Thursday, November 12, 2026
By Brian Soergel
For George Rohwer, a day at the office might mean managing the logistics, purchasing, financial accounting, and inventory aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter.
But on a buoy tender with a crew of only about 20 to 25 people, job descriptions have a way of expanding. Especially when Rohwer is underway on the Coast Guard Cutter Henry Blake, a 175-foot buoy tender based at Naval Station Everett.
It might mean standing on the deck, helping haul a navigation buoy – along with its chain and heavy anchor – out of the waters of the Salish Sea.
“Just because I’m basically an accountant-slash supply chain guy, it doesn’t mean I won’t also do some of the labor,” the petty officer second-class (SK2) storekeeper said. “There’s not enough hands to specialize that much.”
Variety is part of life aboard a Coast Guard cutter. That can put Rohwer in two very different workplaces: an office aboard the cutter by the bridge or the buoy deck, where he is qualified to work as a rigger and operate the ship’s crane. He also stands watch on the bridge while the cutter is underway.
The Henry Blake, named after a 19th-century lighthouse keeper (not the “M*A*S*H” character), is an aids-to-navigation cutter. Its primary area of responsibility includes the Salish Sea – encompassing Puget Sound, Grays Harbor, and the San Juan Islands – where its crew maintains the buoys and other navigation aids mariners use to safely move through Northwest waters.
Think of a network of road signs for the water. Buoys and other aids identify channels, hazards, and safe routes. Without them, Rohwer explained, vessels could stray into shallow water and run aground. And unlike a highway sign planted beside a road, a buoy spends its life being battered by salt water, weather, and currents.
The Henry Blake maintains 110 lighted and 48 unlighted buoys, as well as 65 shore aids to navigation. It also performs other Coast Guard missions, including search and rescue, maritime law enforcement, and marine environmental protection.
“Someone has to maintain those buoys and those aids, or they’re eventually just going to weather,” Rohwer said. The job is to keep them from drifting off station and to make sure their lights and other components continue working.
On any given day underway, when the Henry Blake works a buoy, its crew can bring it aboard into a saddle on the buoy deck. Crew members haul up the chain and sinker that hold it in position and inspect the equipment, including shackles and chain, for wear or damage.
The goal is simple but important: Make sure the aid stays where mariners expect to find it.
Rohwer sees a direct connection between that work and the Puget Sound region’s maritime economy. Commercial ships depend on a reliable system of navigation aids to safely enter and leave the area’s ports.
The cutter also has sophisticated equipment to support the work. Rohwer described a dynamic-positioning system that can hold the Henry Blake at a designated location while the crew works a buoy, allowing an aid to be positioned with remarkable precision.
One storekeeper, many jobsRohwer, 32, is on what the Coast Guard calls “independent duty,” meaning he is the only storekeeper assigned to the cutter.
In port, much of his day can resemble a civilian logistics or financial-management job. He handles procurement, supplies and services, budget execution, property and inventory management, and other logistical needs for the cutter. He is also the only person aboard with certain certifications and purchasing authority needed for some of that work.
Rohwer said managing the cutter’s entire budget is more responsibility than someone of his rank might ordinarily have at a larger unit. His next assignment could put him into a more specialized position involving procurement, property, or contracting. On the Henry Blake, however, he gets to do a little of everything.
When the cutter gets underway, the job changes.
Rohwer can work on the bridge, recording information about navigation aids as they are serviced. He can operate the crane. As a rigger, he can join the crew on the buoy deck, handling the heavy equipment used to bring buoys aboard.
It is one reason there isn’t really a “typical” day.
The cutter normally gets underway once or twice a month, often for about five days at a time. Its regular territory is Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, although the cutter can travel much farther when necessary.
Rohwer and the crew recently headed north toward Juneau, Alaska, for an annual buoy-tender gathering involving crews from Coast Guard districts in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The event includes competitions built around the specialized skills buoy-tender crews use, including crane operation, line throwing, and handling chain and shackles.
When the Henry Blake is underway, it’s not just Rohwer’s workplace. It’s home.
He sleeps in a five-person berthing area with other second-class petty officers. Living arrangements aboard become somewhat more private with rank, he said, with senior personnel and the cutter’s command having smaller berthing areas or their own staterooms.
Meals are prepared aboard. On a normal day, breakfast might include eggs cooked to order, pancakes, bacon, or sausage. The coffee maker gets plenty of use.
And when the workday allows some downtime, sailors find familiar ways to relax. A Nintendo Switch is aboard, and it’s plenty popular. The crew watches movies, and Rohwer brought along a collection of Jack London stories and novels for the trip, including “The Sea-Wolf,” “The Call of the Wild,” and “White Fang.”
Technology has also made underway life considerably less isolated. Rohwer said the cutter now has Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite network. Before it was installed, getting underway meant losing internet access. Now the connection aboard can be better than his cellphone.
Still, some of Rohwer’s favorite moments at sea have little to do with technology. He remembers traveling beneath a dark sky with virtually no light pollution and looking at the stars through night-vision goggles.
“You can see all the stars. You can see everything.” On another trip, while heading to Portland for Fleet Week, dolphins appeared alongside the cutter. On another, Rohwer gazed in wonder at the northern lights.
Daily life changes considerably when the Henry Blake returns to Everett. Rohwer lives in Renton with his wife, who has a civilian job. Most days in port, he reports to the cutter and works from his small office aboard, then heads home at the end of the day.
There are exceptions. Crew members stand 24-hour duty aboard the cutter, and Rohwer said he typically does that two or three times a month. Otherwise, his in-port schedule can feel surprisingly conventional – essentially an office workday followed by the commute home.
It is a long way, in some respects, from where his Coast Guard career began. The Gig Harbor native joined the service at 24 after attending Central Washington University, where he earned a degree in technical writing and once considered journalism.
He wanted to see more of the world than his home state, and the Coast Guard offered that opportunity. He initially secured an assignment to Alaska and later spent about four and a half years in New York.
Like many in the military, part of the Coast Guard’s appeal was experiencing new locations. “I wanted to get out of Washington state,” Rohwer said. “I’ve been here my whole life leading up to that, and I just wanted to see other places. That was kind of like 50% of it. The other 50% was that I just thought it was a cool experience. I liked the mission of the Coast Guard.”
Now, after roughly eight years in the service, he is back in Washington and plans to make the Coast Guard a 20-year career.
Storekeeper was a job he had considered even before joining. Finance, property management, and logistics interested him, and he recognized that supply-chain skills could translate to civilian employment someday. He found he liked the work even more than he expected. But the attraction goes beyond spreadsheets and purchasing.
Rohwer said he believes in the Coast Guard’s broader missions and particularly enjoys aids-to-navigation work. As a storekeeper, he also likes being in a support role – the person who can purchase what a unit needs and solve the logistical problems that allow everyone else to do their jobs.
A cutter the size of the Henry Blake makes teamwork unavoidable. Its crew ranges from young Coast Guardsmen just out of high school to senior members in their 40s. Rohwer falls somewhere in the middle. On a larger ship, sailors may be able to remain largely within their specialties. With only a couple dozen people aboard the Henry Blake, everyone has to carry more than one responsibility.
That makes the crew’s relationships important. Rohwer said the Henry Blake has a particularly good crew whose members generally enjoy working together. But liking one another, he said, isn’t really the essential part.
“They don’t have to like each other, but they do have to get along,” he said.
And aboard a small cutter, it quickly becomes apparent if somebody isn’t carrying his or her share of the work. “There’s a lot of teamwork that goes into it. Basically, a lot of people have to wear a lot of different hats.”
For Rohwer, those hats can include accountant, purchasing agent, inventory manager, bridge watchstander, crane operator and buoy-deck rigger — sometimes within the span of a single trip.
It’s a job that shifts between office and ocean, between a commute home to Renton and a bunk shared with shipmates, and between the routine work of balancing a budget and the heavy, physical work of maintaining the markers that guide vessels through Puget Sound.
Most mariners passing one of those buoys may never know who keeps it there.
For the crew of the Henry Blake, that’s the job.
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