Commissary and 1Q Orders

I had scheduled my stores on load to coincide with the stores on load for food service. Looking back that might have been a mistake since food service was receiving a large shipment that morning. The general idea was to get all the stores loaded at the same time. We just ended up moving more than anticipated.

First my receipt inspector needed to check my 1Q stores while they were still at the warehouse to verify we were receiving everything correctly. After he was done with that inspection, he and I went over to the Commissary to inspect the special order there and pay for the items in advance of delivery. There were a few problems that required me to replace items and that changed the total.

Upon returning from the Commissary, I found the ship had already started the stores on load for the food service stores. I started supervising that operation while I waited for my stores to arrive from the warehouse and Commissary. The pier had close to fifty full pallets at one point with the additional arrival of parts. That starts to approach a carrier level stores on load. Unfortunately my destroyer does not have the equivalent manpower to support an on load of that size. The working party started taking water breaks every so often so they could rest.

About midway through loading food service's supplies, mine arrived from the warehouse. That really got the working party discouraged, the arrival of supplies from the Commissary had them at an even lower point. Since it was approaching lunch and the stores had not been completed everyone took a longer break to eat before finishing the on load. I took turns with my SHs monitoring the remaining stores on the pier until lunch was done. They wanted to continue moving the stores by themselves but I ordered them to take a break. I was worried they were going to work themselves too hard for little gain.

The last project for the day was to organize the stores. My storeroom had overflowed into the ship's store. That needed to be organized so everything was documented and organized correctly in the storeroom. The ship's store could not be opened until all the supplies had been crammed back into the store room. Only my SHs could work with the supplies while they were in the storeroom and ship's store. Luckily, everything did manage to fit, there was not much room to spare, we packed it to the bulkheads. That was one of the busiest and most physically taxing days I have had on board so far.