"It requires a lot of focus. There's a lot of distractions. There's a lot of things happening on the bridge at that time, but you have to be super keyed-in to what the ship is doing," said Ellis, who, as one of the Dunham's conning officers, keeps an eye on the ship's movement during replenishments.
Ship-to-ship replenishments and vertical replenishments, which involve helicopters, can be done simultaneously, compounding the complexity. But even just moving stores from one ship to the other requires many eyes and many hands to keep things under control.
"That's why we have so many people up," Ellis said, "so that we can delegate the work out and delegate the responsibility so that the [conning officer] can just focus on this. And there's a lot of oversight. You would usually have a more experienced lieutenant there ... and of course ... for any high-risk evolution [the captain] is going to want to be on the bridge. So lots of oversight, but it is a very high-stress situation."