Cape Class Patrol Boat - History

History

The 95 foot patrol boat was originally developed as shallow draft ASW boat and as a replacement for the aging, World War II vintage, wooden 83 foot patrol boats that were used mostly for search and rescue duties. With the outbreak of the Korean War and the requirement tasked to the Coast Guard to secure and patrol port facilities in the United States under the Magnuson Act of 1950, the complete replacement of the 83 foot boat was deferred and the 95 foot boat was used for harbor patrols. The first 95 foot hulls were laid down at the Coast Guard Yard in 1952 and were officially described as "seagoing patrol cutters". Because Coast Guard policy did not provide for naming cutters under 100 feet at the time of their construction they were referred to by their hull number only and gained the "Cape-class" names in 1964 when the service changed the naming critera to 65 feet. The class was named for North American geographic capes.


The Cape class cutters were replaced by the 110-foot (34 m) Island class patrol boats beginning in the late 1980s and many of cutters were transferred to nations of the Caribbean and South America after they were decommissioned by the Coast Guard.

Read more about this topic:  Cape Class Patrol Boat

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

    In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.
    Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)