Tenth Fleet Summit

The Tenth Fleet Summit is the annual in-person gathering of the Tenth Fleet. Rather than being tied to a single venue, the summit is held each year at a science-fiction convention somewhere within the fleet's area of responsibility — which spans California, Oregon, and Washington — and is hosted by a local echelon or chapter. It serves as the fleet's principal muster, bringing together the crews of its member chapters for a program of meetings and ceremonies over the convention weekend.

Format

As originally designed in 2015, the Tenth Fleet Summit is not a single meeting but a series of separate sessions held across the convention weekend, each aimed at a different tier of the fleet — so that there is something for essentially every level of the membership:

• Commanding Officers' Meeting — chapter commanding officers and echelon commanders meet with Fleet Staff to work through the how of executing the fleet's plan, with open questions and discussion on making things work at the chapter level in alignment with fleet direction.
• Senior Enlisted Meeting — the same format as the officers' meeting, but run by the FSMCPO specifically for bosuns, gunnies, and senior enlisted advisors. The enlisted track runs parallel to, and separate from, the officers' track.
• Flag Officers' Meeting — a smaller, more focused session for flag-rank officers and echelon command only, addressing higher-level topics such as echelon-support alignment and troubleshooting that do not need to be raised in front of the full room.
• Awards Ceremony — led by the Fleet Commanding Officer, presenting promotions, awards, and recognition for service over the previous fiscal year. It closes out the summit and sends members back to the convention floor on a positive note.

In addition to these sessions, summits have hosted commissioning ceremonies for newly formed chapters and vessels — for example, HMS Cerberus was commissioned at the 2015 summit.

Host conventions

Because the Tenth Fleet's area of responsibility is geographically vast — spanning California, Oregon, Washington, and beyond — Fleet leadership (the Commanding Officer, Deputy Commanding Officer, and FSMCPO) established a practice of alternating the summit between northern and southern locations to keep travel distances equitable for the fleet's widely dispersed ships and members. Accordingly the summit rotates between northern venues in the Pacific Northwest — such as NorWesCon (SeaTac, Washington), OryCon (Portland, Oregon), and RadCon (Pasco, Washington) — and southern venues in California, principally BayCon (Santa Clara), with a nearby echelon or chapter serving as host each year.

Separately, Task Group 91.1 held its own Task Group 91.1 Summit for the task group's own members at BayCon in 2016 and 2018; these were distinct from the fleet-wide Tenth Fleet Summit. The destroyer HMS Chainshot was commissioned at the first of these, BayCon 2016.

Summits by year

Year	Convention	Location	Host echelon	Notable events
2015	BayCon	Santa Clara, CA	Task Group 91.1	Commissioning of HMS Cerberus
2016	NorWesCon	SeaTac, WA	HMS Truculent
2017	OryCon 39	Portland, OR	—
2019	BayCon	Santa Clara, CA	—
2020	RadCon	Pasco, WA	HMS Eardsidh Kamerling	Held that February, before the pandemic shutdown
2022	BayCon	Santa Clara, CA	—
2024	BayCon	Santa Clara, CA	—
2025	OryCon	Portland, OR	—
2026	BayCon	Santa Clara, CA	—	Designated a Flag Event by Tenth Fleet Order 2511-01

Host echelons and venues for the 2018, 2021, and 2023 summits are not yet documented here. BayCon itself was cancelled in 2020 and held only virtually in 2021 during the pandemic; the 2020 fleet summit was nonetheless held at RadCon that February.

See also

• Tenth Fleet
• Task Group 91.1
• BayCon