Almost as much as I love Lake Superior, I love to find the special people living near it who also love and respect it. Then I like to introduce them to you.

Commander Bill Diehl at the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office in Duluth, Minnesota, is one of these special people.

Commander Diehl has been part of our community for almost three years, and - as is the way of the Coast Guard - will soon move to an assignment elsewhere. During his tenure here, Commander Diehl has proven himself to be a comfortable fit with our lake city. He doesn’t hide behind his rank and authority and has spent his years here building bridges.

A lively storyteller and personable commander, he has aroused a renewed interest in and an increasing respect for all the Coast Guardsmen who make our waterways safe.

As senior officer for western Lake Superior, Commander Diehl is responsible for the safety of shipping activities basically from Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula westward on Lake Superior. This mission includes ensuring that passenger boats operate safely and that the ships so vital for commerce and jobs deliver their cargo without incident. The Marine Safety Office does this by inspecting and working with the maritime community to reduce risk. Commander Diehl boils the mission down to this: “When we, as part of the maritime community, are successful, nothing happens - no oil spills, no ship collisions, no injuries to passengers, nothing to report on the nightly news. When maritime accidents do occur, we quickly respond to mitigate the impact, investigate the cause and improve our preventive efforts.”

What few see in the background is a team of skilled inspectors and pollution responders doing their best to ensure that things operate safely.

Commander Diehl has been many places during his Coast Guard career, including Washington, D.C. Assignment to Lake Superior has proven subtly different. “Corpus Christi, Texas,” he gives example, “was a big refinery port, a lot of ships coming and going. Then I moved up to Detroit, where I saw basically a lot of shipping going by, but nothing really stopping. On Lake Superior, I’ve got pristine water and I’ve got shipping that’s really stopping.”

People around Lake Superior, he was delighted to discover, are more particular about their water treasure. Here, the Coast Guard gets calls - and goes to check - if there is simply a “sheen” of oil-looking substance on the surface.

“If we have a sheen in Lake Superior, we react to that as much as if we had barrels of oil (in the water) in Texas,” he says. “It’s just a different tolerance that the people have here. I like that.”

I read in a recent article how Commander Diehl described the Coast Guard as a “3M” company. Not the 3M of “sticky notes” fame, he admits, but the “Maritime Military and Multimission” service that is today’s Coast Guard.

Something has changed dramatically for Commander Diehl and the Coast Guard since he first arrived on the lake. That something was the national tragedy of September 11, 2001.

As the smallest of the five branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, the Coast Guard isn’t one that I usually associate with a military mission. Yet, since September, I stand in awe of the Coast Guard and the military in general.

Many are aware of our lake region Air National Guard patrolling our airports and skies. An equally impressive effort is occurring in our ports and on our waterways by the Coast Guard. Since the attacks, the Coast Guard in all of the Great Lakes has added extra patrols, cancelled all leave and has boarded and gone through the crew and cargo lists of every foreign vessel.

“There’s a big concern over the ports in general,” Commander Diehl says. “Ninety to 95 percent of our foreign shipments go by ship. Take out 95 percent of our foreign exports; it’s a big crippling factor.”

The Coast Guard’s job now is to “get out there and to be seen” and to make any Great Lakes targets “harder to hit.”

About 150 Coast Guardsmen are stationed on western Lake Superior at Duluth, Portage Station in Hancock, Michigan, in Bayfield, Wisconsin, and seasonally in Grand Marais, Minnesota. They’ve instituted random, round-the-clock patrols. So have Coast Guardsmen to the east in Marquette and Sault Ste. Marie. What pride we can take in the Coast Guard.

With his term almost concluded, Commander Bill Diehl acknowledges that leaving the big lake will be difficult for his family and him. He musters a characteristic smile and adds, “I have the utmost confidence in the Coast Guard people stationed here; the commander may rotate but their mission of saving lives and protecting the environment will remain the same.”

Bon voyage, my friend, smooth sailing and come back soon.

A selection of Jim Marshall’s columns of lake lore and his inland sea voyages has been published as Lake Superior Journal: Views from the Bridge by Lake Superior Port Cities Inc. Follow this link for more information.

Feedback: jrm@lakesuperior.com