USLSS Wreck & Rescue

A Visit with our Friends at... STANT St. Ignace, Michigan
by John J. Galluzzo

Looks odd, doesn't it? Is "STANT" even a word? Well, in the Coast Guard it is, or at least it's an acronym. It may be, too, though, that it's an acronym recognizable only to those people who follow the Coast Guard at the Mackinac Straits, the body of water separating Michigan's Lower Peninsula from its Upper Peninsula, for it was here, at St. Ignace that the term was coined. The "ST" stands for "station," the usual designation for a small boat station; the "ANT" refers to an "aids to navigation" team. In 1982, Aids to Navigation Team Cheboygan moved to the Station St. Ignace grounds, and ten years later the Coast Guard tried a new concept, a merged ST/ANT with cooperative "sides" operating out of the same buildings. Today, the small boat side oversees the largest area of responsibility on the Great Lakes, more than 4050 square miles containing more than 50 islands. The aids to navigation side, according to the STANT St. Ignace webpage, watches over "123 primary aids and 91 secondary aids, including 21 major lighthouses, 13 of which are offshore."

Now, add in a berthed 140-foot Bay Class icebreaking tugboat (USCGC Biscayne Bay, WTGB-104) and five supporting Coast Guard Auxiliary flotillas, and the situation becomes even more cloudy.

One would never know, though, by visiting the crew at STANT St. Ignace that there is even the slightest hint of confusion at the station. It looks, instead, like the Ninth District's STANT experiment is a success. From all accounts, it is.

So there you have it: search and rescue operations, aids to navigation work, law enforcement duties, including homeland security and migrant interdiction, pretty standard stuff, right? Wrong.

"We do a lot of ice rescue, too," said Senior Chief Boatswain's Mate (BMCS) Will Johnson, STANT St. Ignace's officer-in-charge on Sunday, September 11, 2005. "Well," he added, smiling, "we usually hear about it after the fact. You'll be at the barber shop and one of the guys will say, 'Yeah, my cousin fell through the other day.' So we try to find out where it happened so you can watch out for it in the future."

Ice is simply a fact of life on the Great Lakes. Some Canadian Coast Guard crews go home for the winter when the ice takes over. St. Ignace, though, trains, and passes on news of what works and what doesn't to Sector Sault Ste. Marie ("Guardians of the Northern Lakes") and the Ninth District. They also work to educate fire departments in the area as to what they have come to know as safe practices. Yet even the Coast Guard has had its share of losses to the ice. One man, Seaman First Class Paul DeSantis of the Mackinac Island Coast Guard Station, died after falling through on January 10, 1943.

Now, widen the camera lens even further. The Mackinac Straits, a body of water that is five miles wide at its narrowest point, while separating the Upper and Lower Peninsulas, also connect Lakes Huron and Michigan. At that point, stretching from Mackinaw City in the south to St. Ignace in the north, stands the Mackinac Straits Bridge, the plan for which was conceived in 1934, but which did not come to fruition until 1958. The result was what is now the third-longest bridge in the United States, behind only New York's Verrazano-Narrows and San Francisco's Golden Gate bridges, at 8,614 feet. The towers stand 552 feet above the waterline, 155 feet of clearance underneath allow ample passage room for ships of all types, and the bridge weighs a total of 11,840 tons. That's a lot of bridge to watch, and a lot of water to cover.

The U.S. Life-Saving Service realized the importance of the waterway early in the organization's existence, placing an 1875-type station on nearby Beaver Island (St. Ignace was home to a French Catholic mission in 1670, and the passage had been utilized by French fur traders as early as that date) in 1875, though quite a bit west of the straits. In 1890, the service added a Marquette-type station at Bois Blanc Island (pronounced "Bob-Lo") to the east, north of Cheboygan, and a new structure on Mackinac Island in 1915, directly east of St. Ignace.

The latter station proved to be beneficial in more ways than one. "Mackinac Island Station wasn't as busy with life saving duties as was expected," writes Alan Nelson in "Keeper Arndt Anderson, USLSS 1870-1926." "The two nearby stations of Boise [sic] Blanc Island and Hammond Bay, within 15 miles, drew the majority of the calls. Even so, the Mackinac Island Station served a better purpose of promoting the Coast Guard and in turn, brought support of the wealthy and politically connected who used the island as a vacation get away."

Mackinac Island remains a playground for the rich and famous, known for its automobile-less streets and horse-drawn carriages. The enduring image of the island may be the Grand Hotel, a sweeping Victorian era jewel featured in the romantic film Somewhere in Time in 1979, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. The names connected with the island - from Civil War General John C. Pemberton to writer Mark Twain to President John F. Kennedy - will resonate through the hotel's halls for a long, long time. No doubt the crew at St. Ignace gets the occasional VIP escort call when a politican of note is in the area.

Bringing the story to the modern day, the Beaver Island station closed in 1922 and the Bois Blanc and Mackinac Island stations gave way to the current station at St. Ignace in 1968.

Currently, the station is under the guidance of BMCS Johnson, who has more than a career interest in the Coast Guard. His grandfather, Martin Louis Johnson, served at the Frankfort, Michigan, Life-Saving Station some time around 1910, judging by pictures the Senior Chief has in his office. Johnson is currently seeking answers to several questions about his grandfather, including exact dates of service and the significance of a white star lapel pin visible in his posed portrait. He's also working on compiling a scrapbook of station history to leave for future generations of Coast Guardsmen and women to have handy for those ice-locked days, after training is through, of course.

STANT St. Ignace stands at a great maritime crossroads, connecting two of the largest lakes in the world and the cities that have grown up on them. Here, with ice rescue added into the regular mix of missions, Semper Paratus is a way of life, and not just a motto.

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