An Average Buoy Tender Trip

Seaman Scott Fischer, a crewmember aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Henry Blake, talks about his most recent deployment on the coastal buoy tender. Fischer has been assigned to the Henry Blake for the past ten months, most of which has been underway tending to aids-to-navigation throughout Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and the Washington State coast.


We pulled out of port on Monday and came back in today on Thursday. Our main mission was to do hull reliefs on three buoys in the Bellingham area. Hull reliefs are when we take the entire buoy out of the water. [Every few years] the entire buoy has to be replaced with a brand new one and then we take the old one, recycle it, and build it into a new one. The evolutions we had this week went smooth. With one of the buoys, it was in real shallow water, so we had to be careful up on the bridge to keep out of the shoal water.

A normal day on a buoy tender is, we'll work a buoy from eight in the morning till 11 in the morning, clean up, break for chow and work another buoy in the afternoon. Maybe even get three buoys in a day, if we're lucky and everything goes smoothly. We also stand a watch rotation. Four or five days is a pretty normal deployment, unless we have a discrepant buoy, then we might go on a day trip just to fix a single buoy.

The most interesting thing that happened this trip is we had a dead bird stuck in a buoy, which was gross. I had to pry it out with a big hook. That was pretty interesting. Something I hadn't experienced before.