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Buoy Tenders

by Eva Murray

In August 1997 the USCG launched the 175-foot buoy tender USCGC Marcus Hanna, one of the Keeper class of tenders, home-ported in South Portland, Maine. Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard

Here on Matinicus, Abbie Burgess is our own particular local hero. If there is still anybody in Maine who doesn’t know her name or hasn’t read her story to a small child, Abbie was a heroic teenaged lighthouse-keeper on Matinicus Rock in 1856 who managed to do what had to be done in the face of adversity, in frighteningly bad weather, without formal certification from the authorities, for a solid month without help, and she did it all in a dress. To this day, it is that sort of attitude which makes the world go ‘round.

The 175-foot United States Coast Guard “Keeper-class” Cutter Abbie Burgess, home port Rockland, sports as her most conspicuous deckload a crane rather than a mess of armament. She is the local buoy tender, and represents to my mind a most noble purpose of our Coast Guard, along with icebreaking and search-and-rescue. A reassuring presence is our cutter Burgess, a welcome sight and a good neighbor.

A little while back, just as I was hunkering down by the fire and settling into a sedentary position in advance of the latest Oncoming Storm, the phone rang. George, a friend who lives down through the woods on the west side of the island, reported that the Abbie Burgess was way in close to the shore outside his kitchen window, and he thought he suspected why.

The Bantam Ledge buoy had gone adrift a few weeks back and had been lodged on the remote rocky shoreline on the west side of Matinicus for a while. The lost navigational buoy made for a noisy neighbor on that part of the island, banging around as the tide and the surf moved it just enough to make it creak and thunder. One local fisherman, whose house is closest to where the buoy fetched up, reported that the racket got so loud he couldn’t sleep. George said he’d heard that Robert had been phoning the Rockland Coast Guard station on a regular basis. The day the Burgess showed up, Robert was on the mainland, but George happened to be washing up his lunch dishes when he looked out the window and saw a very large boat inside the bit of ledge called the Black Rocks--which was certainly not normal.

My husband Paul and I got rigged up and I jumped into one of the old utility trucks that used to belong to the phone company, what we call “the family car” around here, and headed for the west side. We parked the truck outside of Robert’s yard, continuing on foot, and once we got to the woods found the comfort of some lee. The snowstorm which had kept the TV weather geeks in overdrive for the past couple of days had just begun. We met up with George, and soon, way down the steep banking through the tangle of windblasted spruce, saw the stuck buoy with its red-faded-to-orange paint. With it were two guys in orange safety gear, PFDs, and hard hats.

The three of us slid on our rear ends down the steep and snowy bank to say, “Hi there.” Such a visit from random islanders, appearing from the tangle of trees overhead as the weather got rapidly worse, was something they clearly did not expect. “Do you guys need anything?” I asked, because that is what you do. After all, the Coast Guard men were the folks out where they wouldn’t ordinarily belong; we were more or less just enjoying a walk in the snow in our own hometown, a bit of exercise, maybe, or a little fresh air. I believe they suspected we three were an ounce out of balance.

Paul told them how, if we’d have known they were coming, we would have made doughnuts. We are generally looking for an excuse to make doughnuts.

The wind that day was predominantly from the east, so the Burgess had a lee in which to work. The buoy tender’s crew had attached a rugged piece of line to the stranded buoy, and the other end to an orange poly-ball about halfway back to the cutter, which was in as close as she could reasonably manage. They attached another line from the Burgess to that.

Somebody on the Burgess radioed to the two on the beach that it was “time to get out of the way, we’re going to take a strain on it.” George, Paul, and I climbed up the bank while the crewmen found a perch a safe distance away near the water’s edge. Slowly, the long rope from the buoy tender came taught, and with a bit of banging and groaning and crunching the buoy came free of the rocks. Just as soon as there was any water beneath it, the beat-up buoy worked to right itself.

We had mentioned to the two Coast Guard fellows on the rocks that there also appeared to be another beached buoy on one of the Green Islands, visible from the air as we fly from Matinicus to the Knox County Airport in Owl’s Head. Of course, I am not even sure the Green Island object is a navigational buoy, having only seen it from the airplane a couple thousand feet up. Maybe it is some other piece of junk that just looks like a buoy. No doubt the local guys over there have reported it, if there is anything to report.

But these things do happen; that’s what keeps the Burgess busy. We had the Matinicus Harbor bell buoy go adrift once a few years back and make its way in among the lobstermen’s wharves. Paul was working in the power station that morning and heard an uncommonly loud bell. Upon viewing the situation, he called me up laughing and said, “You’ll want to come down here with a camera…” That one was still afloat, however, and could be pulled into deeper water by lobster boat, to assist the Coast Guard.

Anyway, a winch aboard the Burgess slowly pulled the battered and dented Bantam Ledge buoy toward the vessel where it would presumably be hoisted by the crane (the crew having already set a new Bantam Ledge buoy where it belonged.) As the pretty snowflakes degenerated into a slushy, sleety mix, the Coast Guard small boat picked up the two guys in hardhats from the beach down by John Libby’s, which was a bit more accessible. Paul and I started back to our truck, and George toward his dishwashing, thinking about how we ought to send the Coast Guard a thank-you note from Matinicus Recycling for helping with our scrap metal cleanup in a really big way.

We also had a little harmless fun at the expense of the sleepless neighbor who suffered through all the noise. “Suppose we should call up Robert and tell him it’s gone?” “No, let’s tell him there are two of them now.” I left the scene ruminating upon what to say. We’ll tell him that one on Green Island went adrift again in the heavy weather and fetched up here, maybe fifty yards from the other one, and all night long the two of ‘em sound like an oil drum full of sledge hammers rolling down a fire escape.