One of the oldest pieces of the proficiency program, the helicopter crew’s seasonal deployments involve a training course conducted at a more southern air station or other installation – most recently, to the east coast of central Florida, near Patrick Air Force Base – to work with other Coast Guard units interested in using their cutters and boats to help with hoists.

Proficiency requires a certain number of hoists every six months, Torpey said, and because there are limited opportunities for practice, the district prioritizes, focusing on more experienced aviators and crewmembers. “We get a lot more return on our investment if we send the most senior guys and our instructors,” said Torpey. “They’re the ones more likely to be in command of an aircraft during a SAR case. The brand new aviators and co-pilots will spend most of their time in training rather than gaining proficiency.”

Boats are also a moving platform for another law enforcement capability – mounted automatic weapons (MAW) and small arms – for which the need to maintain proficiency is self-evident. Because on-the-water live-fire training is not conducted on the Great Lakes, boatcrews from the district have, for the past five years, spent time each year training on the waters around the U.S. Army’s Fort Knox, Ky.

As Lt. Cmdr. Matt White, assistant chief of the 9th District’s Enforcement Branch, pointed out, these training exercises are sufficient to make boatcrews qualified – but one of the principles behind the district’s proficiency program is that there’s a significant difference between “qualified” and “proficient.” This past winter, the district’s boatcrews took advantage of the downtime to get additional firearms practice on a mobile MAW simulator. “It’s basically a tractor-trailer with some computers and screens in it, and machine guns that fire blanks,” White said. “It’s kind of like a video game – but the weapon feels real, and it sounds real.”

The district’s focus on proficiency, White said, has begun to shift its people’s attitudes about the changing seasons – instead of seeing winter as the dreaded doldrums, they’re more likely to view it as an opportunity. “You can roll this simulator into the parking lot. The crews don’t have anything else to worry about, really, because their boats are out of the water. You can get them two or three days of just dedicated practice, firing basically thousands and thousands of simulated rounds. It gives them a lot of good experience.” White anticipates a future in which the district’s annual Fort Knox training sessions are supplemented by annual use of the MAW simulator.

 

Marine Safety

The Coast Guard’s non-negotiable mandates include responsibility for marine safety, a complex mission that involves vessel inspections, casualty investigations, and mariner credentialing. In the Great Lakes, where fresh water has enabled the massive legacy freighters known as “lakers” to remain in service for decades, this mission is perhaps even more complicated. “We still have riveted hulls,” said Cmdr. Scott Anderson, chief of the 9th District’s Inspections and Investigations Branch. “We still have vessels that use boilers as their primary means of propulsion, a car ferry that runs on coal, and one of the oldest operating commercial vessels in the world.” Launched in 1906, the St. Marys Challenger was plying the waters of the Great Lakes a year before the White Star Line even started designing the RMS Titanic.

Overseeing such a diverse fleet built across different eras of American history creates a unique set of proficiency challenges. Certain regulations apply to vessels depending on when they were built or when the last major modification occurred, while other regulations apply to all vessels, regardless of age. Because these vessels operate on an inland waterway, many regulations that apply throughout the rest of the country do not apply to lakers, or apply in different ways. Marine inspectors and investigators have to be intimately familiar with these nuances in order to oversee the Great Lakes fleet.

The seasonal nature of the Great Lakes also impacts marine safety missions. Since ice normally covers a significant portion of the lakes, causing vital navigation links such as the Sault Ste. Marie Locks and the St. Lawrence Seaway to close for the winter, most lakers lay up for the winter to conduct repairs and complete their regulatory inspections. This leads to a huge spike in workload as vessels complete their repairs and inspections in order to commence operations each spring. This is known as the “Spring Breakout,” and it’s an all-hands-on-deck evolution for marine safety personnel.