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THIRTY YEARS IN THE COAST GUARD BMC DONALD FRETWELL, USCG (RET.) - 1964 TO 1994 |
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A few people who found the Canal Watch have asked how I came to be up here watching boats. Here is the short version. The long version takes a pot of coffee.
| YEARS | WHERE AND WHAT |
| 1964 | Enlisted at eighteen, the June after high school. Boot camp at Cape May, New Jersey, where I saw the ocean for the first time and got yelled at beside it. |
| 1964-67 | Seaman, then boatswain's mate third class, at a small-boat station on Lake Michigan. Search and rescue, mostly fishermen and pleasure boats who didn't believe the weather report. Learned to run a boat in a sea. |
| 1967-68 | A year in Vietnam on an 82-foot patrol boat, stopping and searching junks and sampans along the coast. Hot, wet, and long. I don't say much more about it than that. |
| 1968-76 | Cutters out of the East Coast. Fisheries patrols, search and rescue, a good deal of North Atlantic I could have done without. Made first class. Met Faith on leave in Duluth, at a cousin's wedding, and married her in 1971. |
| 1976-82 | Back to the lakes, on the icebreaker Mackinaw out of Cheboygan, Michigan. Opening the shipping lanes in the spring, keeping them open in the winter. If you want to know what a laker captain thinks of you, be the icebreaker that's late. |
| 1982-90 | Made chief. Small-boat stations on Lake Huron and Lake Superior, the last four years in charge of one. |
| 1990-94 | Chief boatswain's mate on a buoy tender out of Duluth. Setting the buoys in the spring when the ice goes out, pulling them in the fall before it comes in, and every chain and sinker in between. Best duty I ever had. Retired in August 1994 with thirty years in. |
What a boatswain's mate does, for the landlubbers: the deck. Small boats, lines, anchors, rigging, cargo, buoys, towing, and the seamen who do the work. A boatswain's mate is the one who knows how everything on deck is supposed to go and says so loudly. The chief is the one they all come to when it doesn't.
Why I still watch boats. Thirty years of looking at the water to see what's coming will do that. On the tender we knew the lakers by sight and most of their captains by voice. I don't miss the cold. I miss the crew, and I miss knowing that the buoy I set in April would still be on station in November because I'd set it right. Now I sell shackles and line three days a week at a marine-supply counter, and the customers bring me the gossip off the docks.
For the young people who write and ask about joining: the Coast Guard is small, the work is real, and you'll be good at something by the end of your first year. Talk to a recruiter and ask a lot of questions. Ask what boats are where. Ask about the lakes.
