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thedrifter
08-31-08, 07:03 AM
August 31, 2008
Standing guard

'Day In The Life' series spotlights Coast Guard Station Two Rivers

By Benjamin Wideman
Herald Times Reporter

A deafening shout echoes from aboard the patrolling U.S. Coast Guard ship.

"Man overboard! Man overboard!"

Petty Officer 2nd Class John Boyer's anchor-tattooed right arm spins the silver steering wheel, propelling the 41-foot utility boat toward the lifeless body of Oscar, who's floating on Lake Michigan a half-mile from shore.

In seconds, the ship erases the 100-yard gap and pulls alongside its target.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Zachary Dahl, wearing a standard-issue blue uniform, black boots and blaze orange lifejacket, leans over the side, grabs Oscar and, with Petty Officer 3rd Class Bryan Brickson providing added leverage, pulls him safely aboard.

Another successful training mission at Coast Guard Station Two Rivers.

Oscar, an orange flotation device for a head and a matching orange wetsuit for a body, lives to teach another day.

"We take our training very seriously," says Boyer, 25, of Gig Harbor, Wash., who has saved about a dozen lives in six years with the Coast Guard. "When we're in pressure-packed situations, we fall back on this training. We always train like it's the real thing. You never know when you'll need to save a life."

He should know.

Four days before the training exercise, Boyer and Petty Officer 2nd Class Linden Hannon, 27, found themselves treading water two miles offshore after rescuing two men whose boat sank. One of the Coast Guard's dewatering pumps went down with it.

Five days after the training exercise, Boyer was back on Lake Michigan with three other crewmen, this time rescuing four Two Rivers residents — two adults and two children — from the water after their fishing boat filled with water an hour earlier.

"Having the Coast Guard in this community is a great asset," says Petty Officer 1st Class Heath Yeager, 26, of McGregor, Texas, second in command at Coast Guard Station Two Rivers. "We live and work in the community, so the people we see in town or we live near, those are the same people we rescue and help. It's a rewarding job."

As part of the Day In The Life series, the Herald Times Reporter recently spent a Wednesday with the 24 crewmembers and six reservists at Coast Guard Station Two Rivers.

The station is part of the Great Lakes' Ninth District, home to more than 6,500 Coast Guard members who typically spend three to four years in one city before being transferred.

Coast Guard Station Two Rivers responds to an average of 75 search-and-rescue (SAR) cases each summer, and has saved countless lives since forming in the 1870s. Its SAR area of responsibility covers just south of Manitowoc, to just north of Kewaunee, to several miles out on Lake Michigan.

In addition to life-or-death emergencies, the SAR crew responds to calls for disabled vessels, ships out of gas and medical assistance, among other things. It also performs security patrols for the Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant, conducts law enforcement boardings and promotes boating safety.

The Two Rivers station is unique in that it's one of just four stations on Lake Michigan also housing an ATON (aids to navigation) unit. The six ATON men service 102 federal aids to navigation, which include lighthouses, buoys, day boards and range boards. Their area of responsibility spans from Manitowoc to Gladstone, Mich., including all of the Door Peninsula and the waters of Green Bay and Lake Winnebago, as well as a handful of other small waterways.

"We're all over the place doing all kinds of things," Yeager says. "You need us, we're there."

Rise and shine

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8 a.m., Coast Guard members gather for quarters in front of the station, which has witnessed many a rescue since its construction in 1941.

Chief Petty Officer John Davis, 43, sporting hammerhead shark and pirate skull tattoos on his forearms, oversees "colors" — the raising of the American flag. Davis, 21 years into his career, took command in Two Rivers on July 22, 2007.

"The hardest part for me," Davis says, "is that the days of going out there rescuing people and responding to calls, they're done. If a call comes in, it's hard to stay here and look on as they go out and do their jobs and handle the situation. But that's my job. If anything happens out there, it's my responsibility to make sure it gets taken care of."

Davis, native of Santa Rosa, Calif., says he's proud of saving lives, "but it's the ones you lose, those are the tough ones you dwell on. I still remember one of the worst ones was a plane crash off Cape Cod. We only found body parts in the water."

On this day, his task is more upbeat. He presents one of the youngest crewmembers, Fireman Trina Beiring, 19, of Calumet, Mich., with a boat engineer certificate.

Biering joined the Coast Guard last year because "I thought I'd see where life blows me and go for an adventure."

As far as being one of three females at the Two Rivers station: "The thing that really makes me mad with being in the Coast Guard, they really treat us like girls sometimes," Biering says half-jokingly. "Some of the guys will say, 'Oh, I can do that for you.' And people watch their mouths around us. But we're all friends here. We all work together."

Quarters lasts about 20 minutes.

Biering and a handful of others head home on their day off, while Davis and most of the crew return to the station.

Practice makes perfect

Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Belval has been monitoring distress frequencies and incoming calls in the communications room since 6:50 a.m.

Personnel in Milwaukee handle the overnight duties remotely, immediately notifying Two Rivers crews if an emergency arises. The SAR crew works 48 hours on, 48 hours off, with sliding weekend shifts. The ATON crew typically works Mondays through Fridays.

"It's like a dispatch in here," says Belval 28, of Virginia Beach, Va., noting mariners frequently call seeking weather updates.

The communications room has nautical maps, weather instruments, a phone, radios set to distress frequency channel 16, a secured-access computer for confidential Coast Guard transmissions, and four security cameras scanning the fenced-in property.

"As long as we stay calm in here, they stay calm out there," Belval says about handling distress calls. "The moment we sound like we don't know what we're doing, that will cause them to panic. We need to stay calm at all times."

Last summer, Belval was among the crew that responded to the waters near the Lighthouse Inn, where a 34-year-old man drowned after saving one of his sons from drowning.

On this day, the distress call Belval receives around 9:30 a.m. isn't as urgent — it's a training exercise about a boat taking on water — but he handles it like any other, quickly gathering information and filling out paperwork to relay to the responding boat crew.

"With calls like this, we'll launch either the 41-foot utility boat or the 25-foot response boat," Yeager says. "Once we're on scene, we assess the situation. We have dewatering pumps we can put aboard the vessel, and then we'll hook them up in a tow and bring them back to a safe harbor."

Six reservists, including Dahl and Brickson, are in town for their yearly two-week training program. It's ideal for learning protocol and terminology, not to mention hands-on applications like determining bearings, tying knots and throwing lines to stranded vessels.

"When you judge drills, you judge the whole crew, not the individual pieces," says Boyer, who, as coxswain, closely surveys the crew's every move. "Newer people will make some mistakes in training. But that's why we train, so they can get used to what's going on.

"We're never happy with practice until it's perfect. We're always critiquing our drills."

Adds Davis: "Training for us is constant."

True to form, training continues moments later on the 41-foot utility boat with a man-overboard drill as Davis and Petty Officer 2nd Class Jeremy Zimmer, riding in a smaller boat, dump Oscar into the lake.

"We run these drills to simulate if someone falls off our vessel, or if we're on scene with somebody that fell off another vessel," Yeager says. "Our goal is to safely recover anybody within a three-minute time."

Dishing it out

Hard work means hungry stomachs.

The SAR crew heads to the cafeteria for pork, rice and sweet bread prepared by Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Perez, a Chicago-area native who serves as cook.

Following high school, Perez, 29, enlisted with the U.S. Navy and spent seven years with the Marines Corps as a field medic. After a year out of the military, he re-entered with the Coast Guard.

"I was tired of being shot at, and the Coast Guard is more family-oriented and every aspect of it is about saving lives," says Perez, a married father of five.

Coast Guard members get shot at too, though. While stationed in Wilmington, N.C., Perez served aboard a 210-foot cutter that patrolled the South American coastline, where drug runners didn't waste bullets on warning shots.

"It's a lot quieter here," Perez says with a smile. "I like what I do here. I see the cook as the morale of the unit. If I'm cooking good meals, they'll be happy and that means they'll be doing their jobs well. And that means more of a service to the public."

Perez wakes up at 4:30 a.m. each weekday to prepare breakfast and lunch, and doesn't finish until mid-afternoon when the dishes are cleaned. The crew gets its own dinner.

Perez, whose specialty meal is Penne Rustica, buys all the groceries, distributing money equally among various stores in the Lakeshore.

"He makes good food," Belval says. "I like it."

Lighting the way

Meanwhile, the ATON crew continues working two miles northeast at Point Beach State Forest. It's replacing a lighting mechanism atop the 113-foot-high Rawley Point lighthouse.

The old equipment atop the 114-year-old structure broke five days earlier.

The job involves carrying heavy equipment up a tight, winding staircase, fastening it down after drilling new holes in the confined space, and then bringing the old materials safely down.

"We're here to do a service for the mariner," says Petty Officer 1st Class James Farris, 41, a native of Shawnee, Okla., who serves as ATON supervisor. "Everything they utilize for navigation is on us. We keep the light burning — literally."

The ATON unit's aids to navigation (including 18 lighthouses) all are meticulously tracked using charts on the second floor at Coast Guard Station Two Rivers. One of the most dangerous tasks is fixing range boards more than 100 feet high; it requires special tower-climbing training.

"As far as the ATON community is concerned, I don't think people realize the time and the work that goes into it," Farris says. "They always know the lighthouse is going to be lit, that the day boards are going to be in good, serviceable condition so they can navigate the waterway. … It does take quite a bit of work and effort to maintain the aids to navigation."

Among the other ATON crewmen sweating atop the lighthouse is Jeremy Zimmer, 34, the only current Coast Guard member in town with direct ties to the area. His father, Rene, a 28-year veteran of the Coast Guard, was born in Two Creeks and grew up in Two Rivers. His mother, Kris, is from Kewaunee. Jeremy's grandmother lives on 27th Street in Two Rivers, and his mother still has family on the Lakeshore.

"Since I joined the Coast Guard at 18 years old, I don't think I've ever been this close to family, to this extent," Zimmer says. "It's pretty nice."

Two Rivers is a far cry from his days in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he became a footnote in history during the international custody dispute involving Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez.

Gonzalez was 6 years old when fishermen rescued him from an inner tube on Nov. 25, 1999 off the Florida coastline.

"I picked Elian up," Zimmer says. "I took him right from the fishermen.

"Elian was in shock when I first saw him. Most of the people (including his mother) on the raft died. He just had this far-off stare in his eyes. He didn't say much about anything."

Five months later, the custody dispute ended when armed immigration agents took Gonzalez from his Miami relatives' home. He eventually returned to his father in Cuba, and, two months ago, made international headlines again when he joined Cuba's Young Communist Union.

"Down there, the Coast Guard can get a 'bad guy' persona even though we're just doing our jobs," Zimmer says. "Up here in the Great Lakes, I know we still have the 'good guy' persona, which I'm happy about."

Upholding the law

At the Manitowoc Marina, 10 miles southwest of the lighthouse, Hannon, Boyer and three reservists — Dahl, Brickson and Petty Officer 3rd Class Kevin Tyndall — approach a boater motoring toward the launching ramp.

"Unlike police officers, we're not stopping you because you did something wrong," says Hannon, a certified boarding officer who hails from Marshall, Wis. "Law enforcement and boardings are just part of our job."

Hannon fills out the mandatory paperwork for each boarding while resting an arm on his belt, which holds pepper spray, handcuffs, a flashlight, an expandable baton and a .40-caliber Sig Sauer handgun. Target practice is held at a gun range every six months.

Guns aren't as necessary here as they are in places like Juneau, Ala., where Hannon just finished a four-year stint.

"When we'd pull into port there, we had to watch our backs," he says. "Some of the fishermen — they had large fishing boats — they weren't always easy to deal with. They didn't like getting fines. It was more 'Wild West' up there."

Like the time he was called to assist the Juneau Police Department.

"A recreational fisherman was found dead on an island, and there was a black bear in the area so I had to carry a shotgun," Hannon says. "The bear was there, and it was eating the guy. The guy was schizophrenic and had been dead for a while."

Unlike Alaska's vast and unforgiving territory, where winds may gust up to 90 mph and the scene of an emergency may be eight hours away, the trip to Manitowoc on this pleasant day only takes about 10 minutes.

Coast Guard Station Two Rivers conducts about 200 boardings each year. On this day, three boats are boarded — one of them near the pier in Two Rivers — but no major violations are uncovered.

Generally, the Coast Guard checks for proper lifejackets for each person on board, a throwable life jacket, a fire extinguisher, visual distress signals, identification and boat registration.

"Sometimes we run into DWIs on the lake, but mostly we run into problems with people not having flares or fire extinguishers," Hannon says.

Welcome aboard

It's late afternoon and the sky has begun to peak out from behind the clouds.

Inside, Yeager sits in his office alongside the station's newest member, Fireman Charles Walker, typing information into a computer.

Walker, 19, of Columbus, S.C., arrived in town four days earlier after graduating from boot camp in Cape May, N.J.

"The guys have made me feel welcome since day one," Walker says. "You're coming out of boot camp, which is very intense. You don't know what to expect when you get to your first unit. You're kind of scared to meet your chief. But I like it here. I'm getting to know everyone and the community."

It wasn't quite that way at first, though.

"When I first heard my orders, I was kind of like, 'What's in Wisconsin again?' " Walker says with a laugh. "But then the next day I started thinking about it and learning more about my unit, and I was looking forward to it. I always try to look at things in a positive way. Coming from down south, you've got to understand this is a whole new experience for me."

Walker, whose father served 20 years with the U.S. Army, opted for the Coast Guard after speaking with a recruiter.

He couldn't swim before joining the Coast Guard, and that briefly held up his graduation.

"Basically, I learned to swim in one day," he says. "Now, I'm like the master of the breaststroke."

As he pulls the brim of his Coast Guard cap down beneath his eyeline, he's asked what he'll remember most about basic training as he embarks on his career.

The immediate reply: "Our motto, 'Semper paratus.' It means, 'Always ready.' The first day I was here they saved two lives — those guys on the boat.

"They were ready."

Ellie