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New cutter struts at Inner Harbor

ABOARD THE COAST GUARD CUTTER BERTHOLF — Late-afternoon diners at the waterfront restaurant Shuckers, in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, looked up from their clams Friday afternoon to watch a sleek, steel iceberg with an orange racing stripe glide into a Fell’s Point pier.

Soon, the 418-foot, 4,500-ton cutter Bertholf, the first new large Coast Guard vessel in three decades, loomed over the al fresco tables. News helicopters droned overhead. Fireboats and a small armada of pleasure craft lolled out in the harbor, having escorted in the cutter from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where it had anchored briefly to pick up dignitaries and reporters.

In short order, dozens of blue-uniformed Coast Guardsmen tied the ship up to the pier. Harbor workers lowered a brow onto the flight deck, and soon the cutter disgorged U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, a hometown Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the Coast Guard. Along with the Bertholf’s skipper, Capt. Patrick Stadt, they faced a phalanx of television cameras from a podium set up on the dock just below the Bertholf’s bow. All as the crowd at Shucker’s munched in the shade.

The news-makers and the ship represented the culmination of a public-relations bid by the Coast Guard to introduce its new $640 million cutter in person to Washington overseers, the news media and regular people across the East Coast. (In addition to dignitary tours Friday, the Bertholf is open to public tours on Saturday and Sunday.)

Delays and cost overruns have made the ship controversial, a fact about which Cummings and Allen joked as the ship cruised toward its dock.

“It’s so nice you-all brought it up to my neighborhood,” Cummings said. “I appreciate that. I don’t know if it was a coincidence or what, but it certainly feels good.”

“Completely random,” Allen riposted.

Chertoff and Allen brought the Bertholf up to Baltimore to show Congress and the public that the Bertholf was worth the extra time and money.

From the new muzzle-velocity radar in its 57mm deck gun on the foc’sle to the boat-launch ramp at the stern, the Bertholf brings a new set of capabilities to the cutter fleet, Stadt said.

Veteran crew members agreed.

Chief Gunner’s Mate Larry Muldowney, who pointed out that the deck gun wore a brass plate that listed it as number 001 — the very first copy of a new weapon that will be carried by the Bertholf’s follow-on ships and also aboard the Navy’s littoral combat ship — said the gun was better than any comparable weapon he’s known on his five Coast Guard cutters.

Chief Electrician’s Mate Lincoln Hearing remembered standing between two separate generators on a 210-foot cutter and “fiddling with the controls” on both of them until they synced up. With the Bertholf’s entirely computerized system, he and his shipmates in the engineering department can do their jobs just by clicking a mouse, he said.

Even a crew member on his first sea tour, Yeoman 3rd Class Mark Dubois, said he recognized the comparative luxury of the six-person staterooms, full gym and smooth ride of the Bertholf.

“We know how good we’ve got it,” he said.