So there we were, sitting around the Barnes & Noble fireplace on Tuesday, February 9 at 6 p.m., and our guest speaker had bailed on us. An officer with the United States Coast Guard, he had come up with what we had to admit was an original excuse: He'd been reassigned to Juneau.
Here, serendipity occurred.
Lieutenant Commander Greg Omernik, also of the Coast Guard, stationed in Kodiak and in Anchorage for a medical appointment, overheard us bemoaning our speakerless state and stepped forward to volunteer his services. He taped up a map of the Bahamas and another of the Caribbean and he was off, speaking extemporaneously for forty-five minutes of his previous duty stations in Clearwater, Florida and Traverse City, Michigan, and of the fun and frolics the Coast Guard indulges in our own back yard, the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea.
The Coast Guard is not well liked in the Caribbean, he admits cheerfully, since it has been instrumental in lowering the success rate of smugglers flying drugs in from South America. A pilot, he flew helicopters with a four-man crew, plus one DEA agent and two Royal Bahamian Defense Force guards. "The guards were armed; we weren't," Omernik says. "If we don't shoot at the smugglers, they won't shoot back. We had shotguns in case we had to put down and needed to guard the aircraft, but that was it."
He remembers intercepting one smuggler who had sixteen hundred pounds of cocaine on board. "You figure it out," he says. "One kilo, or two-point-two pounds, is worth $23,000, and that's pure, before it's been cut." This particular smuggler also had $30,000 in cash in his pocket and a cell phone. "The average drug smuggler flying an old Queenair twin [the door opens in on a Queenair, the better to drop drugs out] and equipped with a handheld GPS averages about $250,000 profit per trip."
Omernik says the Coast Guard managed a thirty percent interception rate, and it has been enough to force the drug trade to begin moving drugs up through the Yucatan instead of directly across the Caribbean. "It's not like the mid-eighties," he said, "when everyone in the Caribbean was wearing fourteen carat gold everything including the wheels on their tires. No, they're not happy with us."

Sometimes his crew was late on the scene, after the drugs had been dropped into the water and fished out by a waiting boat. In that case, his crew might drop a big chunk of ice out of the helicopter, holing and if not actually sinking the boat, then at least slowing it down enough to be caught. By that time the ice had melted, leaving no evidence, and his crew could scratch their heads and say, "Gee, I don't know why it sank."
Now Omernik flies for the Coast Guard's AlPat, or Alaska Patrol, enforcing the Convention Line. His crews launch when it looks like a foreign fishing vessel is crossing the two-hundred mile limit into American waters, and they are empowered to chase said vessel all the way back to home port, if necessary.
"We find them, we catch them and then we take their catch and their boat," he says. One of his crews chased a high seas drifter all the way back to Japan.
"Flying is only five percent of the job," Omernik says. "For every one hour of flight time, there are three hours of maintenance." The station deploys three H65 helicopters on three high endurance, aircraft deployable cutters, and the crews are at sea for forty to seventy days. When an aircraft lifts off the back of the cutter, it can remain in the air for 2.2 hours before refueling. The cutters cruise on diesel engines at four knots, and have gas turbines for pursuit that boost their speed to 35 knots. "Throws a wake twenty feet high," Omernik says. "It's something to see." The turbines are gas hogs, though, burning JP5, the same kind of gas his aircraft use, and operating them usually requires an immediate refueling stop in Dutch Harbor.
It routinely blows seventy to eight miles per hour in the north Pacific, and it can get a little hairy getting the helicopter back down on the cutter in heavy seas, especially at night, and Omernik won't even try it if the deck is icy. "The ship's crew gets out and chips off the ice first."
Omernik didn't say what would happen if his craft was low on fuel at the time, and we didn't ask.