Lifestyles
Petty Officer Luke Pinneo
On Guard!
It’s 11:00 on a bitter-cold winter night in early January 2007 when the distress call crackles over the radio. A lobster boat is disabled, twenty miles off the rocky coast of New Hampshire. Seas are choppy with ten-foot swells, the water brutally cold and deadly. The wind tears across the waves at a speed that would topple trees on land; out across the ocean, unimpeded, it races with the force of a hurricane. And it’s so dark. Pitch black.
“You never know what’s waiting for you out there,” says Coast Guard Executive Petty Officer Michael Cunningham, who vividly remembers the cold, the wind and the dark. “So far as we understood the situation, the lobster boat was anchored and not in danger of sinking, but until you actually get out there you just never know. It’s the middle of the night. You get woken up by the call, so you’re not completely awake, but you still need to think at the top of your game. You’re going out twenty miles in those conditions on the rescue boat, but you’re not getting there as fast as you want to because of the wind and the water’s chop, knowing you could go faster, but that you’d beat up your crew in the process. And you just never know what to expect once you get on scene.”
It took Cunningham’s team until five the following morning to safely tow the lobster boat back into Portsmouth Harbor—a harrowing but ultimately happy ending to a difficult night he knows could just have easily gone in a different direction. “The cold, the dark, the wind—they’re not the worse part. It’s the unknown, so you prepare yourself for every scenario the best that you can…”
“The ocean is a bountiful, wonderful living thing that I’ve enjoyed my entire life,” says Chief John Roberts, a sixteen-year Coast Guard vet. “But it’s also absolutely unforgiving and doesn’t care the least bit about human life, and it’s willing and able to take life at all times—which keeps us employed, and constantly on our toes.”
Roberts, 37, was quickly reminded of this fact in September of 2007, soon after he assumed command of the Coast Guard’s Portsmouth, New Hampshire, station when a pleasure craft ran ashore in the dark upon the rocks at Duck Island, an uninhabited, northernmost outcrop in the Isle of Shoals.
“Night had fallen, and the five people onboard this sailboat got disoriented,” Roberts recalls. “They were screaming into the radio, panicked, worried they were going to fall into the freezing water and die. We dispatched a rescue boat. Our crew went out, had to get up close and personal with the rocks, but we brought them all safely back into the harbor.”
Though the tiny New England state boasts a mere eighteen miles of mostly rocky coastline (as opposed to hundreds of miles in states like California and Florida or Alaska, which has more ocean coastline than all of the contiguous states combined), New Hampshire’s Coast Guard runs, on average, a hundred missions every year. Most are like the sailboat and stranded lobster boat incidents—successful Search and Rescues (referred to among Guardsmen as SARs).
“Summer is the busiest time for Search and Rescues, what we call ‘SAR Season’ around here, because there are more recreational boaters on the water from May through September. That’s not to say those things don’t happen in the winter, and when they do, it can be considerably more complicated. Usually, those SAR missions are farther off shore, involve commercial vessels, and can make for situations a whole lot scarier.”
But Coast Guard duties extend far beyond the expected heroic water rescues people see on the news and in movies. The statutes of the smallest armed service in the United States military also includes Port, Waterway, and Coastal Security, Aids to Navigation, Defense Readiness, Drug Interdiction, ICE Operations, Marine Safety and Marine Environmental Protection.
“The Coast Guard has a unique main mission,” adds the thirty-two-year-old Cunningham, who joined on the advice of his father, himself a Coast Guard Reservist. “We’re trying to save lives, yes, but depending upon where you’re stationed, you can be doing SAR missions one moment, law enforcement the next. It’s always something different—everything from people in the water, vessels taking on water, vessel fires, medical situations on boats, to communications check-ins for people suffering from engine troubles, flair sightings…any number of things.”
U.S. Coast Guard Station Portsmouth Harbor employs twenty-eight active duty people and eighteen reservists. Members of the Coast Guard Auxiliary, a volunteer organization comprised of civilians and retirees who served in World War II and Vietnam, add extra muscle by helping out with responsibilities that range from vessel safety checks to holding courses on boating safety. The station itself, built in 1967, is located at Fort Point on Newcastle Island, at the mouth of the sprawling Piscataqua River. On the grounds of the base are the remains of a previous coastal life-saving station from the 1880s, a Revolutionary War fort and the Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse, which has been in continuous operation in various forms since 1771 (the present lighthouse was built in 1877 and automated in 1960).
Though tiny New Hampshire’s coastline stretches for a mere eighteen miles between the states of Maine and Massachusetts, Station Portsmouth’s men and women guard a distance of twice that—thirty-five miles, both north and south.
“The majority of our SARs are fairly localized, but half of our area of response is in the state of Maine,” says Roberts. “And our boats can respond as far as fifty nautical miles out to sea.”
Closer to home, they also keep a watchful eye over the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear power plant and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which provides maintenance, overhaul and refueling to the U.S. Navy’s fleet of nuclear submarines. “We conduct random patrols of all the critical infrastructure,” he adds. “That means we’ve got boats driving around with machine guns mounted on them. We make sure there’s nothing squirrelly going on in the area, the power plant in particular, as well as the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The shipyard is protected by Department of Defense Police, who do an excellent job, but we work closely with them.”
Aiding the station’s manpower are two 47-foot state-of-the-art motor lifeboats and two 25-foot response boats, each capable of navigating thirty-foot seas with twenty feet of breaking surf, and in 50 knots of wind (a gale-force equivalent strong enough to uproot trees). The rescue boats are equipped with numerous radios, chart plotters, radar and GPS. The Portsmouth base maintains a helicopter pad, but doesn’t operate its own fleet of helicopters like those seen in the movie The Perfect Storm. Those are stationed farther south on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, although Roberts’ team regularly trains with them. When rescue divers are called upon to go into water that’s colder than 50 degrees, they’re outfitted with high-tech polypropylene long underwear beneath their wetsuits that keep their bodies dry and warm.
Despite the impressive technology, the Guard’s core asset is still its manpower. Guardsmen must successfully complete eight weeks of boot camp, where they’re trained in the history of the service, physical fitness, seamanship, firearms operation and small unit cohesion.
“We’re marched around, do push-ups, and get yelled at,” says Roberts. “It’s true that we are the smallest armed service in the U.S. military, but we cover enormous territory, and since 9-11, our mission has expanded. We’re not war fighters by trade, so our missions are primarily defense work. We operate primarily in the U.S., though we do have forces over in Iraq. The Coast Guard is different in that we specialize in water-based Search and Rescue, which isn’t usually taken on by the Navy and the Marine Corps, and which is oftentimes one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs. The Coast Guard’s Commandant works closely with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We coordinate with the Air Force. They do national SARs over land while we handle the navigable waters of the U.S. Here in New Hampshire, we have a strong working relationship with the local police and fire departments, the Fish and Game Department, the Marine Patrol, and the same agencies across the border in Maine.”
Station Portsmouth Harbor maintains a solid interagency relationship with the rest of the military as well. Roberts’ team recently completed military exercises with the New Hampshire and Maine National Guard Civil Support Teams, which are chemical/biological/radiological response teams run by the National Guard in both states.
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“Which all goes back to our motto, Semper Paratus,” he says. “It means we’re always ready to meet the demands given out by that ocean, and that when American citizens need us, we show up and do our job. This is an outstanding organization that demands a lot of its young men and women. We have these modern rescue boats, each one a $2 million piece of equipment, but there could be a nineteen-year-old serviceman driving that boat if he’s qualified and works hard enough, if he shows the maturity in judgment and seamanship skills. If you ever get in trouble on the water, he could be the person who’s coming out to rescue you.”