The Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley and crew returned home Wednesday evening following a six-week deployment to Puget Sound, where the crew underwent a challenging period of training and evaluation. The ship first stopped in Seattle, where a large part of the crew completed team firefighting and damage control courses where crewmembers learned fire-fighting techniques and had to control flooding in a tank made to simulate an engineering space on a sinking ship. With almost 60 of the 100-person crew on their first assignment to a ship, the learning curve was steep at times. Following this training the ship sailed north to Naval Station Everett Washington and began a rigorous three-week Tailored Ship’s Training Availability (TSTA).