Part Two: When I joined the USCG at age 17, my boating skills were limited to rowing a bateau across the Isle of Hope River to throw out crab lines. Somehow, in Coast Guard basic training, I became the coxswain for my recruit company’s rowing team. We were not dealing with sleek Harvard type rowing skiffs. We had big heavy seaworthy surf boats with, as I recall, eight rowing positions.
My job was to steer the boat with a sweep oar about 12 feet long and call out the cadence for rowing. We would start with about five or six very quick pulls on the oars and then go into a rhythm to keep the boat on plane. We competed in one race a month. Our team won them all! It helped that I had a couple of guys on the team who had actual rowing experience and were built like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
During one race the leather strap that held the steering oar to the transom broke. I am not exactly sure what happened next. I was suddenly trying to maintain a cadence for my crew while wrestling with a very long, heavy steering oar no longer attached to the transom but suddenly alive with a mind of its’ own, whipping around in cross wake and current Out of the corner of my eye I saw the boat next to us Roy Hubbard
slipping slowly ahead. The race was part of the competition between the units in training and the winners got a long weekend ashore.
I saw my long weekend at Crest Pier, Wildwood Beach, NJ slipping away!
Struggling to control the sweep oar, I tried without success to keep the cadence of the rowing commands.
My team never hesitated.
They kept up the cadence and pulled those oars in perfect unison.
I lay across the transom with the oar under my armpit to hold it down till I could get my belt off and tie the oar down. We lost position for a few seconds during the confusion but we finished the race a good half length ahead of the nearest boat. A complaint was filed about crowding followed by a close examination of our sweep oar tied down with my belt. We got our long weekend off! Needless to say there was a little betting money floating around between the Chief Petty officers in charge of the different companies. Our chief was a happy sailor.
I was proud of the determination my rowing crew demonstrated that day. During my four years in the USCG I witnessed numerous times that same determination, discipline and good seamanship from the ship’s captain on down.
During the next few years I witnessed a lot heroism and skills besting the seas and impossible conditions of the North Atlantic to complete the mission.
There were weeks of fighting the massive seas and holding position in the same coordinates where the “Perfect Storm” occurred.
One time we were underway a couple of hundred miles off Nova Scotia in a raging North Atlantic storm. If you walked thru the ship you would find yourself walking on the bulkheads, (walls) instead of the deck because the ship, 255 feet long, is laying on her side with the sea rushing by right at the top edge of the gunnels. Hanging on to anything handy, as the ship rolls one side to the other, you slowly walk down the bulkhead, across the deck and up the other bulkhead as the ship rolls one side to the other.
We lost life boats and deck structure in monstrous seas off the coast of Newfoundland. The Sickbay would be full of injured sailors. Before the phrase was ever made famous in the movie “Jaws”, I was thinking, “We are going to need a bigger boat”!
Tied to a dock deep in snow and ice in the harbor at St. John’s, Newfoundland, we used giant chains fastened across the deck with massive pelican hooks, (google It), to hold the ship to the dock against the hundred mile an hour blizzards that would crop up with little notice.
In those days Aids to Navigation in US waters closer in, included large anchored buoys which tend to go out during storms when a ship needs them the most to navigate the rocky shores of our Northeast coast.
Those giant buoys, about 15 feet tall, chained to a concrete anchor weighing tons and bouncing around like a cork, had to be captured in rough seas and usually brought aboard a Coast Guard tender for servicing in the dark of night under icy cold, very rough, dangerous conditions. There were different challenges with air/sea rescues. Amazing Coast Guard chopper pilots and jumpers picking ill or injured individuals or an entire crew off the tossing deck of a distressed vessel, often in stormy darkness.
The U.S. Coast Guard is not for the faint of heart.
To Be Continued.