Coast Guard Cutter Elm Heads to Baltimore for Overhaul

 

The cutter’s departure from Atlantic Beach, N.C. will mark its last from its current homeport. After the overhaul work is completed, the Elm will report to a new homeport in Astoria, Oregon.

 

Coast Guard Cutter Maple, which is presently undergoing a midlife overhaul of its own, will replace the Elm in Atlantic Beach this April.

 

The Juniper Class, 225-foot seagoing buoy tender Elm was commissioned in 1998 and reported to Coast Guard Sector Field Office Macon, N.C. on the U.S. East Coast, where the vessel has spent the last two decades maintaining more than 250 floating aids to navigation from central New Jersey to the border of North and South Carolina.

 

The Elm was also key to a Coast Guard partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) to maintain weather buoys, and in 2005 its crew members worked with NOAA marine biologists to help save an entangled northern right whale.  

 

Additionally, Elm crew members deployed to heavy ice seasons in New England, breaking ice for merchant traffic and freeing vessels trapped in the ice along the Hudson River and in Delaware Bay; performed law enforcement duties to ensure the safety of recreational and merchant vessels and to uphold compliance with fisheries laws; and even deployed to South Florida to conduct migrant interdictions.

 

The Elm’s humanitarian missions included crew members deploying in the wake of Hurricanes Matthew, Irma and Maria, and their missions during these responses helped reopen ports in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Florida and Georgia. The Elm crew also spent five months coordinating and performing oil cleanup following the Deepwater Horizon incident off the coast of Louisiana in 2010.