With the size of Enterprise, which you are far more familiar than myself. There would be more than one machine shop and not hard to lose a compartment, especially when using layer construction.

How I found out that the fellow was on Enterprise was he ran a charter boat and changed his call sign to Enterprise 4 days into a charter. When asked why, it was to avoid paying the local one week charter boat tax and RT traffic was monitored to check which boats were out.