THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 2, 1994 TAG: 9409020619
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DENNIS JOYCE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
They don't take their ``Eyes'' off the horizon for even a second aboard the cutter Cowslip. They might miss a speck bobbing on the horizon, the next group of Cuban refugees struggling to say afloat.
Most Coast Guard rescues in the Florida Straits begin with Big Eyes, giant pole-mounted binoculars that can spot a 10-foot raft at 5 miles.
For all 14 hours of daylight someone is standing high atop the flying bridge of the Portsmouth-based Cowslip with his face pressed into the small end of the 4-foot-long telescopic lenses.
It's exacting duty, and two men rotate each half hour for a four-hour shift. While one mans Big Eyes, the other provides backup, scanning the horizon through hand-held binoculars. ``People here are absolutely knocking themselves out so they don't miss anyone who might still be alive in a raft,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Cook, skipper of the buoy tender. ``When we spot more than one raft at a time, we send an officer up there, too, to coordinate the tracking.''
That's when all 54 members of the Cowslip, one of 34 Coast Guard vessels now assigned to the Florida Straits, show their stuff.
The ship normally is assigned to maintain buoys and other navigational devices. So its crew is uniquely suited to the Cuban mission - maneuvering the big vessel up to a succession of small floating objects, and working on them.
The Cowslip has had as many as seven craft at a time to deal with, and as many as 64 refugees on its deck at once. During a routine day, no more than two or three hours go by without the ship being involved in a rescue.
In a phone interview Thursday from Key West harbor, as his ship headed back to sea with supplies for another week or so, Cook described the rescue routine:
Once a raft is spotted, the Cowslip maneuvers close and looks inside to see the condition of the boat and the people. A boarding team including Seaman Hector Melendez, Puerto Rican-born and fluent in Spanish, makes sure everyone is wearing life jackets. Melendez asks a series of questions, including how everyone is feeling. Before the refugees leave their rafts, the medical corpsman back on the Cowslip, Petty Officer 2nd Class Joe Ferreira, knows which ones will require treatment. Usually they need water, maybe even an intravenous electrolyte solution for dehydration.
Once aboard, the refugees receive an identification band listing health condition and the group they were traveling with so family and friends can stay together through the process.
They are fed a meal of rice and beans on hastily built tables. The crew uses sawhorses and plywood they bought during a visit to a Home Depot when they stopped in Miami on the way down.
Typically, the rescued refugees fall asleep immediately in the shade of a tarp on the buoy deck. The deck has room for 200.
Within a day or so, a larger Navy ship arrives - most recently, the Norfolk-based Whidbey Island - to ferry the refugees to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. They are carried over in a small boat from the Cowslip, as many as 12 at a time.
The cutter then returns to duty.
It's exciting work for Cook, a 37-year-old husband and father of three from Virginia Beach who has been in the Coast Guard 15 years. Up until now, his most demanding assignments aboard the Cowslip included oil spills and barge fires on the Elizabeth River.
``We honestly feel that with the poor condition of these rafts, if we hadn't saved them at the time that we did, there's no guarantee they'd still be afloat the next time a cutter reached them,'' he said.
One case in particular gave the mission a sense of urgency and importance - an older Cuban man so weak, even after a day and half on the Cowslip, that he had to be hauled aboard the Whidbey Island in a special medical basket. After a night of 8-foot seas, the crew had found him tied inside a single inner tube no bigger than what you'd find in a car tire. ``He said he had been out for seven days,'' Cook said. ``He barely had enough strength to wave to us. I don't know how he stayed in there.''
A lookout, scanning the horizon at daybreak, spotted the old man.
``As soon as the lookout with Big Eyes spots a raft, the other lookout calls down and gives a bearing,'' Cook said. ``He never takes the Eyes off the raft until the officer of the deck can get his binoculars on it.''
If they lose sight of the raft, they use navigation equipment to find the craft again using the bearings they recorded.
``It's real teamwork when it gets to that point. It's really intense - right up until we're close enough to know whether there are people in the raft.'' ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO COURTESY OF COAST GUARD
To spot Cuban refugees, the Coast Guard uses binoculars that magnify
objects 50 times. Two men rotate each half hour during a four-hour
shift. While one mans ``Big Eyes,'' the other scans the horizon
through hand-held binoculars.
Graphic
STAFF
CUBAWATCH THURSDAY
SOURCE: U.S. Coast Guard, Defense Department, National Weather
Service.
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: CUBA REFUGEES U.S. COAST GUARD by CNB