Search & Rescue

July 31, 1974

I don't recall traveling to the Taylor's Island Coast Guard Station, but I remember my time there very well. I loved it there. It is ironic that I had hated icebreaker duty enough to go AWOL rather than face it again, but I loved search and rescue enough to consider making a life out of the Coast Guard. The men and women in the Coast Guard perform a great many task, but the job they all love the most is search and Rescue, what we call SAR.

Station Taylor's Island wasn't a military base in any conventional sense. The facility itself was a large houseboat moored in a private marinara. The commanding officer was an E-7, Chief Petty Officer from North Carolina whose name I don't recall, but a man I have always liked and respected. He was the kind of man I wanted to be when I grew up, a goal I never reached. The base had two shifts of eight men each and one cook. We had three boats, two were standard Coast Guard SAR boats of the time period, a thirty footer and a forty-one footer. Both were heavy steel hulled boats with twin diesel engines. Both boats could tow a vessel three times it's weight and size and were strong enough to handle any seas the Chesapeake could throw at them. Both were slow. The third was a commercially available Boston Whaler with an outboard motor. It was light and fast, but not good for heavy seas. Generally when we were called on a SAR the seas were heavy because that's when most boaters found themselves in need of our services.

Our two crews had separate sleeping quarters and opposite duty hours. We worked two days on and two days off with a three day weekend of either on or off duty. When we were on duty we couldn't leave the marina area which was small enough to immediately respond to a call. Duty was twenty-four hours for each of those days.

Sometimes you could sleep and play all of those hours. Sometimes you were at sea the entire time. When you were off your time was your own. You could leave and go where ever you wanted and many guys used those three day weekends to go home. You could also stay on the base when off duty which some guys did too. That's what I did at first. I loved it too much to leave.

Other than SAR there was little to do other than maintain the boats and keep the houseboat clean. But we did have the onerous task of maintaining one light house and several channel markers and buoys. This required replacing batteries and lights and cleaning sea gull droppings. None of that was fun, but we didn't have to do it very often. I was part of changing the batteries in the lighthouse once and that was a chore. Hard dangerous work, but necessary work so I didn't mind. There was no such thing as busy work at Taylor's Island CGS, which is one of the things I loved about the place.

Most of our Search and Rescue operations were more like performing sea going tow services. The Chesapeake Bay is home to some of the nations best oysters and its famous blue crab. To harvest these fine catches there was a sturdy group of men known in the area as "Watermen". They weren't called fisherman because they didn't fish in any conventional sense. During crab season they laid long weighted lines of string (not rope, actual string) across the bottom with a float on each end, usually old plastic milk jugs. To the line they tied pieces of raw chicken, or other such things for bait. They didn't use hooks. They slowly moved their boats down the length of line with the string looped around a wheel hanging over the side. The string would slowly raise out of the water a foot or so. The Waterman would then use a small net to scoop up crabs hanging on to the chicken.

During oyster season they used long handled tongs to dig oysters off the bottom. These are difficult to describe, the best analogy would be that of a manual post hole digger, only different. The handles were fifteen to twenty feet long and the hardware on the end was more like a clawed double basket that is brought together by moving the handles apart. When you watched them work it looked like they were digging post holes in the sea bed, only they brought up oyster shells instead of dirt. I've never tried this, but it's evident it was hard work.

The watermen worked alone or with one helper on the boat. Usually a son as it was pretty much a generational business. The boats were all low sided with either a small forward pilot house or completely open. They were between twenty and thirty feet in length and they all had gasoline auto engines. These boats were collectively called "Work Boats". The Watermen were all proud hard working men, but they made little money so their boats were often in ill repair. Thus most of our calls were to tow a Work Boat home. This was tedious work without challenge. They would call us on the radio, tell us exactly where they were and we would go out there and tow them back, or to the nearest dock, which was Coast Guard policy. Unless the weather was bad we were never in a hurry with one of these calls. If we were eating when the call came in we'd finish eating. If we were watching a show on TV we might finish the show first, if it wasn't too long. Surprisingly none of us had a problem doing this because we all respected the Watermen. And there was always the benefit of their "tip".

We weren't allowed to accept any form of payment or tips from those we rescued, something the Watermen all knew, but every time we towed or helped one of them they would put a half bushel of their catch on our boat. None of us encouraged this, we even tried to talk them out of it because we knew they struggled to survive, but it was their code, so it was allowed by our CO. They even took it further and would often bring us part of a bountiful catch when they didn't need our services. The Watermen respected us for what we did, which gave all of us a sense of pride in our jobs. This sense of purpose was what I first fell in love with about Search and Rescue.

It wasn't all towing the Watermen home. I was involved in numerous rescue operations, a few of them nasty boat fires. The fires were all related to gasoline. Like everyone whose ever been involved in SAR, I am a firm believer that gasoline has no place on a boat unless the gasoline is stored on an open deck. Even that I don't like it. Boats were meant to run off diesel fuel, which is far less flammable.

One rescue operation is worthy of mentioning due to its uniqueness. A call came across the radio from a Waterman that there was a small boat at then end of our cove in serious trouble. The base CO was about to take the Boston Whaler out for a check ride, meaning he was going to do a little fishing, so it was ready to go. I was standing nearby so he ordered me aboard and we responded to the call. We were on the scene ten minutes after receiving the call. It was a strange sight. A runway boat. There was a man in the water with a small open boat running in fast tight circles around him. The Waterman who'd called it in laid off a bit, watching intently. The only other person around was a four year old boy on the runaway boat. He was doing all he could to hang on, but he was also crying and calling to his dad for help. Dad couldn't do anything other than tread water and try to avoid being run over by his own boat.

What we learned later was that the man was having trouble starting his outboard motor, so he stood in the back of the boat pulling the cord with all his strength. The motor started suddenly, its throttle stuck full open, the motor itself cantered to one side. The man was thrown over the back and into the water and the boat ran in tight circles around him. When we arrived he'd been in the water for nearly a half hour. With no floatation device to keep him afloat he was getting tired and near drowning.

My CO slowed the Boston Whaler as we closed, both of us taking in the strange scene. My brain was running full speed trying to figure out a solution. My first thought was to ram the runaway boat to stop it. But the small child prevented that idea from reaching my lips. The boy would be thrown into the water and he wasn't wearing a life vest. My second thought was for us to run along side so I could jump into the boat. My CO was uncoiling a length of nylon line when I suggested this. "Your stupid enough to try that," he said. Then he told me to hold the end of the line and throw the rest over the stern. When I gave him a blank look he tossed the line over the stern of our boat and handed me the end. "Hold this," he said. "And try to stay in the boat."

I was still trying to figure out what he was doing when he turned our boat and took a wide turn around the runaway boat. The line we were pulling floated so I could see it as it was pulled into the runaway boat's path. I was still trying to figure out what the CO was doing when the other boat ran across our line. Immediately the outboard motor's prop fouled in the line, which snapped tight in my hand and nearly pulled me into the water. As per regulation, I was wearing a big Coast Guard life jacket so the CO ordered me into the water to help the man while he ran the boat over to get the child. I vividly remember the man's tears and gratitude when I grabbed him and held him up, the CO holding the boy to reassure him. The waterman helped us get the man into our boat, which wasn't easy as he was unable to move well on his own. When we had both man and boy aboard, the old Waterman said, "Been doin this since I was that lad's age," he said pointing at the now sleeping child. "But that's the damndest thing I've ever seen. I could have done it myself if I'd have thought of it. You guys are pretty smart." The CO told the Waterman it was nothing, something we were trained to do. But I later checked. The Coast Guard didn't train us to capture a runaway boat that way. No one had even heard of it being done. Our Chief Petty Officer was just the best there was.

There was one SAR that touched me deeply, one I will never forget. There was a small eight foot dingy with a tiny electric trolling motor on it in a small cove on the opposite side of the Chesapeake from us. In the boat was a woman and her four children: a twelve year-old boy through a nursing infant. They were putting around the small protected cove near where the family was camping with her husband watching from the shore. He'd been giving rides all day so Mom wanted to give it a try. She was about a hundred yards from the shore when the battery died and the small motor stopped. There was a light wind blowing off the shore, but strong enough to push the light boat out towards the larger Chesapeake Bay. Dad valiantly attempted to swim to the boat to save his family, but couldn't reach it before it was blown into the Bay and out of sight. By the time he swam back to the nearest shore, ran to his car, then drove to the nearest telephone it was dark. The small boat lacked lights, paddle, radio, or any type of flotation device. The little protected cove had been calm and flat, but the seas in the Bay were ten feet high with a confused sea. The kind of seas that hit you from several sides at once. The kind of sea that all sailors hate.

When we got the call we had just dug into a large pile of blue crab. We'd all been thinking of this meal all day, so were enjoying our first bites. The man on radio watch stuck his head around the top of the steps and said we had a call, but it didn't seem pressing. All he'd been told was that it was a small boat with a dead motor in a protected cove. The engineer cranked the forty footer to let the engine warm up, but we kept eating. A few minutes later the radio man ran half way down the stairs screaming for us to get under way. "Where are we going," our boatswain asked. The radio man said, "Just head across the Bay, I'll call with specifics." When we moved too slow for him he screamed, "Children in the water". That got us moving. We'd just about reached the Bay when we received the radio call with the specifics. The radio man was slow getting to us because he'd been trying to get a helicopter for the search. The Coast Guard had far fewer aircraft in those days, so the closest one was in North Carolina and it wasn't available. No one else was within range so we were their only hope....