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05/20/2019 12:00 AMAccording to Westbrook First Selectman Noel Bishop, geography is destiny. The town, he said, has a “symbiotic relationship with Long Island Sound,” which is why the town’s brand-new patrol boat is a big deal. The boat, which cost just under $200,000, was christened earlier this month at Pilot’s Point, with Bishop’s wife, Kit Bishop, breaking the ceremonial bottle of champagne against its hull.
Getting the new boat was “about a five-year process,” said Dave Russell, de facto head marine patrol officer.
“We knew that the old boat was coming near the end of its usefulness,” he said.
The older 22-foot boat, which was purchased in 1987, will eventually be sold by the town.
“We researched what other law enforcement agencies were using and we decided that the boat that we ultimately ended up purchasing met our needs,” Russell said, noting that the 27-foot Boston Whaler model purchased “has been used by many agencies worldwide and is a common boat in marinas. It’s a heavy-duty commercial boat, much heavier than a recreational boat...It’s a rugged piece of equipment.”
Marine patrol officers conduct inspections of leisure boats to ensure that they’re properly equipped, Russell explained. That entails bringing the patrol boat right up alongside the boat they’re about to inspect in order to check papers and safety equipment.
The boat also has “360-degree walk-around capability,” Russell said, allowing those on board to walk around the entire pilot house. “We are protected and can lean against the gunwale to keep us safe.”
The boat was taken out for its first shift the following Saturday, Russell said.
“Wayne Buck, our resident trooper, and myself worked. [The new boat] was very, very comfortable. It’s nice this time of the year,” he reported. “Having the pilot house, you have protection from the colder weather. It will allow us to go out in much rougher weather if we have to.”
As it was early in the season and still a bit chilly, there weren’t many boaters on the water during that first shift. It was uneventful, in the best possible sense of the word.
“The weather has been terrible as far as anybody boating—cold and rainy,” Russell said. “Boating is pretty much a fair-weather sport. If the warm temperatures aren’t there, people don’t go out.”
Westbrook, with around 2,500 boats in its harbor, “is one of the largest recreational boating harbors in the state,” Russell continued. “We have fairly large boats here on a regular basis. It’s not uncommon to have 100-footers in our harbors.”
Because it’s a small town, he pointed out, many people don’t realize that it’s a recreational boating destination and hub.
Russell and the two other marine patrol officers, Mike Morris and Tom Smith, work three to four days a week during the boating season, depending on wind and weather conditions.
“Our normal patrol area is roughly the Kelsey Point breakwater in Clinton [in the west] over to the Old Saybrook boundary on the east side and the Long Island sand shoal—a big sand bar about one-third of the way out in the Sound—to the south. If there’s a need, we go to help other towns, just like they come to help us,” Russell said.
Lt. Alaina Fagan of the Coast Guard’s Long Island Sound Sector attended the christening and said a few words about its collaboration with Westbrook’s marine patrol.
The Coast Guard has “come to rely even more on local town police and fire units, especially when it comes to search and rescue because many times they are able to respond and arrive on scene before our vessels can,” she said.
“For instance,” she continued, “here in Westbrook, our closest unit would be coming from New London. That can make all the difference when it comes to a search and rescue case...We conduct a lot of joint search-and-rescue training so that we are operating on the same set of objectives and criteria when it comes to searching for distressed people on the water. We really value our partnerships with what we call other government agencies—fire and police.”