Coast Guard goes high tech
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
Lt. Commander Marc Stegman, captain of the Kukui, stands on the bridge of his state-of-the-art Coast Guard buoy tender and flips switches to engage the high-tech controls.
Computers linking satellites to the steering and propulsion systems on his ship allow Stegman to switch to fully automatic mode at sea. A map on a computer screen shows his vessel in relation to the pier in its home port off Sand Island, to the contours of O'ahu and the surrounding Pacific, and to the direction of the wind.
"I had no idea I'd ever be on a ship like this," Stegman says. "Its such a huge leap forward." He smiles as he stands in the brisk air-conditioning, fiddling with a joy stick used to make minute adjustments in the ship's position, and looks through the expanse of glass that separates him from the deck of the 225-foot, 2,000-ton Kukui.
"The technology just wows me," he says.
The moored ship barely moves as the waves lap against its huge black hull.
The Sassafras, a visiting Coast Guard buoy tender out of Guam, is parked a few hundred feet down the pier. The 180-foot, 960-ton, black-bottomed ship, Kukui's precursor, was built in 1944.
The Sassafras bridge is a quarter of the size of the Kukui's. There is no airconditioning. Coordinates often must be calculated by hand.
Men standing above the Sassafras' bridge use sextants to figure proximity to landmarks and relay their findings to officers below, who use grease pencils to plot coordinates on a map. Minute adjustments are made by turning the huge ship's wheel Ü similar in breadth and design to the one Ahab might have heaved while chasing his whale Ü and by adjusting persnickety throttles.
Lt. Commander Caleb Corson, captain of the Sassafras, says that sometimes when he has to order parts for his ship, he discovers the company that made them has gone out of business.
The Kukui and the Sassafras are charged with servicing navigational devices at sea. The Kukui's 45-person crew uses the latest in navigational technology to complete its mission. The 65 crew members crowded aboard the Sassafras rely on sweat and teamwork. The task isn't the most romantic of those accomplished by the Coast Guard, but it is essential and dangerous.
The ships must pull close to the buoys and the rocks and other hazards the buoys mark. Using cranes, they pull the devices aboard. Sometimes they bring the 1,200-pound concrete sinkers to which the buoys are moored onto the deck, a process which also requires hoisting in hundreds of feet of rusting chain. Each link weighs13 pounds.
Petty Officer 1st Class Mike Ellis of the Sassafras says he envies the Kukui's "winchasaurus," a huge drum that rolls up the chain like thread on a spool. Ellis and his fellow crew members hand-feed the loops of chain directly onto the deck. A misstep, a few too many links of chain slipping off the deck, and a crew member is pulled to the ocean floor, chain spiraling down atop him.
The dangers and difficulties are what inspired the team of Coast Guard sailors who helped to design the Kukui and her sister ships, and the Sassafras captain was on that team. But that doesn't mean Corson is anxious to trade sweaty seamanship aboard the ships he loves for comfort. It doesn't mean he won't answer testily when asked when Sassafras will make her final port of call.
"There is no set date," he says. "It's just rumor."
