The Complete US Coast Guard

Chapter 1

1

“This is Carlos Torres and you’re listening to Crossing the Bar where I bring you the latest news of what ships are crossing the Columbia River Bar. Today I also have on the radio the newest Surfman of the US Coast Guard search-and-rescue team stationed nearby at Cape D, that’s Cape Disappointment, Washington. Actually, she’s the newest Surfwoman. But first, here’s what ships are crossing the bar today.”

Carlos sat in the small, circular tower that had always been the home of Crossing the Bar. His aunt had started it as a lark when she was between jobs, doing what she could to learn more about the ships she could watch entering the Columbia River from the window of her Astoria, Oregon late-Victorian home. Her podcast became an overnight phenomenon. At her listeners’ request, she began learning what the ships were carrying in their holds. She then added in their last port of call, their owners, and even tidbits of their history—like just how many different flags they’d sailed under.

When she added interviews her podcast had changed from a local success to become the second most popular shipping news show anywhere in the world, coming in second only to the BBC’s historic 150-year-old Shipping Forecast.

For months she’d been teasing him about taking over the show before she “withered at the microphone.” As if. Women like Aunt Roz lived forever—at least he hoped so. When he’d finally confessed to a little interest—she’d instantly flown to Japan and booked a three-week passage on a car carrier running a load of Subarus from Japan back to Portland, Oregon, her idea of a fun vacation—and left the show to him to try out.

If it had been his idea, he’d probably have called the show The Graveyard of the Pacific. Over two thousand wrecks littered the sea floor around the Columbia Bar—the massive undersea sandbars churning gigantic surf even on the quietest days. It was generally acknowledged as the most dangerous shipping waters in the world.

But it wasn’t his show, so he’d focus on doing Aunt Roz’s version. He’d sat here beside her enough times as a teen to know the drill, often gathering the data from the various sites for her: The Kiro, built in 1987 in the Yokohama, Japan yards, easily identified by the mismatched patch of blue paint on her starboard bow from her collision with a bridge abutment last fall—fault of a drunken captain, not a broken ship—currently underway from Shanghai with 4,432 TEU of containers of consumer products.

A TEU was short for a Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit shipping container. As forty-footer lengths were far more standard, it was a good information tidbit to throw in that the ship was actually most likely carrying 2,216 forty-foot containers—which was a mind-boggling amount of “stuff.” It was firmly in the Panamax class of ships that could fit through the original Panama Canal locks carrying up to 5,000 TEU. There was a larger class, the Neopanamax class, that could pass through the upgraded Canal locks with 14,000 TEU. Each time one of those loomed over the Columbia Bar, Carlos could only marvel at what was possible.

The Penny, built…

Using the MaritimeTraffic.com site, it was easy to see who was inbound and outbound—anyone could who cared. It was the stories behind the ships that kept the podcast so interesting. It’s what had originally hooked him. He remembered one poor ship his “Auntie Roz” had reported on that had been pirated four separate times in a single passage. In Indonesia, there’d been a smash-and-grab job clearing out the crew’s meager belongings. The second and third—while headed through the South China Sea—they’d had a quarter of their fuel oil siphoned off onto smaller, faster ships in hundred-thousand-gallon thefts. And the fourth pirating off Saipan had actually lasted three days before the pirates had become bored and simply left.

And yet the crews went to sea—a long and lonely life mostly seeking the money to send home to their families who they so rarely saw. Auntie Roz’s podcast had given this backbone of international trade a face, at least across the Columbia Bar.

He continued reading down the traffic list.