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By GORDON I. PETERSON
Senior Editor
Senior Editor
Gordon I. Peterson spent three days with the men and women of Coast Guard
Group St. Petersburg, Fla., to document their operations.
The terse
telephone call to Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg's operations center was
received shortly after 9:00 a.m. on 14 June: "Small craft submerged
in the intercoastal waterway near Venitian Island; it fell off its davits
on the pier overnight. There's an oil spill. St. Petersburg fire
department is on the scene."
Within minutes,
Boatswain's Mate 2nd Class Bradley Bohnsack, an 11-year Coast Guard
veteran, ordered Seaman L. David Johnson and Fireman Daniel J. McKinney to
make the St. Petersburg Station's 21-foot rigid-hull boat ready for
response.
The three-man
team was soon underway across the waters of Tampa Bay, moving quickly
northward past St. Petersburg's skyline, the city pier, and the expensive
homes lining the canals of Florida's intercoastal waterway. Another
typical day for the men and women of Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg had
begun. As Bohnsack observed, "We're getting into the busy summer
season."
Overall, such
calls for assistance are on the upswing for the roughly 300 officers and
enlisted personnel assigned to the Group and its subordinate units--who
are ably assisted by Coast Guard reservists and more than 1,900 Coast
Guard Auxiliary volunteers.
Between 1994 and
1998, for example, the Group's annual search-and-rescue case load had
increased from approximately 1,600 cases in 1994 to more than 2,800 cases
during 1998--resulting from what the Group's commander, Capt. Walter S.
Miller, described as a continuing growth in the recreational boating
population along the 500 miles of Florida's Sun Coast that fall within the
Group's area of responsibility.
This day's
initial mission proved uneventful. Bohnsack and his crew arrived at the
scene of the boating mishap to find a 20-foot airboat submerged next to a
pier. Heavy overnight rains had filled the boat with water. The boat fell
off its lift and submerged when the added weight exceeded the strength of
the lift's arms. The sheen of gasoline from the boat's leaking fuel tank
was visible in the water. Bohnsack offered technical advice to the owner
to assist in the boat's recovery--a challenging task complicated by the
weight of the six-cylinder Continental engine in the stern. By the time a
Florida State Marine Patrol small craft arrived on the scene at 11:00
a.m., the owner had refloated his airboat, and it rested snugly at its
pier. Fuel pollution from the airboat was minimized. The initial spill of
several gallons of gasoline soon dispersed and evaporated.
"Something
Different Every Time"
Fifteen miles
north of St. Petersburg--soon after Bohnsack was completing his
after-action report--Master Chief Boatswain's Mate Alejandro Q. Laquian
ordered his crew to take in all lines on the USCGC Point Jackson.
He slowly backed the 82-foot Point-class patrol boat from its pier at
Clearwater Beach, Fla. Laquian, a seasoned veteran of nearly three decades
of Coast Guard service, carefully conned his cutter through the shallow,
restricted, and crowded channel leading to the Gulf of Mexico. His
nine-man crew responded promptly and precisely to his commands in a smart,
seaman-like fashion.
Each year, the Point
Jackson spends approximately 1,575 hours on patrol in the waters off
Florida's west coast performing the Coast Guard's standard combination of
multiple missions--maritime law enforcement, search and rescue, port
security, boating safety, humanitarian service, and protection of natural
marine resources. A typical monthly cycle may entail two three-day patrols
interspersed with shorter missions, on-call response periods, and
"down" time at the pier for maintenance. In the words of one Point
Jackson crewman, "We do something different every time we go
out." Constant training and requalification for law-enforcement
duties are also the order of the day.
To the south of
St. Petersburg, another Point-class patrol boat--USCGC Point Countess--adheres
to a similar routine from its station at Nokomis, Fla. Both patrol boats
are approaching 30 years of service. Three 110-foot Island-class patrol
boats will replace them next year. With their 2,000-mile range, the
replacement cutters will improve the Group St. Petersburg's reach into the
Gulf of Mexico for drug-interdiction and other priority missions.
Last November, Point
Jackson teamed with the U.S. Customs Service and seized 220 pounds of
cocaine after boarding the motor vessel Chios Charm outside the
Port of Tampa. A stowaway on the 600-foot Panamanian vessel planned to
jump overboard with his drug stash and swim to shore before the ship
pulled into port. "We got on board and did a safety boarding to
start, then once the vessel crossed the 12-mile zone we started our
tactical sweep of the ship," said Petty Officer 2nd Class John
Brogan, a crewman aboard the Point Jackson. U.S. Customs agents
later arrested five men in conjunction with the drug-interdiction
operation.
Three weeks
before, Point Jackson had terminated the voyages of two fishing
craft that had been sighted trawling inside the closed Florida Middle
Grounds--a 40-square-mile area off Florida's west coast closed to all
trawling. Master Chief Laquian seized more than 8,400 pounds of shrimp
valued at more than $19,000 from one of the commercial shrimp boats and
issued a fine of $2,000 for the violation.
More recently,
the Point Jackson rescued two recreational sailors after their boat
sank en route to Miami, Fla., from Texas. In another routine response, the
cutter towed a disabled sailboat into Fort Myers Beach. On today's patrol,
a civilian sailboat is boarded and inspected without incident--all in a
day's work to the upbeat and professional crew under Laquian's command.
Helping
Commerce "Come and Go"
Across the
channel from Group headquarters, the crew of the 175-foot Keeper-class
coastal buoy tender USCGC Joshua Appleby prepared for an upcoming
aids-to-navigation underway period. To cross the brow of the Coast Guard's
most modern buoy tender is to take a step into the future--to a time when
cutting-edge computers, modern marine-propulsion and navigational systems,
and innovative contracting-out procedures will improve mission
performance, reduce crew size, and lower life-cycle costs. To her
commanding officer, Chief Warrant Officer Ray Sisk, the cutter is not just
state of the art--she is a next-generation ship.
Sophisticated
hardware is profusely evident on the bridge, in the engineering spaces,
and on the buoy deck--where a 6,200-pound marker buoy and its 6,500-pound
concrete sinker can be lowered by a 24,000-pound-capacity in-haul winch in
eight minutes to within one yard of the charted position in a channel.
The ship's
integrated bridge system consists of a variety of advanced navigational
and propulsion-control systems that offer virtually "hands-off"
operation--if desired--once geographic positions are entered for the point
of departure and desired destination. A Differential Global Positioning
System, an Electronic Chart Display Information System, an Aids to
Navigation Data Recording System, a Dynamic Position Positioning System,
and a Main Propulsion Control and Monitoring System all interact to give
the buoy tender the precise navigational and operational capabilities
essential for the accurate and safe placement of aids to navigation.
"When we lay a track line," Sisk said, "we normally see
deviations of from five to15 feet to the left or right of the
track--there's not a helmsman alive who can steer that well." Sisk
said that the ship's automated navigation systems are more accurate, more
timely, and more useful than a conventional map team's use of visual and
paper charting.
The Joshua
Appleby was built by Marinette Marine Corporation in Wisconsin using
modular fabrication in combination with assembly-line progression.
Commissioned in November 1998, she is the sixth ship in a planned
fourteen-ship class of coastal buoy tenders. Liberal use of the newest
technologies allowed the crew size to be reduced to 18 members--compared
to the 40 to 50 personnel normally assigned to a cutter of comparable
size.
"We are
optimally manned," Sisk observes. "We have the right number of
people to operate the ship and do our assigned mission." The smaller
crew--coupled with highly sophisticated equipment--presents more demanding
training and qualification requirements, however, and several simultaneous
absences resulting from unplanned emergency leave or sickness can pose
manning complications.
The ship is built
to American Bureau of Shipping standards for an unmanned engine room--but
when the ship is underway an engineering watch officer is routinely
stationed at a console in the engineering control center to monitor and
operate all main propulsion, auxiliary, and damage-control equipment.
Keeping
the Wind In a Sailor's Sails
In port, Joshua
Appleby's crew is augmented by a five-person maintenance-assist team
to keep the ship in top operational condition. Civilian contract workers
clean interior spaces and paint the hull, exterior bulkheads, and the buoy
deck--saving time and reducing work for the crew. "There's nothing
that really lets the wind out of a new sailor's sails than to have to
strip and wax a deck or be a mess cook for a month or so," Sisk said.
"We are just not manned for that, so we contract out for it--and it
seems to be working quite well for us."
Sisk is proud of
his ship and crew. "Our people get out to mark the channels to enable
commerce to come and go," he remarked. "It is unglamorous,
dirty, and hot work--there has only been one buoy tender on "Bay
Watch" that anyone can ever recall--but it is important work. It
is just amazing what my people can do and what they know--they are able to
use the ship as she was designed to be used."
Multimission
Teamwork: Air and Sea
The five stations
assigned to Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg have already conducted more
than 1,500 search-and-rescue (SAR) missions this year (through the end of
June), reflecting Miller's primary emphasis in the busy waters of his area
of responsibility. If necessary, he can turn to other Coast Guard assets
stationed in the greater Tampa Bay region, including seven Coast Guard
C-130 fixed-wing aircraft and 13 HH-60 Jayhawk helicopters assigned to the
command of Capt. Ben R. Thomason III at Coast Guard Air Station
Clearwater, Fla.
On rare
occasions, three 210-foot Reliance-class cutters homeported in St.
Petersburg also could be made available. The larger cutters and aviation
assets are under the operational control of the Coast Guard's Seventh
District, headquartered in Miami, Fla., and the Atlantic Area Command in
Portsmouth, Va.
By early July,
Thomason's air arm had participated in nearly 400 search-and-rescue
missions, but his force is most heavily engaged in illegal-migrant and
drug-interdiction operations. The C-130 Hercules aircraft, now being
upgraded with forward-looking infrared radar, are staged regularly at the
U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for one-week rotations in support
of the Coast Guard's Seventh District or the Joint Interagency Task Force
East's counterdrug operations. Similarly, the station's Jayhawk
helicopters are forward-deployed on two-week rotations to Caribbean
operating sites on the islands of Nassau and Great Inagua.
The operational
tempo is high. According to Cdr. Fredrick D. Pendleton, the air station's
operations officer, the Seventh District recently augmented the unit's
flying time beyond the collective total of 5,600 hours allocated annually
for C-130 aircraft operations. "We are actually going up to 6,400
hours, with a similar increase for our helicopters," he said. Surge
operations, like the current Frontier Lance Phase II, will temporarily
provide added air and sea assets committed to the drug-interdiction
mission.
Because most
counterdrug operations are conducted at night--an inherently more
challenging mission--Coast Guard pilots and aircrew must adjust to the
pace of "reverse cycle" operations. Fatigue can pose added risk,
given the unavoidable interruptions to normal circadian rhythms. For this
reason, the Coast Guard has developed facilities for "day
sleepers" forward-deployed to the Caribbean region. Special
provisions are made for light, noise, daytime activities, and meals.
Faced with a
ruthless and cunning adversary, equipped with high-powered "go
fast" boats capable of speeds above 70 knots if the sea state allows,
the station's helicopter pilots inevitably encounter a major frustration
during counterdrug operations--no "end game" leading to an
apprehension. Helicopter aircrews are not allowed to employ force to stop
surface craft observed or suspected of drug smuggling.
"My pilots
hate this," Pendleton told Sea Power, "because there are
hours and hours of nothing, and all of a sudden you get something but the
guy gets away." The Coast Guard recognizes this shortcoming in its
drug-interdiction capabilities and, according to its fiscal year 2000
budget statement, plans to test the use of force from aircraft. Last
December, the Coast Guard selected Boeing's MD-902 Explorer helicopter to
help the service determine if its helicopters should be armed.
On
Station, Ready, and Responsive
Miller advocates
the goal of excellence in operations and support through teamwork at Coast
Guard Group St. Petersburg. "You can't have great operations without
great support," he said, "so I want to emphasize that role to my
people." During numerous interviews with the men and women of the
command, morale and a sense of mission accomplishment received high
ratings. That is not particularly surprising--throughout the Coast Guard,
responsibility is delegated downward to the most junior members. Also not
surprisingly, the most serious quality-of-life concerns center on better
financial compensation, adequate housing allowances, and a consistently
high workload--issues that extend well beyond the Group's purview or
ability to influence directly.
Just as members
of their sister services are doing during this time of a booming U.S.
economy, many enlisted Coast Guard members and spouses are turning,
because of financial pressures, to civilian employment during their
nonduty hours. "Go to a Home Depot on the weekend," said
Thomason, "and you will find the Coast Guard--they're drug-free,
they're reliable, and they work like the devil."
Boatswain's Mate
3rd Class Jeffery Putnam, assigned to the St. Petersburg Station, will
leave the Coast Guard at the expiration of his four-year enlistment.
"It was fun," he said, "but there are more opportunities on
the outside." Putnam's earlier career assignments entailed
experiences shared by many of his shipmates in the service--extended
deployments at sea and extraordinarily long workweeks when in port. While
assigned to the Hamilton-class high-endurance cutter USCGC Boutwell at
Alameda, Calif., for example, he spent 210 days underway in one year. Add
normal workday and watchstanding requirements in port, and 100-hour
workweeks are not unusual. "It's not like working at a bank,"
Putnam said, "where you can call in and say, 'Sorry, I won't be in
today.'"
Miller and his
fellow Coast Guard commanders are sensitive to these concerns, and they
work hard--but not always successfully--to ensure that personnel rotations
occur on time and with qualified replacements. They have sponsored
innovative "career days" to expose junior nonrated members to
professional opportunities in the service. They also assist married
members locate suitable and affordable housing and to receive
family-service assistance, if necessary, at Tampa's MacDill Air Force
Base.
Miller said that
the replacement of the Group's two 82-foot patrol boats with three
110-foot vessels and the addition of new support billets will benefit his
command's personnel and operational posture--reflecting positive support
from his Seventh District and Atlantic Area headquarters.
"I'm very
proud of the Coast Guard people here--and their dedication to the
job," he said. In that respect, his pride mirrors the esprit
displayed by the men and women of Coast Guard Group St. Petersburg--on
station, ready, and responsive. |
