The Arctic: August 26th to September 1st

I’m in a warm cozy little coffee shop in Anchorage. I just spent the last 10 days aboard the US Coast Guard High Endurance Cutter Boutwell. Seven of those days were actually spent at sea. Our departure from Dutch Harbor was delayed by a day due to weather and a last minute change in the ships primary mission.

U.S. Coast Guard Flag

The crew was originally tasked to carry out Living Marine Resources related operations. This usually involves boarding fishing vessels of varying classes and making sure they are obeying both fishing regulations (size, quantity, etc.) as well as making sure they are maintaining the proper safety equipment and keeping it all up to date. It is a fairly dynamic operation that involves deploying the “small boats” as they call them. The “small boats” are Rigid-hulled inflatable boats (RHIBs). D17, the coast guard command for the area requested that the Boutwell instead should head north to patrol in the area of the new arctic oil rigs. After that the Boutwell would patrol the Kotzebue Bay area to act as an added military presence in the region while the President was in Kotzebue.

Black line- Route of Ship;  Red Line - Helicopter Trip to Kotzebue; Blue line - Flight to Anchorage

So, we made our way north. We were eventually met with some rough seas, 10 foot swells and constantly overcast weather. We ran parallel to the international time zone line which doubles as the border between U.S and Russian territories. From the ship we were able to see mainland Alaska and Russia in the form of Big Diomede, a tiny island belonging to Russia. Apparently on a clear day we should have been able to see mainland Russia with the aid of binoculars, but there were few clear days.

Not having any specific job tasks or schedule to keep to time on the ship quickly became a blur. By day three I thought it was day five.  I spent a lot of my time between the bridge, where all the navigation occurs, and the “Wardroom,” the officer’s dining/lounge area. The bridge was one of the few places on the ship with easy access to the outer decks and for obvious reasons it was wall to wall windows. When I thought about getting on this ship and going out to sea it evoked notions of freedom and vast openness, and there was plenty of that, but my experience was dominated by the narrow passageways and tiny rooms. 160 people confined to several levels of floating steel. 

The crew was incredibly friendly and professional. The captain was a “mustang,” meaning he enlisted into the coast guard and eventually became a commissioned officer. He was well respected and very affable. While aboard I observed flight deck operations (Helicopter Landing), various drills from toxic gas response to hitting a submersed object, and operations/intel briefings. 

The port and hangar for the Red Dog copper mine. The largest copper mine in North America.

Weird cravings took hold of me, like a pregnant woman in her third trimester. After watching a movie that had a brief scene of a character eating skittles I became galvanized by the need to ingest these magical pellets of happiness. Gyros became a thing I dreamed of. Soda, that fizzy elixir of the gods. Thankfully Saturdays on the Boutwell are “Morale Day.” The food is extra unhealthy, and candy, soda and ice cream become readily available with each meal. 

We reached the oil rigs, somewhere around 72N latitude, on Saturday August 30th. I "think" I saw two of them with a dozen or so support vessels in the area. Polar Pioneer, of the Shell corporation,  was one of the two. The other may have been a crane or a support vessel of some kind. I can’t find any info on another rig being out there, but it sure looked like one. 

This is the second oil rig in question. Not the Polar Pioneer by Shell.

We made our way back south towards Kotzebue. The clouds dissipated and the winds died down. On September 1st, after a few hours of delay due to a malfunctioning hangar door, I hopped on an H60 Coast Guard Helicopter and was flown to Kotzebue where I spent the good chunk of a day before catching an evening flight to Anchorage. 

H60 Helicopter on approach to land on the flight deck of the Boutwell

A C-5 or C-17 flying into Kotzebue Airport in preparation for the Presidential visit to the Arctic

The second leg of my work trip, much like the first leg, has been turned upside down. I’ll now be attending a Climate Change workshop focused on using predictive analytics to see how climate change in the arctic will affect infrastructure and equipment in arctic regions.