Coast Guard Station Montauk will soon be without its 87-foot cutter, Bonito, East Hampton Town Councilman David Lys said at the town board’s Dec. 19 meeting, leaving only smaller, 47-foot vessels based at the station.
The reason, according to Ensign Hunter Medley, a spokesman for Coast Guard Sector Long Island Sound, is a personnel shortage. The Bonito will go to a Coast Guard yard in Baltimore, he told The Star the next day, and its crew will transfer to Highlands, N.J., to replace another cutter’s crew. The Bonito will not be taken out of service permanently, he said, but rather temporarily, “pending us getting more personnel.”
The Coast Guard commandant “came out with a force alignment initiative for 2024 to address our shortfalls in personnel,” Ensign Medley said. He added that “for Sector Long Island Sound, there is always a search-and-rescue cutter. With this change, with the Bonito leaving, there will really not be any sort of lapse in our search-and-rescue standard.” Everything will be done in the same “timely manner, per policy.”
The town board was less sanguine last week. “I personally believe this decreases the readiness and response time for the town’s maritime fishing fleet and fishing industry,” Mr. Lys said. “I will advocate, and look for the town board to continue to advocate, [for] our federal elected officials and the Coast Guard to maintain the readiness of having a Coast Guard cutter at Coast Guard Station Montauk. With the implementation, now, of offshore wind, I think it’s very important to provide the safety needs that are out there for our fishing fleets and our mariners, and people that just traverse here, as far as bringing goods from the north, from the south, from Europe.”
The Bonito is not just leaving East Hampton Town, “it’s leaving the region,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “And to think that, given the maritime commerce and travel and whatnot, we could actually be cutting back such a crucial asset at this point is kind of hard to fathom. I know that it all comes back to recruitment . . . they’re suffering from not having enough people coming up through the ranks to staff and maintain the presence that they’ve had, so they’re shifting things around and moving personnel.”
The town is best positioned to reach many areas along the coast, Mr. Van Scoyoc said. “A cutter is an asset that can go out in the heaviest of weather and respond when needed, where those 47-footers just don’t have the range or the ability to do so. That’s something that we should all be very concerned about.”
