USCGC John McCormick

USCGC John McCormick (WPC-1121) is the United States Coast Guard's 21st Sentinel-class cutter cutter, and the first to be stationed in Alaska, where she is homeported at Coast Guard Base Ketchikan.

The vessel's manufacturer, Bollinger Shipyards, of Lockport, Louisiana, delivered the ship to the Coast Guard on December 13, 2016, for her acceptance trials, and then John McCormick was commissioned on April 12, 2017 in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Mission
The Sentinel-class cutters are lightly armed patrol vessels with a crew of approximately two dozen sailors, capable of traveling almost 3,000 nautical miles, on five day missions. The cutter is a multi-mission vessel intended to perform law enforcement, search and rescue, fisheries and environmental protection, and homeland security tasks. Houma Today quoted Ben Bordelon, Bollinger's CEO, that John McCormick will ""assist in defending our nation's interests in the Alaskan maritime region.""

Operational history
On March 12, 2017, John McCormick stopped in Astoria, Oregon, on its way to its commissioning in Ketchikan. The Coast Guard invited Astoria residents to tour the vessel. The Daily Astorian reported that the Coast Guard was considering stationing two Sentinel-class cutters in either Astoria or Newport, Oregon.

The vessel arrived in Ketchikan, Alaska on March 17, 2017. The Ketchikan fireboat and smaller Coast Guard vessels escorted her to her moorings. She was commissioned on April 12, 2017. Five other Sentinel-class cutters will be based in Alaska, including the USCGC Bailey T. Barco in Ketchikan.

Admiral Charles D. Michel, the Coast Guard's Vice Commandant, attended the vessel's commissioning ceremony on April 12, 2017. He published an op-ed in the Juneau Empire celebrating the improvements the cutter offered over earlier models. He explained how important the cutter, the five sister ships that will join her patrolling Alaska's water, will be for the Alaskan economy.

On September 23, 2020, the John McCormick proceeded to Hoonah, Alaska, on a rescue mission. Her crew rescued the crew of a fishing vessel that was stranded on rocks there, and were able to tow the vessel back to port.

Namesake
In 2010, Charles "Skip" W. Bowen, who was then the United States Coast Guard's most senior non-commissioned officer, proposed that all 58 cutters in the Sentinel class should be named after enlisted sailors in the Coast Guard, or one of its precursor services, who were recognized for their heroism. In 2014 the Coast Guard announced that John F. McCormick, a Coast Guard seaman who earned a Gold Lifesaving Medal for saving the life of fellow Coast Guard sailor, Richard O. Bracken, off Clatsop Spit, near the treacherous Columbia River bar, would be the namesake of the 21st cutter.

Accolades
The crew of John McCormick was awarded the 2017 "Hopley Yeaton Cutter Excellence Award (small cutter)" by the Douglas Munro Chapter of the Surface Navy Association. The award was presented on January 11, 2018 at the 2018 Surface Navy Association National Symposium in Washington, D.C. The "small cutter" category of the award includes those with a length of 175 feet or less; over 150 such cutters were considered for the 2017 award. The Hopley Yeaton Cutter Excellence Award recognizes crew performance in areas such as the crew's accomplishment of operations and of missions, their training and readiness, their engineering prowess, and their commitment to the crew and to their families.

The award citation noted the crew's high level of readiness and training, which allowed it to quickly deal with engineering and damage control problems which had appeared during McCormick's long voyage the previous year from Key West to her Ketchikan homeport. Also noted were the crew's immediate and effective integration into the Ketchikan community and into the Coast Guard's Alaskan operations: during 2017, McCormick's crew conducted 77 fisheries boardings and rescued or helped to rescue ten people and more than US$1 million in property.