After my longtime buddy BMCM Paul Debold's retirement ceremony at the Gator Den, we discovered this old beauty (lots of beer makes things beautiful). The cutter's captain is CDR Ed Pino (Captain selectee) and he and I used to work together at Miami International Airport in the late 70's and early 80's. After Ed obtained his bachelor's degree from Barry University in the early 80's, I suggested to him that he apply for Coast Guard OCS, and hopefully be selected for flight school after that, because the airlines weren't hiring a lot of pilots at the time. He applied, was selected for OCS and graduated but didn't get flight school due to a minor vision imperfection and I thought he would kill me after being assigned to a 210' cutter out of Miami Beach. However, he has evidently enjoyed flying these cutters all these years all over the Caribbean, Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific.

The USCGC GENTIAN was decommissioned at 1800 on June 23, 2006, at Causeway Island, Miami Beach and is now sitting at the Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay, Maryland at the time of this writing (2006).