Yesterday, when I rode my bike down by the bay it was obvious that it was not going to be an ordinary day for the residents of our little community. Anchored in the middle of our bay was a genuine U.S. Coast Guard Cutter. It wasn’t one of the special rescue cutters, that sport white hulls with distinctive Coast Guard orange stripes on the bow. The Henry Blake has a black hull, but it does have the Coast Guard stripe and the words, “U. S. Coast Guard” plainly printed on her sides.

After I rode from one end of the bay to the other, I stopped for coffee and the cutter was the talk of the coffee shop. Mind you at the time there were only three other people, including the server, in the coffee shop when I arrived. Ours is a sleepy little village and most of our tourist traffic occurs on weekends. The few locals who stop by the coffee shop before 8 am tend to be like me, retirees who get plenty of sleep.

Ours is a shallow bay without much distinction. If you start at the U.S. - Canada border, the first inlet is Drayton Harbor. It is a neat, well-protected harbor that used to be home to a sizable commercial fishing fleet. There are still a few commercial boats based there and there is a crab market and oyster farms in the harbor. Mostly, however, Drayton Harbor is a safe haven for recreational vessels and a few larger yachts. It also is home to the tiny passenger ferry, the Plover, that carries tourists from Blaine across the harbor to Semiahmoo Resort. The resort is located on a spit of land where there used to be multiple canneries.

Moving south, ours is the next bay. It is shallow dip with a tiny marina for recreational boats at one end and a few mooring buoys scattered along the edge. It is pretty rare to see a boat larger than 30 feet in length in our bay.

Off the south end of our bay and around the corner is Cherry Point, where there is a BP refinery and a terminal for unloading crude oil from tankers and loading refined fuels onto other tankers. Beyond Cherry Point begins Bellingham Harbor, which is a proper harbor with cranes for unloading cargo and a real Coast Guard station.

So a 175 foot long, 850 ton cutter with a 58 foot mast powered by a pair of 1,000 hp Cat diesels and a 500 hp bow thruster anchored right in our bay is enough to spark all kinds of coffee house chatter.

The primary mission of the Henry Blake is tending navigation aids along the coast and among the islands. She is equipped with a powerful crane that can lift buoys from the water onto her deck for maintenance. Like all vessels of the Coast Guard, however, she carries equipment and trained personnel for search and rescue operations. In the past she has responded to sinking vessels and airplane accidents at sea. Since her presence in our little bay was unusual, there was brief talk of a possible rescue mission, but the weather was calm and there had been no news of craft in peril.

The true story is probably a lot more boring. The Blake is designed for the crew to live and work at sea. Equipped with enough staff for night watches and a complete galley for meal service, the Blake can travel 2,000 nautical miles between fueling. She is officially based at Everett, but is only at her home port of maintenance and refueling. The rest of the time she is at sea, traveling from job to job. She is known as a keeper, a term carried over from the days when lighthouses in remote locations required ships to supply them and conduct major maintenance. These days lighthouses and navigational aids are automated and require regular inspection and maintenance.

The Blake is also equipped with a large tank that can be used to pump oil and polluted water from the sea when leaks or sinking occur. She has transfer pumps that can be used to empty tanks from vessels in distress to prevent environmental damage. She has other special equipment for responding to environmental operations. Once she recovered 1,400 feet of nets from a fishing boat wreck.

By mid morning the Blake had lifted anchor and headed off to her next job. I rode my bike back home and looked up the Blake on Wikipedia. As Coast Guard cutters go, she is relatively new, officially commissioned in 2000 after sea trails that took her from Marinette, Wisconsin where she was built to her base in Everett, stopping in four countries and eleven states along her maiden voyage. In place of a conventional rudder the ship is equipped with a pair of Z drives that can be aimed in the same direction or in different directions for precise maneuvering.

I’m sure that the talk at the coffeeshop will return to the usual banter about the weather. Things are going to be pretty stationary for the next few days, with a high pressure area bringing hot temperatures to inland areas and the middle of the state. Here on the coast, our pressure should be a little less and our temperatures will be cooler. Highs will be in the 60’s and 70’s, which is a bit chilly for midsummer, but appreciated by locals who for the most part aren’t accustomed to high temperatures. Those who have lived here for a long time don’t notice a few clouds in the skies so what outsiders and newcomers call partly cloudy is referred to as clear skies by locals.

I’ll keep scanning the horizon as I ride my bike by the bay. I know I’ll catch an occasional glimpse of a tanker or cargo vessel and perhaps a BC Ferry on its way to Vancouver Island if there isn’t too much mist on the bay. And I’ll keep looking at the boats that do come into the bay and anchor for a night. There are always interesting things to see when you live by the sea.