-round for maintenance. But yesterday's departure still bore signs of a hasty one.

By the time Comfort left the pier in Canton, most of the toilets in the berthing spaces were overflowing. Paperbacks in the ship's library lay in a pile in the center of the floor. The ship's store was closed, its empty shelves visible through the window in the door.

Food was an immediate challenge, with the Navy cooks scrambling to assess the galley's equipment and locate all its supplies. As crew members ladled out a lunch of meatball subs and fried fish, the menu board still hailed a salmon and roast pork dinner from last July.

Because of the Navy's deployment rotations, most members of the crew had never been inside the ship before Saturday. The odd configuration of the converted oil tanker, peculiar to anyone familiar with the more symmetrical layout of a gray-hulled Navy vessel, had crew members pacing the passageways and clogging the stairwells trying to learn their way about.

But members of the ship's medical crew, most culled from the Navy's hospitals in Maryland and Virginia, said none of the first-day kinks will matter once the ship arrives in Port-au-Prince for an open-ended mission caring for earthquake victims.

"They get you what you need for patient care. That's not a problem," said Cmdr. Deborah Carr, a physical therapist from the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda who was unpacking supplies in the ship's therapy room.

"Everybody wants to be here," Carr added. "You see it on the news, you see what's happening there, you want to go."