"INSURV"

Yet another Naval abbreviation, meaning: Board of Inspection and Survey.

In anticipation of this event (that we've been preparing for all year), liberty expired at noon on Sunday... although I had duty that day (so it didn't affect my liberty). This was the second duty day in a row where I did not have a watch! But now that INSURV is upon us, we are back to six-section duty instead of the three-section duty we've endured this last month.

Monday was an early underway for all the INSURV demonstrations... like Small Object Avoidance (SOA) for Sonar in the morning... weapons, anchoring, boats, full-power run, and finally, our own system demonstration at night... where we tracked a little emitter and made like we were going to shoot it to prove that our system is operational. And we successfully passed it in record time!

Our ship had the President of INSURV, RADM Robert Wray (here's a YouTube video of him) onboard during our underway. Nine crewmembers were selected to have dinner with him on the mess decks to ask questions and I was one of them. When we pulled in the next morning, he had an All Hands call on the flight deck and he gave a motivational talk about the importance of INSURV, illustrated through the story of Dewey at Manila Bay... "You may fire WHEN READY, Gridley." INSURV is all about readiness, so it was very apt.

That afternoon I had an "in-port check" with a Lieutenant Commander on our fathometer. The next day, Wednesday, I did checks with a Chief on a couple more of our auxiliaries, and received a bunch of open purchase items from Supply, which was finished up today.