Coast Guard Training on a Cold River

Astoria, Oregon ~ December 14, 2011

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CG 630 Comes Home

December 6, 2010

I happened to be on the 12th Street Pier yesterday when I saw Coast Guard ship 630 (Alert) coming in to dock at the Maritime Museum at the 19th Street Pier. Later I overheard someone in a store talking about the ship's homecoming, and it sounded like she'd been out for awhile. I don't know the story - maybe one of our readers will comment.

In this picture you can see all hands on deck, only a few short fathoms from home. You can read more about the Alert here and here.

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Going Home

September 19, 2010

It's not unusual to see Coast Guard helicopters all around the area both working and training. Among other things, Astoria is home to a Coast Guard Group/Air Station. This helicopter is headed home to its pad, which is nearby behind the wild trees and bushes at the edge of Young's Bay, which you see in the foreground. Click the second link fora nice photo of the air station from above. 

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Blades and Boats

June 13, 2010

The ship heading upriver was making more noise than usual, and when it came into view past the buildings, I could see why. There was a Coast Guard helicopter hovering right above it.

The pilot boat arrived just as the helicopter was taking off.

Now a small Coast Guard boat arrives while the pilot boat continues toward its usual spot amidships.

The spray from the 'copter has settled down.

And the Coast Guard boat heads back to port. This shot was taken with the long zoom, so the low part of the Astoria-Megler Bridge looks very close. I love that evening light!

My first thougts: I don't know what was going on here. It could have been a training exercise, since there is a Coast Guard base in Astoria. We often see boats and helicopters out for training on the river and ocean. Seeing the helicopter above the ship was also interesting because at one time this is how the ship pilots were transferred at sea - by helicopter. I don't know if they're doing that any more, or if they do it only under certain conditions. I heard that they might be planning to use this method again. I suppose it's possible that they were practicing, and I only got in on the end of the scene. But . . .

. . . two commenters on our Facebook page have the right answers:

Karen Vaterlaus Leedom: The coast guard often inspects ships entering the Columbia. What you most likely saw was them removing the boarding party, which happened to coincide with the bar & river pilots changing places. Also, the bar pilots' preferred method of boarding ships at sea is via helicopter, which they have been doing for years.

Joanne Rideout: Karen's likely right on target - and we'll see more of this going on here now that the USCG Captain of the Port has moved to Air Station Astoria. Some of these inspections used to happen upriver before when that office was based in Portland.

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Scene of the Photo

Here is where I took yesterday's reflection photo. I stood next to the glass window on the left, almost where the center pole holds up the wave-shaped roof. The building is the Columbia River Maritime Museum at 17th Street and the River Walk, which I've shown in previous posts. You can see the Coast Guard boat inside the tinted glass, nose-up on the resin swell. Here's the same section of the museum from another angle.

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Wind and Waves

April 10, 2010

Alongside the Maritime Museum on the River Walk

46°11'22.81"N 123°49'23.81"W

On the south side of the Columbia River Maritime Museum is a tall glass window with a display inside of a real Coast Guard boat lodged at a rakish angle on resin waves. A recording produces the sounds of the pounding sea and the exchange of boat captains navitaging perilous waters. In today's Weekend Reflections photo you can also see Coxcomb Hill and the Astoria Column, the museum parking lot, and a wind-tossed photographer.

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Theme Day: Waiting

City Daily Photo Theme Day: Waiting

Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

Leaving home backwards

This morning the Coast Guard cutter Steadfast left its dock at 17th Street by the Maritime Museum, headed for the ocean. I'm not sure why it does the following, since the river is so wide here, but it backs up from the dock for a about a block (to just outside my office), turns in the water pretty much in place, then heads downriver toward the ocean. I don't know why it doesn't just travel in an arc, but maybe someone can tell me. I've seen other boats do this, too, such as the Sea Bird (National Geographic/Lindblad Expeditions' tour boat), a crane barge, and others. I wonder if it has something to do with the current here, but it's hard to believe that would matter.

I thought the fog and low clouds made a pretty scene this morning. It looks like snow, but there is none. We may have snow this year, but it will be rare. We've had more than usual the past couple of years. Other years we have none.

Regatta: US Coast Guard Search and Rescue demo

Jamie Schluckebier took this photo and sent it for today's blog post. The photo was taken Saturday evening during a US Coast Guard Search and Rescue demo as part of Regatta Weekend in Astoria. As most of you know by now, this massive body of water is the Columbia River, separating Oregon from Washington, and the bridge is the Astoria-Megler bridge, which joins the two states. The picture was taken from the 17th Street Pier adjacent to the Maritime Museum. I've been in Bend all week, so I missed the festivities. I've had a good time here, but I wish I'd been able to see that event! Thanks so much, Jamie, for sending this dramatic photo.

"El Tiburon Blanco," The White Shark

The Coast Guard Cutter Steadfast is usually docked about one block from my office along the River Walk at the Maritime Museum, so I was pleasantly surprised to see her out of dock and floating just outside my office on July 5th. She was barely moving - in fact, was moving in a slow circle rather than making much headway. I saw a cluster of orange life jackets on deck, but since nobody seemed overly excited and in fact the mood seemed relaxed (what I could tell of it), I assumed this was a training exercise. Although I zoomed the pic a bit to frame the ship, it's not that far away. Even fishing boats don't usually come this close to shore where we are, so it was a novelty and a treat to see her up close. (Note the railing of the catwalk in the lower right of the photo.) You can get nearer to the Steadfast in the dock, but it was interesting to see her on the water with the crew out and active.

Note: As it turns out, a friend of a friend is deployed on the ship, and it was just returning from two months on active duty. As home port was only one block (landlubber talk, I know) up the river, friends and relatives were no doubt gathered, and the mood onboard seemed light and even jovial (did I hear laughter across the water?), were they teasing as they delayed their last short distance into dock? Last-minute prep for going ashore? Mystery unsolved!

I knew a few things about this ship, but I'd never heard the full explanation. She bears a large logo of the name "Steadfast" in the shape of a great white shark, and wears a gold marijuana leaf painted on the mast. The ship's notable history is described briefly on her own web site and explains both the logo and the leaf. I think I actually remember this ship in the news from years back, before I moved to Oregon.

I also love the delicate wisps and shadings of the gray clouds in the background. As this is Skywatch Friday, I wanted to bring special attention to them. We've been having days of clouds, rain, drizzle, haze, and more clouds with patches of blue sky. I love all of the colors on the river, including the gray. I'd like to borrow from and link to Sara Chapman, who blogged, "I know I've lived in Seattle a long time when I begin to get excited about shades of gray in the clouds." Sara, I feel the same way. Isn't the sky magnificent?

Say it again

The Thursday Challenge is "communication," and I only hope I can describe the layers of it going on here. I took the photo last Saturday, and the objective is to raise the light plane from the river bottom, where it settled on Friday night after it crashed. What you see is the deck of a Coast Guard ship in the foreground, the plane being lifted out of the water in the center, and a barge with a crane on it behind the plane. About fifty people had gathered in the rain to watch the plane come up or were here in an official capacity. We can't see them in this photo, but there were two TV cameras to my right, and people all over the place with still cameras, cell phones and camera phones, and of course, they are all talking to each other, too. Lee was carrying on a long conversation with someone he hadn't seen in awhile. I don't know what everyone else was doing with their cell phones, but I was texting Laurel to let her know the plane was coming up, and I was also getting e-mail and a bunch of blog and news alerts I'd activated the other day through Google (crazy, huh?).

Just behind where I'm standing on the dock is a truck that travelled two hours from Portland. The company's name is Northwest Underwater Construction, LLC, and they'd brought a diver used to working with heavy objects under water, along with their communications technicians. You'll probably have to click on the photo to enlarge it. The bound red and green cables running into the picture from the foreground and coiling at the edge of the deck are the diver's communication to the truck, including his air line, camera feed, light, and voice communication. Inside the truck are the air tanks, some dial-type monitors for the diver, and a video monitor receiving a picture from under water. They communicated from the truck to the ships with walkie-talkies, and you can see one guy using his hand-held on the right of the photo. Those of us near the truck could hear them talking. I remember the diver saying the plane was on its back and they'd have to flip it before they brought it up, an operation that took some coordinating. There was also a guy in the truck with a clipboard recording notes on a chart.

The guy in the white hard-hat just in front of the crane is giving hand signals to the crane operator, and has been doing that since the lines first went down to secure the plane. Men on both decks are, of course talking about how best to make everything work. On the periphery, there's a Sheriff's boat and probably a small Coast Guard boat hovering near with radios.

There's some interesting non-human visual communication, too. The black and yellow stripes are saying, "This is the edge of the ship - you know what will happen if you get too close!" And the men's hard-hats and bright vests are telling the onlookers, "This is a danger area. Keep out." The buoys in the river tell ships where the shipping lane ends.

By the way, the man in the dark blue clothing and white hat in the center is the pilot who crashed. His mother and brother are on one of the high lookout points of the ship, and another relative is standing in the diver's truck to keep tabs on the action. Throughout the salvage, the pilot is talking to everyone and gesturing to his family.

Just because we need a little more communication here, when the plane was lifted out of the water, my zoom lens revealed that two headsets for the plane were dangling out of the door, attached together and to the plane by wires. They were dripping wet, and were probably the only communication devices that were not busy today.

Everyone survived the crash - you won't belive where the plane floated to on the river's current

Both people survived the April 24 plane crash

in the Columbia River at Astoria, Oregon

Photo by Sheryl Todd

CLICK PHOTO FOR LARGER VIEW

After my first two photos on this blog, I had intended to post a placid picture of the Astoria waterfront, or to show what downtown Astoria looks like. But yesterday afternoon there was an event that takes precedence. I was working in my office on the river, when Laurel called, stumbling over her words. "Right outside your place, we saw a plane crash. I'm not kidding, it's for real. Get out there - take your camera." She and her friend had been looking out the window of her place halfway up the Astoria hill, when she saw a light plane crash into the river about two blocks from where she figured I would be - in the office. I grabbed my camera and trotted the block down to the Maritime Museum - the other block's distance was aquatic. From the bank, I started taking photos. As it turned out, I was the first on scene with a camera, and the only one to capture photos of the people on the plane. It's worth blowing up the photo. You can see them standing hip-deep in water before they were pulled onto the rescue boat. I stayed around and took pictures of the plane as it floated to shore and the Coastguard tried to figure out what to do with it. The people had been taken to the hospital, and reports back at the waterfront were that they were both OK. As it turned out, the occupants of the plane were former Astoria Mayor Edith Henningsgaard Miller and her son, pilot Bill Henningsgaard, a retired Microsoft executive from Seattle. You can read the article in the Daily Astorian online. (After today, you may need to use the search box on the left, and since the paper's site sometimes requires a subscription, you may need to look it up on Google.) I didn't even realize that I had the survivors in my photo! The wind was blowing my hair into my face, the sun was in my eyes, and the focus wasn't set so I could see what I was shooting. I knew the Astorian was looking for pix of the people, but I didn't know I had them, so I stayed for quite awhile with the small crowd in the cold wind. The the pilot boat took off, carrying the survivors to the ambulance a couple blocks away at the pilot boat dock; the pilots had seen the plane coming down and dashed into the river to help. We see pilot boats jetting into the river every day, and they're good at getting places fast. The plane's pilot apparently knew he had a problem with the engine, and was looking for a comparatively safe place to put it down. The plane crash-landed just a few hundred yards upriver from the Maritime Museum where two Coast Guard ships were in dock, and only a few hundred yards (or less) from shore. They were picked up virtually at the crash site, and once the boat had sped away, the plane drifted nose-down in in the river with only the tail and three, then two, windows and a fraction of the wing out of water, coming to rest - unbelievably - just exactly amidships of a Coast Guard ship equipped with a crane for hauling buoys and other objects out of the Columbia River's deadly currents. The crew on the ship roped the plane, and with the help of a Sheriff's boat and a small Coast Guard boat, hauled the plane around to the bow of the ship. I'm not sure what they planned to to with it there, but soon they dragged it back to the side of the bar tender (the bigger ship) and held it there. In awhile, they announced that they were going to haul the plane onboard, and because there was a fuel leak, they called for all lights to be turned off, and they set about moving the piles of gigantic chains with the onboard crane. At this point, all we could see of the tied-up plane was a tip of the tail, rising like a shark's fin just beyond the river-side of the bar tender. At that point the small crowd anticipated getting to watch the unusual spectacle of a plane being hefted out of the water and onto the ship (and what a ringside seat we had, too!), but there was clearly a delay, because the Coast Guard men and women began to appear with snacks and drinks in hand and started waiting it out on the deck and in the cabins. Slowly the crowd dispersed, and I haven't seen the plane again. We went back later in the evening after the Crab and Seafood Festival. The bright lights were on, but the ship's deck was empty. Steve had suggested earlier there would probably be another ship to take the plane to Tongue Point, just up the river, where they have facilities to lift and work with extremely heavy objects.

Water rescues are indeed one of the major faces of this town, although they usually take place out of site of most of us. And Astoria has always had a military component from the moment the location was discovered by Lewis and Clark. Today many Coast Guard personnel are stationed here and comprise a part of Astoria's working waterfront along with fishing, shipping, oil cleanup, marine exploration, cable-laying, ship docking, marine and riverine biology, and other aspects I'll learn more about as I progress with this blog. I simply hadn't expected to get into these facets of the town with a dramatic example so early in the blog! By the way, the hills on the other side of the river are the state of Washington.

I've now put the story in pictures on my personal blog along with a description of the photos. Or, you can check out even more photos in my Picasa web album. Here's a link to the first picture. You can click through for the story if you'd like.