Coast Guard Cutter Elm to Arrive in New Homeport

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.