The city of Mobile is celebrating its tri-centennial this year. Mobile is the second oldest city in the US, the first being St Augustine, Florida. One of the highlights of this celebration took place on July 4th. It was the Sailing of the Tall Ships into the Port of Mobile at the Convention Center from Ft Morgan, some 27 nautical miles down the Mobile Ship Channel where the Gulf of Mexico begins. The Auxiliary assisted the US Coast Guard in this Parade by supplying members and boats to help with spectator control during the transit of a dozen or so tall ships from Ft Morgan to the Convention Center. Our particular boat, which belonged to Phil Orton, was a 20 footer and was tasked with carrying two US Coast Guard boarding officers and leading the Parade from Ft Morgan to the entrance to the Port, a distance of about 22 nautical miles. The boarding officers acted as security and were prepared to board any boat they thought might present a danger to the ships in the parade. Fortunately, none of the spectators in their boats gave cause for boarding and most of our work ended up by giving warnings and wave-offs from time to time to some boats that appeared to be approaching too close to the ships. Here are some of the pictures taken during this parade.
This is the lead ship in the parade, the US Coast Guard training ship Eagle. It is 295 feet long and displaces over 1800 tons. It has a permanent crew of 6 officers and 29 enlisted personnel and provides training for up to 150 cadets or officer candidates at a time. There was virtually no wind this day and most of the ships did not deploy their sails during the parade.
Here are the two boarding offices that accompanied us.
Petty Officer Ault Petty Officer Peterson
This is the ship Gloria from Columbia that was part of the parade.
This is another one of the larger ships in the parade. Pretty impressive with some of the sails up.
This is a picture of the Mobile Bay Light, a structure some 54 feet tall marking the Mobile Ship Channel about mid way between the entrance at the Gulf and the Port of Mobile. You can see some of the thousands of spectator boats on the side of the channel. The spectator boats lined the channel in this fashion the whole length of the channel.
Bradley Thaxton, an auxiliarist from the Birmingham area, uses his PWC to patrol the channel near the Port entrance to keep spectator boats out of the channel during the parade.
This photo shows our boat, the Trophy, as it
nears completion of its task of escorting the Eagle to Channel Marker 72. This
photo was taken by Bob Burton as his boat passed by.
One of the cornerstones of the Auxiliary organization is Fellowship and so on Friday, we celebrated our successful accomplishments as a group with a picnic at the Fairhope Yacht Club. Here are a couple of pictures taken at this event.
Senior Chief Muise, Commander of the Station at Dauphine Island, chats with members during the picnic.
One of the senior officers of the US Coast Guard ship Eagle, discusses yesterday's parade with Phil Orton. The senior officer joined us at our picnic and expressed his ship's appreciation of the help that the auxiliarists contributed to make the parade a safe event.