Eagle Captain Spends Last Summer Aboard America’s Tall Ship
From USCG Eagle Public Affairs  


May 5, 2009

Sinnett first boarded the ship for a week in 1979 as a cadet, followed by a five week stay the following year. He served as Eagle’s executive officer from 1997 until 1999, and returned for a tour as commanding officer that began in 2006. However, this summer’s cruise will be his last aboard the three-masted, square-rigged cutter; on June 27, he will be relieved of duty for assignment to his next duty station at the U.S. Coast Guard’s Operations Command in Portsmouth, Virginia.

“I really love my time aboard Eagle,” Sinnett remarked as Eagle sailed 3,149 miles along the 35th parallel north on an 18-day cruise that began April 20 from the ship’s homeport in New London, Connecticut, bound for Rota, Spain. “This is my seventh cutter and third command, and it’s time for me to move on and let some of the other folks who are up and coming have their shot.”

Sinnett is a sailor’s sailor – sailing isn’t just a job for him, it’s his life.

“The majority of people who sail on Eagle as members of the permanent crew do not have sailing backgrounds; many do have backgrounds in running large cutters, law enforcement, search and rescue and shore operations, but not too many people are honest-to-God sailors who jump on small sailboats and sail around,” he said. “I started racing sailboats when I was in the seventh grade and pretty much have been a competitive sailor my entire life. I met my wife racing against her in a regatta and the first five years we were married we worked our way up to racing at the national level.

“I’ll come home from a deployment on Eagle and I’ll jump on a sailboat the next day with my family and we’ll take off for a few days and sail it.”

In his time aboard, the Captain has sailed Eagle to numerous countries in Central America, South America and Europe as well as ports across America’s three coasts. During this cruise, the cutter will visit Spain, Monaco, France and Bermuda, while training as many as 150 Coast Guard cadets and officer candidates at a time.

While aboard, trainees will learn the basics of sailing U.S. government’s only tall ship in active service, the Captain said. “They will also get experience in deck seamanship and navigation, engineering and the support divisions. This gives them the opportunity to experience all of the jobs on board any cutter in order to make the ship work and achieve mission success. That is a very valuable thing for any future leader to have, that hands-on understanding of the jobs your people have to do. That’s one of the values Eagle brings to the cadet experience.

“There is no other unit in the U.S. military service that gives you the chance to gainfully employ 150 trainees at one time,” Sinnett continued. “This is it. When you see how many ships would it take to provide enough berthing space to get the same volume of people out in the fleet, you can easily see the Coast Guard doesn’t have the ships to do that. They would have to take active ships out of operational missions, and put them into purely training missions for a period of time.”

Thus, Eagle is still performing her original mission, although not for the same political regime and country for which she was originally intended. The 295-foot vessel was built in Germany and commissioned Schiff 508, Horst Wessel in Sept. 1936, by Adolf Hitler. For the next decade, it served as a training ship for German Navy midshipmen. Following World War II, the Allies appropriated Horst Wessel and her sister ships as war prizes; on May 15, 1946, it was recommissioned Eagle, the seventh U.S. Coast Guard ship to carry that name.

In many ways, the ship has not changed much through the last six decades.

“The hull, rig, masts, spars, helm, steering linkage and windlasses are largely original,” Sinnett said. “In the last two years, we have had three or four former Horst Wessel crew members come aboard and remark what great shape the ship is in. They are very happy to see that we are taking such good care of her. They note that the rig and everything topside is pretty much exactly the way it was back then, but they also note the tremendous changes belowdecks and the modernization of all of the equipment.”

These changes include upgrades to modern Coast Guard standards, especially to the messing and berthing areas, engineering spaces and damage control equipment.

As Eagle transits the North Atlantic, the crew is preparing themselves, and their ship, for the busy summer months ahead. These preparations include maintaining a high level of material condition, the training mission of the cadets, and a public relations mission that comes with an estimated 75,000 visitors to the ship each year.

“We are taking advantage of the good weather we’ve got right now to take care of topside maintenance, such as preserving the wood and painting,” Sinnett said. “Eagle is 73 years old and she is in fantastic shape, largely because the Coast Guard has made the commitment to maintain her properly and because of all of the hard work the permanent crew does.

“We are also doing a lot of training, from sail training to small boat coxswain, damage control, and man overboard drills. Even though we are a training vessel for cadets and have a public relations mission, we have to meet all the same shipboard training regulations and requirements as the law enforcement cutters. We are getting all of our new sailors trained and up to speed so that when our cadets come aboard in Spain, we are ready to hit the deckplate running.”

Although elderly by Coast Guard cutter standards, Eagle is showing no signs of slowing down, and Sinnett believes that she will be around for many years after he debarks her bow for the last time this summer.

“She is in excellent shape, she was very well built when originally constructed and we’rre doing a good job of taking care of her,” he noted. “Like any ship, there are always things we need to put into our maintenance cycle to keep up with, but with the current maintenance and sustainability plan, this ship will run forever. From a financial perspective we are getting the best return for every dollar invested, because we are doing regular-level planned maintenance, not repairs to catastrophic failures that are highly expensive on short notice.

"Eagle is going to be around as long as we keep her around.”