PORT ANGELES – A regular part of the Port Angeles harbor is saying “so long”.
Yesterday, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Cuttyhunk was decommissioned during a ceremony held at Air Station Port Angeles.
Cuttyhunk was one of the Coast Guard’s 37 remaining 110-foot Island-class patrol boats. The fleet of Island-class cutters is being replaced by 154-foot Sentinel-class cutters.
Commissioned in 1988, the Cuttyhunk was built in support of the Coast Guard’s maritime homeland security, migrant and drug interdiction, fisheries enforcement, and search and rescue missions. Cuttyhunk was named after Cuttyhunk Island, the site of the first English settlement in New England, located off the southern coast of Massachusetts.
Over the past 34 years of service, Cuttyhunk’s crews completed over 1,000 operations ranging from law enforcement boardings to search and rescue responses throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Nicknamed “The Pest of the West”, Cuttyhunk assisted in one of the largest maritime drug seizures in the Pacific Northwest, near Cape Flattery, Washington, in December of 1997. More than 3,500 pounds of marijuana, estimated at a street value of $15 million, was recovered from the OK Jedi, a 60-foot sailboat with three people onboard.
Cuttyhunk’s crew is scheduled to transit to Ketchikan, Alaska. There, the crew will spend several weeks preparing to bring Coast Guard Cutter Anacapa (WPB 1335) south to Port Angeles.