Sitting on the bookshelf behind me is a Pentax K1000. It’s a 35mm film camera that was made quite a long time ago. I bought the camera while in photography class back in high school. My dad took me to a camera swap meet where I paid a hefty $65 dollars for it and with an otherwise D average, I was proudly earning an A in photography. All of these years later and the camera is still working just fine. Where’s all these great photos you ask, well, I brought the camera with me to my first unit in the Coast Guard. I joined the Coast Guard for an adventure, as many kids my age had, but I had a passion for photography and a genuine desire to capture the next four years. I quickly earned the reputation on the ship for being the guy always taking pictures. Looking at this camera now I can recall so many times I was told to put it away. So many eye rolls and the all too often “Not now” as it was heard through the passageways of the USCGC Mobile Bay. A 140’ tug boat built for breaking ice on the Great Lakes. It also had a barge with a large crane used for pulling buoys out of the water every fall and replacing them with much smaller buoys that could handle the harsh environment of a frozen Lake Michigan, 173 in total. I began documenting every aspect of life aboard the ship.
There was so many incredible moments that unfolded on that ship that I’m grateful that I had that camera in my hand. Like the time I smuggled it on a CG helicopter by stuffing it in my drysuit where I was able to photograph the entire training day from the back seat. Reaching out over the airman as he hoisted the basket from the water and hanging it from the ceiling of the helo while it was my turn to get in the water. On another occasion I would document several crew members chainsawing out a 20ft square in the ice, several feet thick, and then as the tug boat, tied to it, would pull it out of the water. The entire ice shelf shook violently as it lifted out of the water and slid away scaring the shit out of us as we stood on the ice, mere feet away. The ice block weighed over 5000 lbs by a later estimate. We went swimming in the fridged waters and called it “training”. When an icebreaker stops in the ice the water freezes so fast that it's immediately safe to lower a ladder and walk out on the ice. Of course with the serious events also came the less serious, like, the time we went clay shooting off the stern smack in the center of Lake Michigan and then jumped off the 03 deck (the highest point on the ship) into the water as a morale outing. Once I snuck out on the bridge wing to get a shot of the captain while we passed beneath the famous Mackinac Bridge. I, to this day, believe he knew what I was doing and waited until the shutter snapped to yell at me thus satisfying the Executive officer (the bad cop in all situations). The Coast Guard used one of my photos in a training aid, it was of a lone seat cushion floating in still waters far from land. The fishing boat it belonged to was never found despite our surface search radar and a week of an expanding circle search pattern. The ships radar could locate a toilet paper tube 3 miles away and that was all that was found. I was shooting a roll of film a week for two straight years on that ship.
My photo collection along with all my negatives were lost when my second duty station, Small Boat Station Oak Island, burned down. I walked away from photography for almost 5 years after that. There were so many opportunities for me to mail home or drop off the negatives, or copies of everything, but I didn’t.
