ASTORIA, Ore. — The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Elm is scheduled to cross the Columbia River bar and arrive in Astoria, its new homeport, for the first time on July 15 at 10 a.m., the Coast Guard’s 13th District said in a release.
The Elm, a Juniper Class 225-foot seagoing buoy tender, is operated by the same crew that operated the Coast Guard Cutter Fir, which left Astoria in June 2018 as part of a Coast Guard-wide hull swap.
The Elm is coming out of a midlife, dry-dock, major-overhaul period at the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore. The major overhaul began in January 2018.
The Elm, commissioned in 1998, was previously homeported in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, as part of Sector Field Office Macon. It spent the last 20 years maintaining more than 250 floating aids to navigation from central New Jersey to the border of North and South Carolina.
The Elm’s primary mission will continue to be servicing aids to navigation, but its new area of responsibility stretches along the Pacific coasts of Oregon and Washington as well as in the Columbia River. Its area extends from the Oregon/California border north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and east in the Columbia River to Longview, Washington.
The aids to navigation that its crew will service and maintain are essential to commercial vessel traffic in shipping ports such as Coos Bay, Newport, Astoria, Portland, Longview and Seattle.
The Elm’s crew will be responsible for 114 floating aids. The buoys, which the crew normally service, range in size from 13 feet tall and 5 feet wide to 35 feet tall and 9 feet wide and weigh up to 18,000 pounds. The Elm has heavy-lift capabilities with a crane that can extend to 60 feet and lift up to 40,000 pounds.
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