03/18/2007

Photo courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard/William Colclough
A ladder stands against the side of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mackinaw during ice trials on frozen Lake Superior, where a few officers ventured.

Mackinaw is stellar in debut

New cutter has successful first winter

BY SHERI McWHIRTER

smcwhirter@record-eagle.com

Record-Eagle/Sheri McWhirter
The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mackinaw slowly backs down the St. Maryís River in Sault Ste. Marie before dawn on Wednesday, leaving for the last day of ice trials in Lake Superior.

SAULT STE. MARIE - The big, red ship hummed and shuddered slightly as it cruised at six knots through six-foot-deep ice, an amalgam of thick, broken pieces thawed and refrozen in Lake Superior's Whitefish Bay.

It's an impossible task for most mariners, but the crew of U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mackinaw splashed along in search of a greater challenge near Canadian waters, with huge chunks of frozen water floating like giant ice cubes in the wake.

The crew completed the ship's ice trials during the last two weeks as part of its first winter of ice-breaking in the Great Lakes.

"We're measuring the effect Mackinaw has on the ice and the impact the ice has on the Mackinaw,” said Capt. John Little, the ship's commanding officer. "There's more to driving this boat than just steering.”

High-tech sensors lined the inside of the icebreaker's hull, deck and bulkhead, measuring minute tremors in the steel as ice chunks the size of cars broke off and rocked away from the passing ship. Civilian naval architects were on board to study how the ship and its propulsion system held up to the ice strain.

"It's built for 35 tons of thrust from both propellers. It looks like it has hit the mark,” said naval architect Jim St. John, who specializes in maritime ice research.

Mackinaw's propulsion system includes three 4,600 horsepower engines and two Azipods, self-contained electric motor systems that rotate 360 degrees, directing water and thrust in any direction.

The new 240-foot-long cutter did not find any ice in the Great Lakes that it couldn't easily manage. That includes 24-inch-thick solid blue plate ice near Green Bay and a 5.5-meter-deep ridge, where ice pushed together under extreme pressure in Lake Superior.

"It's more advanced than any other ship in the Coast Guard,” said Boatswain Mate 2nd Class Maria Gonzalez, junior officer of the deck who takes nautical readings and handles radio communications.

The ship took over the duties of the old cutter Mackinaw, which was decommissioned last year after 62 years of service and is now docked in Mackinaw City.

The new Mackinaw is designed for heavy ice-breaking, buoy service, search and rescue, law enforcement and oil-skimming at spills. The ship also is rigged to mount 50-caliber machine guns for Homeland Security missions, Little said.

"It's just being a presence in areas that may be a high threat area, like the Sault Locks, Mackinac Bridge or the nuclear power plant in Kewaunee,” he said.

Little said a first year of successful missions has more than made up for a gaffe involving the $82 million ship prior to his command, when the hull was dented in a collision with a breakwall in Grand Haven on Dec. 12, 2005.

The ship's home port is Cheboygan, where the previous icebreaker of the same name also moored on the Cheboygan River, just off Lake Huron.