Sea Fair 2010

As some of you know, I took on an adventure earlier this month by volunteering four days of my life to the Coast Guard at Sea Fair. I had always tried to avoid it when I lived in Seattle (I would come up to Skagit County to my parents' house or just stay in my apartment) because I didn't want to deal with the traffic and the people.

I have heard stories of how crazy it gets on the water. All the drinking, and that combined with hot weather . . . a lot of damn near naked people. Well, there was the drinking this year, but since the weather was so crappy, only a small number of individuals were almost naked. I was even asked at least four times by bead-wielding boaters if "I wanted some bead" (which, as most of you know, you need to flash your boobies to get the beads). I'm sure the Coast Guard is thankful that I turned down the offers with a smile, although on the last day I did lift up one side of my survival vest (which goes over my life jacket) and say "that's all you guys get. Sorry." They laughed, but I didn't ever get any beads for it.
I wrote an article for our Flotilla's newsletter and have copied it to the end of this blog post. It is worth reading, but it is long.















Four Days of Boaters Under the Influence . . .
My First Sea Fair Experience
By Valerie Steiner-Peterson

When I first received the email that all auxiliarists received for the need for Sea Fair volunteers, I blew it off (just like everyone else). Why on earth would I want to expose myself to the verbal beatings of the Sea Fair party-goers, or watch those boaters act like idiots?
After the second email was sent out, I asked myself, “Why WOULDN’T I want to experience that”? After all, I am newly Crew qualified. What better way to gain some real-life experience, and probably put most (if not all) of my training to use. So I promptly sent back an email expressing my interest in volunteering for Saturday and Sunday, and explained that I was a new Crew member.
I got an email back a couple of days later from Gene Rubbert, who was assisting Bryan Dees in organizing the Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteers. He wanted volunteers for all four days (Thursday thru Sunday), and had said that they were trying to get some housing at the Coast Guard Station in Seattle (which is now Sector Puget Sound) for a few members of the auxiliary who were traveling from quite a distance. There was absolutely no way they were going to allow me to drive back and forth from Bellingham to Seattle for this (and there was no way I would even consider doing that). I had lodging set up with my niece and her husband in Shoreline if I wasn’t able to stay at the BQ (bachelors quarters, which is typically used for short-term housing for Coast Guard members who just transferred in and haven’t found permanent housing, or for those who have chosen to stay on base and not look for an apartment off base).
I had discussed this whole situation with my husband, since I’d be gone for four days and nights, and I would have to re-arrange my work shift for that week. Our conclusion was that it would be a great experience for me, and I’d get to see the Blue Angels up close for the first time (and possibly the hydroplane races). I sent off the email to Gene to let him know I was “in” for all four days, and that I would really like to stay at the BQ. This first e-mail’s back and forth started around July 12th. I didn’t find out until Tuesday, August 3rd, that I had a room to stay in, only one day before I was to head down to Seattle. Since this was cutting it close, I was wondering how this was all going to really play out, and I was second-guessing my decision to volunteer for this.
I packed up my car and headed down to Seattle on Wednesday evening, and arrived at the station around 8:30 p.m. I went into the BQ to check into my room, and discovered that they didn’t even have me on the list of people coming in. Great. This is starting out well for me. They find a place for me, I sign in, and they take me up to my “room”. The door opens and there is a young Coastie cleaning up the room. This room has four beds (bunk beds), and I am given a top bunk, with no ladder to get in and out of it. I ask the young gal how I am supposed to get up there and her response is to just pull up this rickety chair and “hop up”. Right. With apparently no other rooms available, I decide to sleep on the floor for the night. “Tomorrow,” I say to myself, “I will just pack up and go to my nieces’ place.”
The next four days were very interesting. I was working with a bunch of people I have never met before, but I also got to use a lot of the skills learned in the Crew Academy. The boat I was on was Gene Rubbert’s boat, a 30’ Carver. And his boat was designated at the PAT-COM boat (Patrol Communications), which meant that we had two Coast Guard COMS people on board. All radio calls went through PAT-COM. So we essentially had the guard of all Sea Fair boats. Granted, Seattle Fire and the other Law Enforcement agencies talked on their own channels, but our designated channel for the weekend was similar to that of channel 16. . . everyone involved on the water for Sea Fair was required to tune into it. The great thing about being on the PAT-COM boat was that I got to listen in on ALL the radio chatter back and forth and I got to experience the frustration of the COMS people when they were off the radio. But once they got back on the radio, you couldn’t hear any of the frustration or annoyance in their voice. They were very professional. Between the two of them, they had three radio channels to monitor, plus their work cell phones for calls that they didn’t want broadcast over the radios.
We did some personnel transfers while underway, so I got to put knot tying to use when deploying fenders over the side, and taking line from another boat. The water was pretty rough three of the four days, and keeping the boat next to us without hitting the hull or rails or anything else was a challenge. We also had to maneuver in tight quarters with the spectator boats, mostly to observe them and ask them to move, but also to hand out the Dairy Queen ice cream coupons for the kids who were wearing their life jackets. Gene has these little nets with long handles to put the coupons in so all we had to do was get within four feet of the recipients boat to hand over the coupons.
Each of the Auxiliary boats got teams of weapon-wielding Coasties, which helped with getting the spectators to listen to us. That also meant that there were a lot of Boarding’s being done, and in turn meant that some spectators had to cut their days short, mostly from being overloaded. Mercer Island Police and Seattle Police dealt mostly with boaters under the influence, or reckless endangerment.
One of the incidents that we dealt with was an overturned boat (a 10-12 ft. Hobby Cat caught the waves). All on board got out of the water un-hurt, but none had life jackets. The only other serious incident involved a young man who jumped off the back of his buddy’s boat while it was still in gear. He got hit by the prop twice: a deep laceration above his left knee (all the way to the bone), and a deep laceration on the back of his right ankle, which went through the Achilles tendon. We were the second boat on scene and were there to just observe. The first boat on scene was a smaller Auxiliary boat with two armed Coasties on it, one of which was also an EMT. A Seattle Fire boat came after about 10 minutes and transported the young man to the hospital.
All four days were 8 hours on the water. I hung out at our private dock a couple of evenings and had dinner and drinks with my fellow Auxiliarists for fellowship. I was definitely tired by the end of the weekend. It wasn’t even that boring at all, especially since the Blue Angels flew every day, and I got to see a bunch of different boats. A couple people even brought their houseboats over! I stayed busy, and took the helm for a few hours each day. However, I called Gene back up to the bridge to take over when we had to go into the crowd.
Will I do it again? Probably.
Will I stay at the BQ? Probably not.