This article is from the winter 2024 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Virginia Kinnier | Photo by Courtney Mason
For Sam and Alyssa Fuller, our local waterways are more than just geography, entertainment, food source, or even beauty. As active duty members of the Coast Guard, the rivers, bays, and ocean that surround this area also serve as their office.
A born and bred Navy kid, Alyssa spent her childhood hopping from one coastal town to the next following her dad’s assignments and spending a lot of time on the water with her family aboard their sailboat. The familiar seaside landscape, whether it was in California or Virginia, led to an early interest in coastal ecosystems, from the water itself to tide pools, marshlands, ecology, conservation, oceanography, and more. In sixth grade, she announced to her class that she wanted to be a marine biologist, and years later in college at William and Mary she followed up this declaration by enrolling in every class she could that fed her coastal interests, eventually narrowing her focus down to marine biology and ecology.
“In a way I have always felt tied to life on the water,” Alyssa says. “It’s always been a part of who I am.”
Much like her ties to the water, Alyssa has also always felt a strong pull toward service in the military. “When I was in high school, my dad encouraged me to look into the Coast Guard because he felt it would be a good fit for me given my interests,” Alyssa recalls. “In college I spoke with Coast Guard recruiters and knew I wanted to circle back to military service at some point. After college I took a job in North Carolina at a marine lab as a marine scientist. I was able to work in the field and get my hands dirty, collecting water samples, participating in oyster reef restoration, etc. It was awesome and a perfect first job for me.”
Despite a great start to her dream career, the Coast Guard kept calling, and while she was working at the marine lab, she answered the call and officially enlisted. Her first job did give her one parting gift before she left: her husband, Sam.
Sam took a more unpredictable route to the Coast Guard, with zero family members in the military and a childhood spent inland in North Carolina. However, he did spend a lot of time in the water — the water just happened to be a swimming pool where he was a competitive swimmer for years.
Sam carried his swimming skills with him to college where he attended North Carolina State University in Raleigh and swam for the NC State swim team. Outside of the pool, he studied civil engineering but decided early on that he didn’t want to continue down that career path. After graduation he moved to the beach, working odd jobs, which is how he met Alyssa, when he landed a job as a tech at the same marine lab at UNC Chapel Hill where she was working as a marine scientist. Sam’s introduction to Alyssa was also his first introduction to the Coast Guard.
“Growing up in North Carolina, I didn’t even know what the Coast Guard was,” Sam laughs. “I think I thought it was the National Guard for the Navy. But Alyssa talked about enlisting in the Coast Guard a lot, and with my history as a competitive swimmer, it sounded appealing.”
At the time, Sam was also the head coach of a local swim team, growing the team from a mere 20 members to over 200 swimmers by the time he and Alyssa were newly engaged and he began to consider a career change. “ What I loved most about coaching swimming was watching the kids grow, not just physically as swimmers, but personally as confident individuals. While it was hard to walk away from everything I had built and accomplished in the swimming world as a coach, I knew it wasn’t sustainable if I was going to be relocating every four years with Alyssa’s new Coast Guard assignments.”
After enlisting, Alyssa’s first assignment brought her to Portsmouth, Virginia. While there she applied for officer candidate school, and although she was not accepted the first time, she was later accepted, graduated from the program, and accepted a sector job in Virginia.
With a bird’s eye view into the Coast Guard, Sam decided to join his wife and enlist. His first assignment was also in Virginia at a Small Boat Station in Virginia Beach. From there he decided to put his swimming background to use again and went to Rescue Swimmer school in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where he was also stationed after he completed training.
Different assignments in different cities meant Sam and Alyssa spent the early years of their marriage apart. When Alyssa left for flight training school in Pensacola, they spent two more years apart until Sam was able to join her at her next assignment in Clearwater, Florida, where they both served as flight crews on Search and Rescue missions and counter-drug deployments in the Bahamas. There they would stand 24-hour Search and Rescue shifts as part of the Air Station’s ready crews, responding to distress cases throughout Florida and the Bahamas. During that time, Alyssa also completed a 12-week initial pilot training for the MH60T Jayhawk helicopter here in Mobile, returning once a year for a week for additional training, so when she was transferred to Mobile last summer to join the training unit here, she was already familiar with the area. Thankfully Sam was able to transfer to Mobile, too, where they live now with their two daughters as they fulfill their Coast Guard duties.
“Mobile is full of really kind people,” Alyssa says. “We are truly enjoying our time here as a family.”
In Mobile Alyssa and Sam are both members of the flight crew aboard the MH60T helicopters, the larger, orange and white helicopters that can be spotted in the skies around town. Out of precaution for their families, the Coast Guard does not allow them to fly together, so they each separately support pilot training at Air Traffic Control. Alyssa serves as the helicopter pilot, while Sam is the Rescue Swimmer seen deploying from the helicopter during water rescues. When not flying rescue missions, Alyssa’s primary responsibility is to train the new pilots at the aviation training center and teach them how to operate the helicopters, simulators, flight events, and audits of other crews, and Sam’s job is also to help train new pilots and participate in Rescue Swimmer deployment trainings.
“It’s a really cool job working with awesome people,” Alyssa says. “In the military your coworkers come from a lot of different backgrounds, not necessarily all from military backgrounds or families. But most people tend to love the outdoors and are adventure seekers. As a couple, we are nonconventional in our career paths, but it’s been a really cool adventure. I always laugh that it’s the best kept secret that I hope more people find out about.”
At its biggest, the Coast Guard is around 42,000 members deep, which is not that many when compared to other military branches, naturally making it a tight-knit community. And in Mobile in particular, the Coast Guard is well integrated into an already existing, tight-knit coastal community.
“The Coast Guard in this area is super operational from Mobile Bay to Pensacola, so it’s pretty heavy with Coast Guard members at various Small Boat Stations who have a great partnership with the community and who are tied to the water already, as fishermen, boaters, etc.,” Alyssa explains. “The Coast Guard mission includes ‘environmental stewardship’ so it is deeply connected to the water and the environment and the success of both. The water itself adds another factor, another layer, to the circumstances surrounding each mission and ultimately the outcome that follows.”
While water quality is outside of their control, the Coast Guard often partners with local agencies to conduct overflights of affected waterways. As the primary maritime search and rescue branch of the military, the Coast Guard is responsible for eliminating safety hazards with any natural occurrences that pose risks to the community, the most common being storms.
In October Alyssa was called upon to assist with relief efforts following Hurricane Milton in Florida and immediately jumped at the opportunity to help her former neighbors and Coast Guard station.
“We immediately pivoted into our roles as first responders and search and rescue duty standers alongside the Air Station Clearwater crews that had evacuated here for the storm,” Alyssa recalls. “There were winds of 20-30 knots and overcast skies as we flew down Clearwater Beach for our initial assessment. We were tasked with flying the area to check damage, search for signs of distress, and note initial impacts. Fortunately since the floodwaters had receded from the Bay, we could see bridges and passable roads from St. Pete down to Sarasota. We flew around inlets, beaches, and canals and took images to pass to the control center of piles of debris left over from Hurricane Helene, and washed out roads, beaches, and docks, as well as many submerged vessels dispersed throughout the Intracoastal Waterway and channels. We then assessed various airfields and area infrastructures but were released from tasking once it was determined that helicopter assets weren’t needed. We flew home to Mobile, passing Army National Guard crews that were heading down to help. It was about 7.5 hours in flight time and a 12-hour crew day. While we didn’t need to hoist or evacuate anyone, it was a great team effort to come together and be ready to respond. We love being able to help our community, and I was grateful for the chance to support a unit and town we were once stationed at.”
This constant readiness built by life in the Coast Guard brings with it a daily sense of purpose that Sam and Alyssa both find great pride in.
“From the first day out of boot camp, you are flying missions,” Sam says. “That is one cool thing about the Coast Guard versus other branches of the military. All of the training you did immediately gets put into action. While no one wants war time, most branches are training for that time, whereas in the Coast Guard, you’re training for every single day of duty. In the Coast Guard, we operate what we train and do our missions on a daily basis. I feel very blessed to be a part of it.”
