CG returns 3 coastal patrol boats to Navy - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

CG returns 3 coastal patrol boats to Navy

The last of the Navy’s coastal patrol craft are returning after years out on loan. By the end of September, the Coast Guard will have returned three Cyclone-class coastal patrol boats to the Navy.

That means the Navy will again have a full fleet of 13 PCs.

The Zephyr, Shamal and Tornado will be returning to Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story, Va., a development first reported by the magazine Seapower. The first to be transferred, Zephyr, may have been turned over as early as Aug. 10, followed by Shamal at the end of the month and Tornado at the end of September, according to Coast Guard spokesman Carlos Diaz.

For now, the boats will be based in Little Creek until a decision is made about overall PC basing, said Lt. Cmdr. Bill Urban, spokesman for Naval Surface Force Atlantic. With the new arrivals, eight of the Navy’s 13 PCs will be homeported in Little Creek. The other five boats are forward-deployed to Bahrain. Crews rotate, typically spending nine months aboard a Little Creek-based boat, followed a six-month deployment to one of the Bahrain boats. At present, the Navy has 13 crews for its 10 boats.

“Future disposition regarding the deployment of PCs will depend upon a number of factors, including the requirements of respective combatant commanders and fiscal controls,” Urban wrote in reply to emailed questions. He added that no decisions have been made to change the cycle of crew rotations or to forward-deploy any more PCs.

Because of tight berthing arrangements, the only billet for a woman aboard a PC is the commanding officer, Urban wrote, adding that a female CO would be taking command of a PC crew Aug. 5.

In 2004, the Navy agreed to transfer five PCs to the Coast Guard to help them meet mission requirements while they were converting other patrol boats. Two of the vessels, Tempest and Monsoon, returned to naval service four years later.

For much of the past seven years, the other three vessels have been based in Pascagoula, Miss. The small craft have been especially useful in a variety of homeland defense missions.

“It was a very good platform,” recalled Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Tony Russell, who commanded Zephyr from July 2010 until May 2011. Russell said the 179-foot cutters were particularly useful for counterdrug and law enforcement operations because they had a high top speed, 35 knots, and could carry a crew of 29, roughly twice as many crew members as other patrol boats.

But there were downsides, Russell continued: limited endurance, no flight deck and an inability to tow large vessels.

Oil spill response

In April 2010, Zephyr was transiting back to Pascagoula after an overhaul in Georgia when the crew heard a distress call. An oil rig had exploded roughly 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana. Zephyr was the first major cutter on scene at the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and coordinated search-and-rescue efforts for the first 24 hours.

“When the Zephyr was coming home from that dry dock, they were really looking forward to getting home from a really tough maintenance period, but when that radio call goes off and says, ‘Explosion on an oil rig’ — there wasn’t a question in anybody’s mind about what they needed to be doing,” said Russell, who took command three months later.

Elements of the Coast Guard thought they might have to decommission the PCs instead of transferring them back to the Navy, according to a Coast Guard personnel assignment guidance sheet dated Dec. 17, 2010.

However, a spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command said the plan all along was to recover the PCs, which will be undergoing $4.5 million of conversion work as part of their re-entry into naval service. NAVSEA spokesman Lt. Kurt Larson said in an email that each of the roughly two-month overhauls will be ship specific, but will update combat systems suites, habitation and mechanical systems.

“The Cyclone-class PCs,” Larson wrote, “should be in service until 2023-2026.”