Three very muscular, 275 horsepower outboards will propel this coast guard vessel with an inflatable hull (foreground) at nearly 46 knots in its law enforcement and search and rescue duties with the US Coast Guard station in Marblehead, OH.
COAST GUARD STATION MARBLEHEAD
...and lots of service memories
Pleasure bombards the soul when good memories are rekindled.
I had that thrill recently when I visited a US Coast Guard facility for the first time since my discharge from active duty nearly 50 years ago.
During life time seems to dissolve. It was apparent that morning at the Marblehead Coast Guard station when the young guardsman who met Sue and me at the door asked when I started my service. “1958,” I admitted casually.
His startled look turned into a knowing smile when he admitted that was 50 years before he joined.
My trip through nautical nostalgia that day actually began a year or so ago when a few of us coast guard veterans assembled ourselves and formed a body that grew to be known as the Buckeye Coasties.
On a recent weekend we and our ladies reassembled ourselves—almost 40 strong—in Port Clinton where nostalgia was trumped only by laughter from an occasional tall tale.
After a Friday night mixer at the motel the meat of the visit began with a guided tour of the Marblehead Lighthouse that next morning. It is the oldest lighthouse in continuous operation on the Great Lakes and has guided sailors safely along the rocky shores of Marblehead Peninsula since 1822.
From there it was on to Coast Guard Station Marblehead, a very modern facility built in 1981, which traces its history to being one of the first 7 ever built on the Great Lakes in 1876.
As we toured, my memory drifted those 50 years to the old, wooden lifeboat station in Charlevoix, Michigan where I began my service.
I remember standing in the watch tower up there as the search and rescue operation for the oar boat Carl D. Bradley played out in the constant squawk of radio traffic. She was 630 feet long and broke in half—and sank—in a monstrous storm just 12 miles southwest of nearby South Fox Island.
I watched the morbid process of bodies being delivered to the temporary morgue in our station’s garage as I manned that radio and kept the official log of the horrific event.
That was just days after my arrival there from boot camp and a prompt lesson in the power of the sea and the mission of my service’s sometimes somber duty.
The names of the two survivors out of the 35 man crew of that oar boat are forever burned in my memory; Elmer Fleming and Frank Mays. I hope their lives have treated them kindly ever since.
I remembered standing on the heaving deck of the CG buoy tender White Lupine as we pounded our way through storms on Lake Ontario to provide maintenance service to its giant buoys.
I remembered ice on the interior bulkheads of our berthing compartment when we were frozen to the dock in the long winters of Ogdensburg, NY on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
I remembered taking the Jeep from my duty station in Oswego, NY where I was serving as the group’s yeoman and searching the shoreline toward Sodus Point for a barge that had broken from its tow in a storm the previous night on that same lake—and finding it, complete with its surviving crewmember who was really happy to see me as his ride beat itself against the shoreline rocks in the cold morning’s light.
Thanks Buckeye Coasties. And, thanks to you modern coasties for your service to our country. May you one day enjoy the warm fuzzies of your very own-even sometimes tragic-memories.
_____________________
A self-righting, 47 foot cutter of 40,000 pounds displacement is pictured to the right rear in the lead photo. It is the primary vessel for the overall mission of the Marblehead CG station and is well adapted to heavy weather operations common on this shallow lake.
In the small photo a 20’ airboat is pictured at the ready in the station’s boat house. It is handy in the marshes of the station’s operating area and was the boat used in the ice-floe rescue of several hundred folks drifting off shore near Oak Harbor in February 2009.
The group photo shows some of the nearly 40 coast guard veterans and ladies of the Buckeye Coasties organization on tour at the Marblehead CG Station with three very professional station personnel flanking the group in blue uniform, jump suits.
COAST GUARD STATION MARBLEHEAD
...and lots of service memories
Pleasure bombards the soul when good memories are rekindled.
I had that thrill recently when I visited a US Coast Guard facility for the first time since my discharge from active duty nearly 50 years ago.
During life time seems to dissolve. It was apparent that morning at the Marblehead Coast Guard station when the young guardsman who met Sue and me at the door asked when I started my service. “1958,” I admitted casually.His startled look turned into a knowing smile when he admitted that was 50 years before he joined.
My trip through nautical nostalgia that day actually began a year or so ago when a few of us coast guard veterans assembled ourselves and formed a body that grew to be known as the Buckeye Coasties.
On a recent weekend we and our ladies reassembled ourselves—almost 40 strong—in Port Clinton where nostalgia was trumped only by laughter from an occasional tall tale.
After a Friday night mixer at the motel the meat of the visit began with a guided tour of the Marblehead Lighthouse that next morning. It is the oldest lighthouse in continuous operation on the Great Lakes and has guided sailors safely along the rocky shores of Marblehead Peninsula since 1822.
From there it was on to Coast Guard Station Marblehead, a very modern facility built in 1981, which traces its history to being one of the first 7 ever built on the Great Lakes in 1876.
As we toured, my memory drifted those 50 years to the old, wooden lifeboat station in Charlevoix, Michigan where I began my service.
I remember standing in the watch tower up there as the search and rescue operation for the oar boat Carl D. Bradley played out in the constant squawk of radio traffic. She was 630 feet long and broke in half—and sank—in a monstrous storm just 12 miles southwest of nearby South Fox Island.
I watched the morbid process of bodies being delivered to the temporary morgue in our station’s garage as I manned that radio and kept the official log of the horrific event.
That was just days after my arrival there from boot camp and a prompt lesson in the power of the sea and the mission of my service’s sometimes somber duty.
The names of the two survivors out of the 35 man crew of that oar boat are forever burned in my memory; Elmer Fleming and Frank Mays. I hope their lives have treated them kindly ever since.
I remembered standing on the heaving deck of the CG buoy tender White Lupine as we pounded our way through storms on Lake Ontario to provide maintenance service to its giant buoys.
I remembered ice on the interior bulkheads of our berthing compartment when we were frozen to the dock in the long winters of Ogdensburg, NY on the St. Lawrence Seaway.
I remembered taking the Jeep from my duty station in Oswego, NY where I was serving as the group’s yeoman and searching the shoreline toward Sodus Point for a barge that had broken from its tow in a storm the previous night on that same lake—and finding it, complete with its surviving crewmember who was really happy to see me as his ride beat itself against the shoreline rocks in the cold morning’s light.
Thanks Buckeye Coasties. And, thanks to you modern coasties for your service to our country. May you one day enjoy the warm fuzzies of your very own-even sometimes tragic-memories.
_____________________
A self-righting, 47 foot cutter of 40,000 pounds displacement is pictured to the right rear in the lead photo. It is the primary vessel for the overall mission of the Marblehead CG station and is well adapted to heavy weather operations common on this shallow lake.
In the small photo a 20’ airboat is pictured at the ready in the station’s boat house. It is handy in the marshes of the station’s operating area and was the boat used in the ice-floe rescue of several hundred folks drifting off shore near Oak Harbor in February 2009.
The group photo shows some of the nearly 40 coast guard veterans and ladies of the Buckeye Coasties organization on tour at the Marblehead CG Station with three very professional station personnel flanking the group in blue uniform, jump suits.
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