From eagle attacks to life-saving boots to new uses for littoral combat ships — maybe — here’s a round up of recent Coast Guard odd news. Let’s start with a report from Alaska: Coasties were attacked by an eagle in the Dutch Harbor Post Office in Unalaska. Eagle attacks are apparently not that rare for people living up there, see here. Then there was the man charged with allegedly attacking a Coast Guard boarding officer in San Francisco. The man was also charged with allegedly making a false distress call. He claimed that a Coast Guard boarding team would be…
Author Toni Rico
The Chinese coast guard is in the news for straying near islands that are part of a territorial dispute between China and Japan, but if you have never seen the Chinese ships, you might have done a double-take. The Chinese consolidated several of their maritime agencies and debuted their new coast guard Monday. If their ships look familiar, it’s probably because the Chinese have modeled their coast guard after the U.S. In a June interview, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Bob Papp told the Navy Times that the Chinese were taking cues for their coast guard from his service. “Most…
The Coast Guard is enforcing a safety zone around a drilling rig that is on fire after a natural gas well blowout Tuesday morning about 55 miles off the coast of Louisiana. A good Samaritan vessel rescued 44 people from the rig when the blowout occurred, a Coast Guard spokesman said. No injuries were reported. Gas escaping from the well at the Hercules 265 rig caught on fire Tuesday night after the initial morning incident, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement reported in its website. “No one was on board at the time of the ignition and no one…
Kelly Rowland can thank the Coast Guard for being a survivor after the service helped locate a boat carrying the Destiny’s Child singer Friday when it became lost at sea off Cape Cod. The captain of the vessel carrying Rowland and some friends got disoriented while following a whale-watching vessel about 30 nautical miles from Provincetown, Mass., said a Coast Guard spokeswoman from District 1, which overseas the Northeast region. Watchstanders at Sector Boston received a call around 4 p.m. Friday reporting the situation. “Using our Rescue 21 system, we were able to triangulate their position,” said Public Affairs Specialist…
Dogs have a long history of combat service in the military — they were first officially used by the U.S. in World War II. The military’s working dogs are trained at their own school at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. The dogs have been trained as sentries, to sniff for drugs, or simply catch bad guys while working with military police. And you can’t forget the military working dogs sniffing out bombs with Navy explosive ordnance disposal teams. So it comes as no surprise that the dog pictured at right is serving sailors off the battlefield. “Admiral” is not a…
A Coast Guardsman who earned a Navy Cross for actions during combat operations in Guadalcanal was buried June 5 in Lakewood, Wash. Retired Cmdr. Ray Evans, whose actions during World War II earned him the Navy’s second-highest award for valor, was part of the a mission to rescue Marines along with Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard’s only Medal of Honor recipient. Evans and Munro were known as “The Gold Dust Twins.” They were both from Washington State and joined the Coast Guard together in 1939. They subsequently served together in New York before entering the history books in the South…
http://www.dvidshub.net/video/290681/femaleastchief#.UajjitgwjrQ
Rescue swimmers in the Coast Guard have to be a tough lot. That’s even more true for female rescue swimmers. There are only four of them in the service, and that gives you a good indication of their caliber. In April, we wrote about Aviation Survival Technician 2nd Class Jaime Vanacore, a rescue swimmer who was trying out for American Ninja Warrior (she got invited to Las Vegas for finals, by the way) and now Chief Aviation Survival Technician Karen Voorhees has made history by becoming the first female rescue swimmer in the Coast Guard to make chief. She was…
A military team is testing the limits of a solar and battery-powered, street-legal golf cart by taking it on a 4,000 mile trip across America. The 10-person team made up mostly of Coasties is hoping to raise $50,000 for the Wounded Warrior Project. The idea for the trip came to Chief Electrician’s Mate Ray Rehberg while on the job at Coast Guard Training Center Yorktown, Va. “It was born in the classroom,” said Rehberg, who is an instructor at the training center. They were wondering how far they could actually drive a golf cart on battery power alone. But they…
If Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are not enough reason to draw you into the movie theater to see “Pain & Gain” — the top-grossing movie in America last weekend — how about the fact that several Coasties make cameos in the movie? As the good guys, of course. Coasties with a law enforcement detachment from Tactical Law Enforcement Team South, out of Opa-locka, Fla., had a chance to be extras in the movie and meet Marky Mark. On screen, the Coasties were the guys escorting Wahlberg from a helicopter to turn him over to Miami authorities, said…
If “Top Chef” was set on the high seas, Coast Guard Food Service Specialist 2nd Class David Blonn might have a shot. The cook on the coastal patrol boat Albacore has had to do some of his cooking in 12-foot waves. His galley is only 12 feet by 8 feet, including all the equipment. The 6-foot-2 Blonn looks like a giant when cooking inside the small galley, and when the seas get rough and the boat is rocking back and forth, cooking a meal can seem like a monumental task in the tight space. While some crew members might be…
