Bringing Coast Guard Cutter Storis online
Interesting article, the ship designed and built to be operated by a civilian crew training the coasties while underway:
Because the Coast Guard acquired and commissioned Storis so quickly, there was no traditional six-month training pipeline. Instead, the cutter deployed with two crews: about 45 Coast Guard members, mostly E-5s and above—and 22 ECO civilian mariners who knew the ship inside and out.
The civilians impressed their military counterparts with their professionalism, deep knowledge, and endurance, standing 12-hour watches compared with the Coast Guard’s four.
Lt.j.g Sofia Scott, who’d served on the CGC Polar Star since graduating from the Academy in 2023, was usually paired with a third mate. “We’d stand watch together and they would basically teach me everything,” she said. “I couldn’t believe all the information they had to know about engineering to hold that qualification.”
Early on, Chief Petty Officer Mike Underwood remembers how Coast Guard members reacted too quickly to an alarm on the ship and caused a blackout.
“It’s so ingrained in us that if you hear an alarm you need to do something to fix it right away,” said Underwood, a machinery technician with five years on the CGC Healy, a medium icebreaker. “One of the training challenges was to change that thinking, to learn to wait 40 seconds for the ship to correct itself. We had a pump fail on a generator that was overheating, and we never actually lost power because it just switched another generator online.”