“Did you sleep, sir?” he asks the captain.
“Yes,” Steve tells him.
“I can’t in these conditions. I was awake in my rack for eight hours waiting for my watch.”
Steve says they found the missing four-ton buoy on a beach north of Eureka last night. He goes below to map things out with his officers.
By noon the offshore swells are down to ten feet and we can get back out on the buoy deck. It’s a brisk cloudy day. In the distance the snow-capped coastal range of Northern California looks as wild and rugged as when Sir Francis Drake first sailed these waters in the sixteenth century. A pair of albatrosses circle around the ship—a good omen.
Buoy Deck Supervisor Paddy White has two guys, Bosun’s Mates Dan Mendez and Liston Jackson, up atop one of the buoys in climbing harnesses. They’re installing a green warning light, retro (reflective tape), batteries, a solar panel with metal legs, coils, and plastic bird spikes—ineffectively designed to keep birds from standing or pooping on the solar panel. The whole Rube Goldberg contraption looks like it could be knocked off with a Super Soaker water gun.
Paddy shows me the next generation of buoy illumination—a small Canadian-made solar cube with superefficient LED lights and internal batteries that can be easily bolted on and off the buoy. Unfortunately, they only have one on board for the two buoys they’ll be dropping on this trip.
Through much of the twentieth century, Coasties installed old 12-volt car batteries to power buoys and when they ran out of juice tossed them over the side. By the 1990s, they were sending divers down to retrieve piles of these old batteries that they’d since identified as hazardous waste.
I examine big coils of thick chain and the four- and six-ton square concrete “sinkers,” or “rocks,” that will anchor these two buoys.
“The last storm dragged a [12,700-pound] rock and broke the chain and sent the seventy-eight-hundred-pound buoy drifting off, so this time we’ll add more chain,” Paddy explains. “A hundred and fifty-five feet of chain is about an extra two thousand pounds.”
They begin moving the chains around with big metal hooks.
“What do you call the hooks?” I ask.
“They’re called chain hooks.” Bosun’s Mate Second Class Paul Vanacore grins.
I ask Paddy if he joined the Coast Guard with buoy tending in mind.
“When I came in I didn’t even know we had a black [hull] fleet,” he admits, “but I like it. It’s more hands-on. There’s more seamanship involved.”
Five miles out from Humboldt Bay, we hit a line in the water where the ocean turns from deep blue to mud brown. It looks like the mouth of the Amazon, this vast outflow of storm sediment stretching up and down the coast. The last time I saw a phenomenon like this was during the El Niño winter storms of 1983. The bridge goes quiet as we enter the choppy brown cauldron. Steve and Stephanie scan the harbor channel with binoculars. Big fifteen-foot waves are rolling through.
“Right ten degrees rudder,” Steve instructs.
“Rudders right ten degrees.”
“Aye.”
They stop to test the ship’s dynamic positioning thrusters to see if the cutter will stick in one place or drift. Then we turn away from the coast, pounding back out to sea. The captain looks pensive.
“Any thoughts at this point?” I ask.
“The North Pacific is no fun in early February . . . We’re going to try to anchor in Trinidad Harbor. Hopefully we can tuck in there with some leeward protection so people can get some sleep tonight.”
He leaves the bridge in the hands of Lt. Meredith Phillips and two other women. As we approach Trinidad Lighthouse three hours later, twelve-foot breakers can be seen rolling around the point, making the harbor better for surfing than anchoring. It’s decided we’ll stay offshore steaming slowly into the swells till midnight, then turn around.
When I wake up at 7:30 we’re back at the mouth of Humboldt Bay, where the seas have dropped to eight feet under cloudy skies. Half a dozen fishing boats are heading out on the iron gray sea after having been stuck in port for several days.
A 47-foot surfboat from the Humboldt Boat Station comes out to drop off two bar pilots who will help determine where to locate the new replacement buoy.
We enter the harbor channel inside the seawall. I talk to Bosun’s Mate Second Class Joshua Peelman, the big redheaded deck supervisor who starred in that Dirty Jobs segment. He’s been onboard the Aspen for three years, longer than anyone else. His father served in the Coast Guard for twenty-two years. “I’m the son of the son of a sailor, like in the Jimmy Buffett song,” he tells me, putting on his white hard hat.
The bow thruster starts rumbling to life below our feet, the dynamic positioning fixing us in place. He orders his crew to turn off the deck radio as it’s time to get to work. The big chain drum (inhaul winch) sits on the buoy deck below the glassed-in control booth for the spar marine crane with its two hooks. A second cross-deck winch used for side balance sits to its left. Josh’s crew hauls a length of chain across the deck and hangs it over an iron block. There they use a propane torch to heat up a rivet pin inserted into a shackle that will extend the chain’s length. When its head is white-hot, Paddy and another crewman beat the pin down with sledgehammers; then a third crewmember comes in with a smaller hammer to flatten the head flush with the shackle.
They move to new positions, and Josh begins giving hand signals. The crane operator, Chief Ken Miller, watches Josh’s thumb and first two fingers as a hook and sling are secured to a big concrete sinker and they open the low starboard gate. Two fingers go up, and the six-ton “rock” slides across the green deck as the drum pulls chain. Two fingers go down, and it hops and slides again before swinging out over the side, where it hangs suspended. Josh works the chain into a roller slot on the edge of the cutter.
The plan is to now have one of the Aspen’s small boats go out and check the water depth. A sixteenth-century drop line with a lead weight attached to it is still a more accurate measuring device than electronic depth finders, I’m told. A moment later, a tugboat comes by and offers to do the sounding for them so they don’t have to launch the boat.
Josh’s crew includes Paddy, rigger Shannon Kelly, Mendez and Jackson, and two cooks, Robert Longsworth Jr. and Jen Wright. I’m warned not to step over the chain lying on the deck, a golden safety rule. They lower the 12,700-pound sinker down the side of the ship into the water, leaving some attached chain on deck.
They then use pneumatic drills to undo the “gripes” or chocks, that secure the far green buoy to the deck. They drag the sinker’s chain end across the deck, getting ready to marry it up to the buoy’s dual suspension chains.
“Break outboard and inward gripes,” Josh directs. “You’re forward,” he tells Rob. “You’re with me, Dave,” he directs me. “Chief, we’re gonna break in and out and then shackle it up.”
“Nice surf, long rides,” Paddy notes as a wave rolls by.
“Too cold for me,” Josh says.
If a large wave were to roll out from under the buoy or sinker as they were going over the side, it could create a “shock load” that might rip the crane from the deck (it’s happened before).
“We’re going live!” Josh announces as they connect the chain to the buoy.
“Swells coming,” Paddy warns, and they wait out the next set.
One of the crew breaks the last outboard gripe. The cross-deck snatch block (the balancing drum) starts pulling the buoy sideways as the main boom lifts it up off the deck. This creates tension that leans the buoy over forty-five degrees and prevents it from swinging loose.
This big clanging industrial choreography reminds me of the drill decks of offshore oil rigs I’ve been on but with more sea movement.
“Get slack,” Josh directs one of the riggers. The boat is turning as Josh gives a thumbs-up with his left hand, two fingers down with his right hand held underneath the left, then thrusts his left arm out as the buoy moves across the deck toward the
open gate, dragging its chains, which are connected to a pair of swing arms that can drop below the surface. Two riggers follow behind with two small tag lines attached.
“Ready cross deck!” Josh calls out. As the big buoy goes over the side and hits the water, the boom hook is removed. The heavy chain rushes off the deck, dropping into the water. There are just two ropes still connected to it as the buoy floats upright. They release the pelican hook and then the cage line. The cage (a Rube Goldberg–like structure) is now bobbing even with the deck as the green navigation buoy begins to drift away. It’s 10:10 A.M. The deck radio is turned back on. Bob Seger’s singing “ ’bout that old-time rock and roll.”
The original plan had been to dock back in the city tonight, but that’s not going to happen, and I have a plane to catch, so I gather my bags from the wardroom and join crewmember Electronics Technician First Class Dan Piccola, who’s also due back, along with the bar pilots. The 47-foot surfboat pulls up to the side of the Aspen. We climb down a short rope ladder, step aboard, and wave good-bye, heading over to the Humboldt Bay Surf Station.
This surf station has been active since 1856. Its white and red main building and boathouse date back to 1936. Its communications center is located in its rooftop cupola. Along with three active boats, it has a fully restored World War II–era motor rescue boat on a launch rail. We spend a few hours admiring the station’s rich history, wild dunes, wind-sculpted trees, and shorebirds before catching a van ride five hours south to San Francisco.
Red Hull
It’s hard to say where the soul of the Coast Guard lies: in its shore-based lifesaving stations, dangling on the cables of its rescue helicopters, or bounding across wild seas on its blue-water cutters. Perhaps it’s in the heart of every Coastie who’s ever had to head out on rough water, be it sweet, brackish, or salty.
Bosun’s Mate Second Class Paul Vanacore recalls serving on the High Endurance Cutter Sherman when it did a round-the-world tour.
“We left Alameda and went to Hawaii, Guam, Singapore, Japan, the Persian Gulf, the Seychelles, Madagascar, Cape Town [in] South Africa—where we helped rescue a car carrier that was dead in the water and listing badly in fifteen-foot swells—then on to Cape Verde, Barbados, Aruba, through the Panama Canal to San Diego and home, where we were greeted like returning heroes with roses dropping from the Golden Gate Bridge and a band waiting at the pier.”
In 2005, the Coast Guard’s largest ship, the 420-foot red-hulled icebreaker/research vessel Healy, sailed from Seattle to the North Pole and on over the top of the world to Norway. The scientists on board wanted to keep stopping to do ice-core sampling, but the autumn ice was hardening fast, and the captain, fearing they would get stuck and be forced to winter over, told them that wasn’t going to happen.
From Tromsö, Norway, they headed toward Dublin but on the way hit a huge storm that raged for days, building to forty-foot seas and seventy-knot winds—until the night it got worse.
Chief Wayne Kidd, a salty old fireplug of a sailor who looks like British actor Bob Hoskins, was standing watch on the bridge at 3:00 A.M. when the rogue wave hit. “I remember we could feel it (the sixteen-thousand-ton ship) just climbing and climbing and climbing this one wave, and as we came down the back side into the trough the next one must have been twice as big, and it just broke on us. Blue water was up to the bridge window [over sixty feet up], and it ripped the cab off the forward crane and lifted it onto the elevated deck. It snapped a fourteen-thousand-pound anchor shaft and flooded the forward berthing in four feet of water. You have these gooseneck air vents to prevent water from getting in, but they were underwater themselves.”
After making repairs, they sailed on from Dublin to the Azores, to St. Maarten in the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and then home to Seattle.
T
oday’s departure from Seattle’s Pier 36 is a little more low-key. The Healy is off on a six-month scientific deployment north of the Aleutians, though I’ll be leaving her in Edmonds, Washington, after they’ve done a few hours field-testing their acoustic Doppler current profiler. This is one of a suite of sensors onboard for the 2008 Bering Sea Ecological Study that will examine the impact of climate change on that productive marine habitat. “This time our only port calls will be at Dutch [Harbor, Alaska],” Chief Kidd tells me.
On the eighty-two-foot-wide bridge, Capt. Ted Lindstrom is pacing, occasionally stepping outside to check the lines and escort tug. Six-two and north of 250 pounds with a husky voice, white hair, and a clipped white mustache, he reminds me of a bull walrus, which seems appropriate given that part of the Healy’s work will involve helicopter surveillance and tagging of walruses.
They test the different pipes (bleats and buzzes) for Man Overboard, Flight Crash, and Ship’s Whistle.
The bow thruster rumbles to life.
One of the cranes “breaks the brow,” lifting the gangplank aboard as it had earlier lifted several “science vans,” shipping containers outfitted as marine labs.
“Permission to get under way?” Ensign Zack Bender, one of the junior officers running the bridge under the supervision of more experienced mariners, asks the captain.
“Let’s do it,” he replies.
The ship’s horn lets off one long and three short blasts.
The ISC (Integrated Support Command) stevedores ashore toss all the ship’s lines at once.
“They want those parking spaces.” The captain grins, looking down at the Healy’s pier with its thirty-five now empty spots.
I look across the Coast Guard station toward the snow-covered mass of Mt. Rainier rising majestically behind the clock tower of the Starbucks Center. We slowly pull out of the channel, moving into Puget Sound through the Port of Seattle, coming about and heading north past the Space Needle and a couple of green and white passenger ferries on the Bainbridge Island run.
Along with the Healy, the Coast Guard operates two other red-hulled seagoing icebreakers, the Polar Sea and the Polar Star, also docked at Pier 36. It also operates a smaller icebreaker, the Mackinaw, on the Great Lakes.
“All ahead sixty shaft turns,” Ensign Bender instructs.
“All ahead sixty shaft turns, aye,” the seaman on the throttle responds.
The Healy’s six diesel electric engines can generate 30,000 hp and break 4.5 feet of ice at three knots or eight feet backing off and ramming the ice.
The older “heavy icebreakers,” the Polar Star, which was commissioned in 1976, and its sister ship the Polar Sea, commissioned in ’78, can generate 75,000 hp with diesels and jet turbines and break six feet of ice at three knots or twenty-one feet backing and ramming, making them nearly as powerful as the largest nuclear-powered Russian icebreakers. With their rounded steel bows, the Polars ride up on the ice and crush it beneath their thirteen thousand tons of dead weight. Taking their time, they can crack and crush up to forty feet of certain types of ice.
For forty years, until 2005, the Coast Guard ran the nation’s icebreaker program that managed these ships. Then the White House Office of Science and Technology handed the program—worth more than $60 million—over to the National Science Foundation (NSF) figuring that, as the icebreakers’ major client, it ought to run the program.
In 2006, as one of its first actions, the NSF ordered the Polar Star tied up to its dock in “caretaker” status, essentially mothballing it. The NSF takeover also marked the end of the Coast Guard’s Polar Operations helicopter wing, which included four HH-65s that specialized in extreme polar flying. The NSF prefers to lease commercial helicopters.
A tour through the 399-foot Polar Sea gives me a sense of why the NSF doesn’t want to use the Coast Guard’s older icebreakers on its science missions. The 1970s lab and library spaces are barely adequate for modern oceanography, the deployment area for the cage-like CTD—conductivity, temperature, and depth—rosette (a basic tool for ocean sampling) is cramped, and acoustic mapping and sensing work is near impossible when the loud and vibrat
ing ship is under way or breaking ice.
On the other hand, the Polars have been as far north and south as it’s possible to sail on our ocean planet and spent over a quarter century clearing and grooming channels through the ice to maintain supply routes for the NSF’s big McMurdo Station in Antarctica. When the NSF tried to use a Russian icebreaker for Operation Deep Freeze in 2006, the Russian broke a blade and the Polar Star had to rush down from Seattle to stand by while repairs were made.
In 2007, the Polar Sea cleared the twenty-mile channel to McMurdo along with an NSF-leased Swedish icebreaker. It was the Polar Sea’s eighteenth deployment to Antarctica. It’s also been to the Arctic eighteen times.
T
he newer, larger Coast Guard Cutter Healy was built as a research support vessel with a computer lab, a dry lab, a wet lab, a biochemical lab, a dive locker, a science freezer, climate control chambers, and a conference room. Besides its helicopter hangar it also has two A-frames, five cranes, and a large staging area for deploying equipment, along with berthing for up to fifty scientists (the Polars can take up to thirty-five). The Healy can also control its radiated noise to allow for underwater acoustic work. In addition, it can carry up to eight science vans, and its crew of eighty-five includes half a dozen marine science technicians.
“We cater to the scientists, put their gear in the water and collect the mud and water and stuff so they can sample it in the warm and dry [labs],” explains Marine Science Technician First Class Eric Rocklage as he tours me around the aft deck. Along with rosettes, nets, and sediment core samplers, they’ve deployed a large ROV robot submarine off the rear A-frame to collect vampire squid and other exotica and dropped a seventy-foot-long jumbo piston core to collect bottom strata.
He shows me the “man-basket” that a crane will lower over the side to put scientists on the ice, along with their Coast Guard escort of lifeguards and bear gunners. On their last deployment, as they were heading north they passed a skinny polar bear floating south on a small ice floe. Even though polar bears can swim long distances, this one’s situation looked fairly hopeless in the increasingly open waters of the Arctic.
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