Great Lakes Coast Guard chief is Ohio native

July 26, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

CLEVELAND (AP) — Coast Guard admiral Peter Neffenger was expecting to finish an adventurous sailing career at a desk in Washington, D.C.

Then his superiors informed the Northeast Ohio native he’d won a post he long thought was out of reach: top Coast Guard official overseeing the Great Lakes.

Neffenger, 53, who grew up near Elyria, has been named commander of the Cleveland-based Ninth Coast Guard District.

Neffenger leads a far-flung corps known as the Guardians of the Great Lakes watching over the nation’s biggest community of boaters.

His responsibility includes the five Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway, encompassing 6,700 miles of shoreline and 1,500 miles of international border.

His command stretches from the locks at Massena, N.Y., to the boundary waters of Minnesota.

“It’s a wonderful way to come back because I get to see all of the Great Lakes now. I get to see the Great Lakes I never knew as a child,” Neffenger said.

The future admiral swam off a Lake Erie beach and learned to sail out of a Lorain marina. But he credits books for inspiring him to think about the ocean, including Rudyard Kipling’s “Captains Courageous” and Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander.”

“I read everything,” Neffenger said. “I had this romantic vision of going to sea.”

He started his Coast Guard career aboard the cutter Gallatin enforcing maritime and fishing laws on the North Atlantic. By day, he boarded swordfish boats. At night, he stood on deck and stared at a moonlit sea.

His cutter also intercepted Haitian refugees sailing for Florida, plucking people from “horribly unsafe boats” and taking them back to Haiti.

For four years, Neffenger was the Coast Guard’s lone representative to American Samoa, designing the island’s first search-and-rescue corps.

He also commanded the ports of San Francisco and Los Angeles before being called back to Washington in 2006 to design the Coast Guard’s $9 billion budget. It’s where he thought his career might conclude before getting the word about his new job.

His Great Lakes corps of nearly 8,000 men and women staff more boat stations, 47, than any other Coast Guard district. They watch over nearly 5 million registered boaters.

They also inspect ships, set buoys, tend lighthouses, break ice, arrest smugglers, clean oil spills, pull drunk boaters off the breakwall and search for missing fishermen.