Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  Two weeks earlier, the Bertholf had landed a big HH-60 Jayhawk on its flight deck, something no other cutter has tried in over a decade. Now, as we enter Chesapeake Bay, a smaller HH-65C Dolphin from Florida’s HITRON antidrug squad approaches. They’ve installed a new tracked trolley system on the flight deck to guide and secure helicopters as they land. This automated trolley system was designed to eliminate the need for a tie-down crew on deck in rough seas.

  No Coast Guard helicopter has yet had a probe attached to lock with the robot sled’s griper claw, however. The second deck hangar was built for a pair of unmanned aerial vehicles, but use of the Navy’s Fire Scout is likely years away even if—with maritime radar added—it proves practical for Coast Guard missions.

  Meanwhile Captain Stadt wants the Bertholf to do its first operational deployment with a pair of Dolphins or a Jayhawk on its flight deck to extend the ship’s tactical reach.

  I watch the 65’s approach from inside the helicopter shack above the flight deck (the icebreaker Healy is the only other Coast Guard vessel to have one). Helicopter control officer Lt. Krystyn Pecora is just over five feet tall and has to stand on an upside-down plastic milk crate to do her work. “6518 . . . This is Tower, you are cleared to land,” she instructs the approaching orange chopper. From inside the shack, she can also hit an emergency button to spray nine hundred gallons per minute of fire-suppressing foam, eliminating the need for a fire crew on the flight deck.

  “Green deck! All stations Green deck!” she announces. The ship will now hold its course and speed steady till the 65 lands or is waved off by the yellow-shirted Landing Signal Officer standing below us.

  The pilot lands it gently, and four blue-shirted tie-down crewmembers run out under the still-turning rotor blades to secure the orange helicopter to the deck with safety straps. I head down to talk to the crew and check out their machine gun and sniper rifle, used to warn and then disable drug-running go-fast boats.

  On Thursday night we anchor three miles off Annapolis, and a long gray utility boat from the U.S. Naval Academy shuttles us ashore for a “Cinderella liberty” (everyone has to be back on board by midnight).

  T

  he crew are all scrubbing, sanding, painting, and polishing the ship as we approach Baltimore the next day. The CO spots someone’s touch-up paint job that was poorly executed. “They have a future with Northrop Grumann,” he notes dryly.

  Visitors have been shuttling aboard all day. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen arrives on the service’s new rugged-looking 45-foot RBM (Response Boat Medium), along with Master Chief Skip Bowen.

  They talk to the crew and are soon joined by the secretary of homeland security, a passel of admirals, and other VIPs.

  Entering Baltimore Harbor, we’re greeted by a water-spraying fireboat, a dockside crowd of reporters and camera crews, black-clad security agents, Rep. Elijah Cummings, and dozens of curious tourists behind metal police barricades at the Broadway Pier in the popular Fells Point waterfront district.

  “I’m glad you came up to my neighborhood,” Cummings tells the commandant.

  “Purely coincidental, Congressman,” Thad Allen quips.

  “I’ll take that,” Cummings replies, grinning.

  There will be a Coast Guard Foundation reception that evening and two days of public tours and congressional visitors up from DC before they sail again.

  There are still eight shipboard problem areas to be resolved between the contractor and the Coast Guard, plus the dry-dock time that will be needed to reshape the ship’s hull in order to extend its life (Northrop Grumann claims this is unnecessary; the Navy and Coast Guard disagree).

  “We’ll spend three to four years getting it up to Coast Guard standards,” Kelly Hatfield predicts.

  Captain Stadt agrees but still believes it’s a fine ship.

  While the Bertholf may be a fine ship and an impressive addition to the Coast Guard, it’s also clear that, in the wake of the Deepwater contracting fiasco, it will be a long time before National Security Cutters replace the service’s twelve aging High Endurance Cutters, and longer still before there’s a truly twenty-first-century deepwater fleet.

  In the interim, to paraphrase a discredited former secretary of defense, the Coast Guard won’t be operating with the fleet they’d like. Instead, as Thad Allen told the crew, “We have to manage with the fleet we’ve got.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Red, White, and Black

  “Sea duty is not punishment. To think of it that way is to dishonor every sailor who

  has ever walked the decks of a Coast Guard or Revenue cutter.”

  —CDR. WAYNE PARENT

  “When the crew gets seasick they keep working—they stay on watch with a plastic

  bag and keep working. The bags get incinerated. We call them puke burns.”

  —CAPT. CRAIG “BARK” LLOYD, COAST GUARD CUTTER MUNRO

  Black Hull

  “Kelly just got hammered,” Lt. Meredith Phillips notes from the high glassed-in bridge of the Aspen. We’ve just passed under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, and already twelve-foot seas are breaking over the buoy tender’s bow. The soaking-wet rigger, Shannon Kelly, climbs down from the fo’c’sle and tosses her cup of “bug juice,” now half saltwater, over the side as she squishes past two seventeen-foot-high, eight-thousand-pound green buoys secured to the rolling deck.

  “Let’s slow down,” Lt. Cdr. Steve Wittrock, the Aspen’s CO orders.

  Commissioned in 2001, the 225-foot black-hulled Aspen is, though seven years older than the Bertholf, still one of the Coast Guard’s newest vessels. Along with red-hulled icebreakers and white-hulled Medium and High Endurance Cutters, black-hulled seagoing buoy tenders are part of the service’s deepwater fleet, which regularly operates more than fifty miles offshore. These sixty-five large vessels form the leading edge of the Coast Guard when it comes to counternarcotics and migrant interdiction, securing sea lanes from threats of piracy and terrorism, providing for science at the poles, and maintaining vital aids to navigation that global trade depends on. They also make port calls around the world, training and carrying out professional exchanges with local coast guards from China to West Africa, presenting a positive image of non-U.S. gunboat diplomacy.

  The Aspen, based at Yerba Buena Island, does most of its work on San Francisco Bay and along the West Coast from Baja to the Oregon border. Designed to service and maintain buoys and other aids to navigation, it also does law enforcement work, including fisheries and counterdrug patrols. It normally doesn’t do buoy servicing in February, but with four Northern California buoys reported missing, damaged, or displaced by recent winter storms, Steve is hoping to sneak through a weather window between the low-pressure fronts that have been hammering the coast. Unfortunately the twenty-four-hour forecast is now calling for twelve-foot seas and high winds. That’s enough to convince the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to pull its technician off the boat and delay a repair on one of its big offshore weather buoys. Steve is hoping the twenty-knot winds will die down soon and the swells ease overnight. For safety’s sake he gets on the ship’s pipe and announces a weather deck. For the next thirty hours, the decks and ladders outside the ship’s skin will be off-limits to the crew of fifty, who will have to get around using internal stairwell ladders.

  “Look at that.” Steve, medium height, with light brown hair and an easygoing manner, nods toward a rainbow arching over Point Bonito.

  The radio reports a sailboat demasted and drifting off Monterey, and there’s some discussion on the bridge over whether the Aspen will now be ordered to turn left instead of right. Sector decides to send the Pike, an 87-foot patrol boat, instead. It will be pushing its limits, with a hard ride south and difficult tow back, but this will permit the Aspen to continue on its mission 250 miles north to Eureka, where a channel buoy has broken loose and gone missing and another is reported out of position. On the way back down south, they’ll replace a damaged buoy at the No
yo River mouth by Fort Bragg, where a fourth buoy is also said to be out of position, or “discrep,” as the crew calls it, referring to “discrepancies” when the buoys are not where they’re supposed to be. The Coast Guard is committed to making sure 99.8 percent of America’s 6,500 major navigational buoys are “nondiscrepant,” that is, fully operational, well maintained, and where they belong. Until recently I was among the tens of millions of Americans who had no idea this is one of the Coast Guard’s missions.

  Yet whenever I sail out of a U.S. harbor or port, I always look to spot the green daymarkers, or buoys, to the right of the harbor channel and the red ones to the left, to be sure we’re in safe water. “Red, right, returning” is the way to remember where to look for the red buoys when coming back into port. Along with radar, GPS and loran, Coast Guard lighthouses, light buoys, and sea buoys help recreational boaters and commercial mariners navigate in and out of our great ports, rivers, and bays, while NOAA weather buoys, which the Coast Guard also maintains and repairs, help determine when it’s even safe to be at sea.

  B

  y lunch, the boat has begun pitching and rolling, a chief has spilled his chicken soup on a stairwell deck, and the seas have turned jade, the skies an ominous gray, and Lieutenant Phillips, along with a number of her shipmates, a distinctive greenish tinge.

  This is in marked contrast to the calm blue day months earlier when the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs filmed on the Aspen, making it the most famous buoy tender in the Coast Guard fleet.

  The deck crew tells how they spent two weeks pulling and dropping buoys till they found a really crusty fouled one for the show’s host, Mike Rowe, to help clean. They’d used their big forty-thousand-pound marine crane and cross-deck winches to lift the barnacle-, mussel- and kelp-encrusted buoy onto the deck, then handed him a long-handled scraper blade. “Did anyone have any idea barnacles smell so bad?” Mike Rowe says in the TV segment, grinning as he scrapes the big, meaty yellow crustaceans off the underside of the buoy. He describes their runny chunks as “some sort of maritime omelet.” Buoy deck supervisor Josh Peelman then has Mike “shoot the tube,” climbing up inside the forced-air chamber that rings the buoy bell whenever waves start creating suction and pressure. Anything obstructing the tube will reduce the sound, so Mike has to go inside with a small handheld camera and begin scraping it clean. “I’m pulling hunks of this stuff as I go,” he explains in a claustrophobic close-up shot. “Blockage coming down,” he calls out on reaching the top of the tube. “Tool coming down. Host coming down.” He then helps “heat and beat” an anchor chain rivet pin with a torch and sledgehammer before the buoy goes back in the water.

  While the segment makes it seem like cool (if dirty) work, it lacks the added three-dimensional drama of tossing seas and gusting winds. Also, they’d just aired an earlier episode in which Mike goes fishing for slime eels off New England, and no job, no matter how dirty, can match the pure disgust factor of handling blind, mucus-spewing deep-ocean flesh borers. It was enough to make a hagfish gag.

  R

  ough seas or not, our first day out is also Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, 2008, with the unbeaten New England Patriots facing off against the New York Giants. Folks are viewing the game in the officers’ wardroom and on the enlisted mess deck below, except for those on watch or hunkered down in their racks trying not to get sick. The cooks have prepared hot wings, ranch dip, and other game treats for those feeling up to it.

  Early in the game I’m gnawing a small poultry leg at one of the floor-bolted mess tables when Bosun’s Mate Second Class Patrick “Paddy” White joins me. The newest deck supervisor, Paddy is short and rotund, wears glasses, and has a fierce commitment to his job. He explains that when the work gets under way I’ll be seeing green hard hats (“break-ins” learning the job), blue hats (qualified riggers), yellow hats (buoy supervisors acting as riggers), and white hats (buoy deck supervisors). One of the Aspen’s four chiefs will be running the crane while the others watch over the work from the fo’c’sle (forward) deck and the captain and officers from the bridge. I’m not convinced I’ll get to see any of this, however, as the seas are continuing to build. Every half hour or so the TV screens go black as we’re hit by a big wave that throws the satellite receiver off kilter.

  Back in the wardroom, five officers are watching the game, including Steve and his XO, Lt. Stephanie Morrison, one of three sisters from upstate New York now serving in the Coast Guard.

  “Maybe those NOAA guys knew something we didn’t,” Steve jokes half-heartedly as we slam-bang through fifteen- to twenty-foot seas. “People slow down as they get beat up by rising seas. Everyone gets tired. It takes a lot of energy just to stay upright.”

  Chief Warrant Officer Pat Barron, a former Marine who reminds me of a younger, fitter Rodney Dangerfield, demonstrates by getting up and letting his body sway back and forth in a forty-degree arc with the movement of the ship. Actually he’s standing upright. It’s the ship that’s swaying.

  Lt. JG Justin Erdman, a tall, gangly academy grad, tells me he still loves working buoy tenders. “Law enforcement is a lot of waiting around. There you’re reacting—here you’re doing.”

  “It’s that feeling of instantaneous gratification,” agrees Stephanie, the XO. “You look back at a channel you’ve worked and there are all those buoys you put in. It’s very hands-on, very tangible work.”

  “I did four years at a shore-based ANT [Aids to Navigation Team] in Georgetown, South Carolina, and it was the best job of my military career,” Pat Barron adds to the amen chorus. ANT use trucks and small utility boats to maintain lighthouses, channel markers, and river buoys. “We had three hundred ATONs [aides to navigation they were responsible for], and there were inspections and maintenance, and hurricanes would come along, and it was just boom, boom, boom. It just never stopped happening.” He smiles fondly.

  L

  ate in the final quarter of the seesawing football game, the ship’s hit broadside by a big wave and the TV screens go black for almost two minutes with only two minutes forty seconds left on the clock. The signal returns as Eli Manning passes long to David Tyree for an unbelievable off-the-helmet catch. This is followed by a final touchdown with thirty-five seconds left in the game as the Giants break the Patriots’ perfect season to win the 2008 Super Bowl. There’s a big cheer from the mess deck below; no surprise to me the Coasties are rooting for the underdogs.

  I go up on the bridge and watch the ship’s bow dropping into the troughs followed by torrents of white water cascading over the bow as we rise into the next wave. The wind-carried spray splashes the windows in front of us even though we’re seventy-six feet up, over seven and a half stories off the water.

  The bridge at night is kept dark except for the low glow of the radars and some spooky red lights that don’t affect night vision. You want that extra sensory edge to be able to spot the unexpected, especially on a black and stormy night like this one. Unable to take notes, I listen to the murmured conversation of the half-dozen junior officers and seamen on watch that soon blends into the white noise of the ocean as they keep a steady course heading into the building seas that will keep us pitching but reduce our side-to-side roll.

  I’m beginning to feel that same headache and vertigo I’ve felt during storms in the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean off Cape Horn, so I stagger down three decks to the cabin one of the chiefs has offered to share with me, bang my elbows trying to brush my teeth at the aluminum sink, then climb into my upper fold-down rack, where I spend the next eleven hours sleeping intermittently as the seas grow to twenty feet with forty-knot winds. For Coast Guard cutters in Alaska’s Bering Sea, this would be considered mild winter weather.

  R

  ough seas are a Coast Guard cutterman’s fate. While the Navy values speed and lethality in their ships, the Coast Guard’s missions require endurance and seaworthiness.

  My friend retired Navy Capt. Phil Renaud once worked at the Naval Pacific Meteorology and Oceanograph
y Center in Pearl Harbor issuing heavy-weather advisories to try to keep ships out of harm’s way.

  “Frequently we would issue a ‘divert’ recommendation to a Coast Guard cutter on fisheries patrol in the Aleutian Island chain of Alaska due to an impending ‘bomb’—a rapidly deepening low-pressure system. Often, the Coast Guard captain would politely thank us and then state that mission requirements precluded them from following our recommendation,” he recalls.

  “On one occasion we received a weather observation from the middle of an eastern Pacific hurricane. The hurricane was well forecast, and we issued many ‘remain in port’ advisories. One of the watch officers just about jumped out of his chair when he received this observation from a Coast Guard cutter under way off the Mexican coast reporting seventy kilometers of sustained winds with seas building above twenty-five feet. Of course we immediately sent an advisory message in an attempt to route the ship safely out of the hurricane’s path. With style and grace, the captain thanked us for our support and stated that pursuit of a drug smuggler took higher priority. I guess that old adage of the postal service equally applies to the Coast Guard: ‘Neither rain, nor sleet, nor hurricanes will stop the Coast Guard from pursuit of the bad guys.’ ”

  T

  he next morning I climb back up to the Aspen’s bridge. The seas have settled a bit. There’s a twelve- to fourteen-foot northwest swell coming at twelve-second intervals with two feet of wind waves atop it. “It’s sporty,” Steve notes.

  A crewman with his hoodie up is watching the radar screen.