USLSS Wreck & Rescue

A Bittersweet Story:
Reminiscences of Life Aboard
USCGC Bittersweet (WAGL 389)
by LCDR Frederick G “Bud” Cooney, USCGR (Ret.)

It was mid-November, 1953, when I received my orders at the Coast Guard base in Seattle, Washington, to board a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) aircraft night flight out over the Gulf of Alaska to Kodiak Island and report aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bittersweet for duty as a Radioman Third Class. With orders in hand I turned to anyone close by that could tell me where Kodiak was and what type of ship the Bittersweet was.
   I soon got my answer. The Bittersweet (“B”) was a black, 180-foot buoy tender out of Kodiak that worked the Aleutian Island chain. As an unworldly twenty year old, I shuddered as pictures of ice, bad weather (“WX”) and Eskimos flashed before me.
   Several days later, the MATS plane touched down in the darkness onto the small icy airstrip, after a several hour, bumpy, white-knuckle flight over the Gulf. Upon reporting in at the Coast Guard Flight Office at the Kodiak Navy Base, I was informed that the “B” was out on the Aleutian Chain and they would get me a flight out to Adak to catch the ship as soon as “WX” permitted. In a couple of days, a Coast Guard aircraft landed me in the dark on another snowy runway on Adak Island. I learned the ship was at sea and due in the next morning. Having spent the night in the Navy barracks, I was told she received a tidal wave alert and was going out to ride it (not uncommon in the Aleutians).
   Later that evening (no tidal wave) the ship tied up and I climbed the icy gangway and came eye-to-eye with the quarterdeck watch, who greeted me with a big grin. He was a radioman I had graduated with at Groton (Connecticut) Radioman School the year before. It was a small service in a small world. And it was the day before Thanksgiving, 1953. My main duty would be to sit four-hour on/eight-hour off radio watches. The eight-hour off watch involved keeping busy with other sailor shipboard tasks.
    The Bittersweet was one of the Iris Class design, the largest of three classes of buoy tenders built in the early 1940s and named after flowers, trees and shrubs. Thirty-eight of these rugged ships became known as “The Black Fleet - the workhorses of the Coast Guard.” When I was aboard (1953-54), the “B” was fitted out with a three-inch gun mounted aft and a fantail loaded with depth charges and K-guns ready for anti-submarine warfare on any ocean. Designed for multiple tasks, the 180-foot buoy tenders had an ice breaking hull that could break up to three feet of ice, a boom with a twenty-ton lifting capacity to haul out and carry sea buoys and cement sinkers on her buoy deck, perform search and rescue (SAR) and law enforecment (LE) missions, and carry out just about any logistical work when called upon. Topped off with diesel fuel the “B” could cover 15,000 miles cruising at an economical ten knots.
    In the Territory of Alaska, our day-to-day activities on the “B” focused on keeping aids to navigation (ATON) buoys and land lights maintained and operational. Routinely, our black cutter would trek out along the Aleutian Chain servicing buoys along the way. We also kept navigational lights along the island shores in service, occasionally stopping at isolated Coast Guard stations with names like Scotch Cap or Cape Sarichef to drop supplies, transfer personnel, or “inspect” the station. These tasks, along with answering SAR calls, added to our purpose for being underway about 85 percent of the time. Patrols along the chain to Adak or up through Unimak Pass into Bristol Bay in the Bering Sea sometimes included unscheduled stops in poorly charted bays or harbors of refuge to drop anchor and wait out the foul weather. The varying twelve-foot tides, combined with Aleutian underground (volcanic) activity that caused shifting sands, sometimes played tricks on the folks on the bridge. With only a twelve-foot draft, we did hit bottom a few times while I was aboard but nothing real serious. The tides always came to our rescue.
    Working lights along the rugged remote shores was an evolution just about everyone on the ship took part in one way or another. Putting a small landing boat or perhaps a large rubber raft into the choppy seas always proved exciting on a cold windy winter day. Loaded with a supply of large gas bottles (accumulators) or forty-pound dry cell batteries and a half dozen crew members, the small craft would land on a rocky cliff shore or volanic ash beach. The enlisted men and officers would turn-to and carry the cumbersome loads up hills and trudge across rough terrain to reach the isolated ATON. Those were the days before the Coast Guard had helicopters to work on ATON in the Aleutians. It was a wise decision at times to wait offshore for twenty-four to forty-eight hours for calmer weather before attempting a trip ashore. Injuries of varying degrees were not uncommon among the crew as the work we did could be considered dangerous at times.
    Looking back, living on a buoy tender in Alaska in the early 1950s with cold steel decks, three-high chain hanging sleeping racks, thawed foods, and powdered milk were the norm - it’s the way it was in this remote part of the world. The deck force had no helmets while working on the buoy decks, and the foul weather gear fell short of meeting the safety standards and practices on cutters today. We were normally in short supply of just about everything. Liberty ashore probably meant getting together at some small remote military base bar for a few hours - in uniform and with no other place to go. Girls? Dates? In Adak, Dutch Harbor, or Kodiak, we never knew of either. Yes, it was quite different before Alaska was a state; it was a rough territory to be in, on the shore or at sea.

Fast Forward

    In 1976, after serving in Alaskan waters for over thirty years, the USCGC Bittersweet was relocated to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she was responsible for search and rescue and law enforcement tasks along with maintaining buoys and lights from Cape Ann, Massachusetts, to New London, Connecticut. This included the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
    In 1993, my wife Ann and I were invited to attend the 50th anniversary of this proud ship at base Woods Hole on Cape Cod. It was a memorable day as I climbed the ladders to the radio shack once again. The ship looked pretty much the same except for the large diagonal red and blue stripe on her bow and block letters COAST GUARD painted on her sides. She was missing the three-inch/.50 caliber anti-aircraft gun on the “gun deck” and the racks of depth charges on her fantail.
    On December 7, 1995, while sitting in my easy chair in my home by the ocean in Charlestown, Rhode Island, reading, and listening to my radio scanner as it made the rounds of the frequencies, I heard “This is the Coast Guard Cutter Bittersweet...” Those are the same words I had spoken so often as a young radioman forty-two years earlier while on patrol in the bleak, windy, cold Aleutian waters in Alaska. The “B” was plying the waters around Block Island, just off shore.
    In 1997, the “B” was decommissioned and transferred to the country of Estonia. Newly renamed the Valvas, the old “B” has a new life in the Port of Tallinn as an Estonian Border Guard Patrol Vessel.
     In 2005, my son John took a cruise ship to the Baltics. With a few emails, I arranged for him to visit my old Coast Guard cutter. When he arrived in the Port of Tallinn he was met at the docks by a vehicle carrying the captain of the Valvas and given a VIP tour of the ship. He climbed the ladder to the radio shack where I stood radio watches over fifty years ago.
     Since her service in World War II, the USCGC Bittersweet served a proud and rewarding long and hard life at sea, and is still going strong.

Frederick G. “Bud” Cooney served for 38 years in the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, and retired a Lieutenant Commander, USCGR. “A Bittersweet Story” is his fourth article for Wreck & Rescue Journal.

U.S. Life-Saving Service Heritage Association, P.O. Box 213 Hull, Mass. 02045