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On Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard held a heritage recognition ceremony for the medium endurance cutter USCGC Dependable<\/em>, which has been performing rescues and busting drug-runners for an astonishing 56 years. The event served the purpose of a decommissioning, though not in name: Dependable<\/em> will be laid up in an inactive shipyard status until her well-earned formal retirement, and her crew will transfer to new units in order to cover the service's manning shortfall<\/a>. <\/p>\n Dependable<\/em> was commissioned in 1968 at American Ship Building in Lorain, Ohio and underwent a deep overhaul in 1995-7. Over the course of her long service life, she racked up a string of drug bust successes, including the seizure of 120 tons of marijuana aboard a freighter in 1978. She was on scene to respond for the Mariel Boatlift in 1980 and the Haitian earthquake of 2010, and participated in multiple migrant-interdiction missions. On her final patrol at the end of last year, her crew saved 33 people aboard a 25-foot boat in seas of up to 12 feet off the coast of Haiti. <\/p>\n The Offshore Patrol Cutter procurement program will gradually deliver replacements for Dependable <\/em>and her long-serving sister ships. In the meantime, the Coast Guard has decided to begin taking three of them off of front-line duty without waiting. The service is short on personnel, and its leaders want to operate cutters with whole crews instead of gapping billets. <\/p>\n “The Coast Guard cannot maintain the same level of operations with our current shortfall – we cannot do the same with less,” said Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Coast Guard Heath Jones in a statement last year. “Conducting our missions is often inherently dangerous, and doing so without enough crew puts our members and the American public at increased risk.”<\/p>\n For Dependable<\/em>, this alignment policy means an earlier retirement – but early is relative. Internationally, seagoing ships usually retire by 25 and rarely outlast their 40th year. 56 years is remarkable for a hardworking law enforcement vessel like Dependable<\/em>. <\/p>\n “This is a fine ship, built long ago by American shipbuilders, tradesmen, and craftsmen,” said Vice Admiral Kevin Lunday, Commander, Coast Guard Atlantic Area. “But a ship doesn’t become a Coast Guard cutter because we paint it white and put a racing stripe on the side. It becomes a cutter when we breathe life into it by crewing it with the finest young women and men from across these United States." maritime-executive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard held a heritage recognition ceremony for the medium endurance cutter USCGC Dependable, which has been performing rescues and busting drug-runners for an astonishing 56 years. The event served the purpose of a decommissioning, though not in name: Dependable will be laid up in an inactive shipyard status until her …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[19484,1579,2559,19483,3861,4360,1580,3874,1886,2465,515],"class_list":["post-41760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-210foot","tag-coast","tag-cutter","tag-dependable","tag-fill","tag-gaps","tag-guard","tag-manning","tag-service","tag-takes","tag-u-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/41761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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