This Day in U.S. Coast Guard History – January 11

1882- At 9 a.m during a thick snowstorm, the schooner A .F. Ames of Rockland, Maine, was bound from Perth Amboy to Boston with a crew of seven persons. She stranded during a thick snowstorm five hundred yards east of Race Point and one mile and three-quarters west of Station No. 6, Second District. The vessel was discovered by the patrol and the life-saving crew boarded her at 9:15 o’clock. She was leaking and pounding heavily. The pumps were manned to keep the water down. The vessel was floated on the rising tide and made sail. She was piloted into deep water. The leak, however, was gaining rapidly. After consulting with the captain, the vessel was put on the beach. The crew was sheltered at the station until the 13th when the keeper sent them to Boston.

1991- Coast Guard units responded after receiving a distress call from F/V Sea King, a 75-foot stern trawler with four persons on board that was taking on water and in danger of sinking off Peacock Spit near the mouth of the Columbia River.  The Coast Guard units that responded included a prototype 47-foot MLB, two 44-foot MLBs, the 52-foot MLB CG-52314 Triumph II, and a Coast Guard helicopter.  Despite valiant efforts to save the vessel, it capsized and sank.  Three Coast Guardsmen who went aboard the vessel to assist were safely rescued from the water.  Another, MK1 Charles Sexton, an emergency medical technician who went aboard the Sea King to assist an injured crewman, was pulled from the water but died 50 minutes after his arrival at a local hospital.  The trawler's captain and another crewman were rescued from the water but the crewman did not respond to resuscitation efforts.  The captain survived as did the crewman who was first hoisted aboard the helicopter.  The fourth crewman remained missing and was believed to have gone down with the trawler.  MK1 Sexton was posthumously awarded the Coast Guard Medal.

(Source: USCG Historian’s Office)