USCGC Bailey Barco (WPC-1122) is the United States Coast Guard's 22nd cutter, and the second to be stationed in Alaska, where she was homeported at Coast Guard Base Ketchikan.
The vessel's manufacturer, Bollinger Shipyards, of Lockport, Louisiana, delivered the ship to the Coast Guard on February 7, 2017, for her acceptance trials. After completion sea trials, USCGC Bailey Barco was commissioned on June 14, 2017 in Juneau, Alaska.
Mission
The Sentinel-class cutters are lightly armed patrol vessels with a crew of approximately two dozen sailors, capable of traveling almost 3,000 nautical miles, on five day missions. The cutter is a multi-mission vessel intended to perform law enforcement, search and rescue, fisheries and environmental protection, and homeland security tasks.
Namesake Bailey T. Barco was the station keeper of the Dam Neck Mills Life-Saving Station of the United States Lifesaving Service, which later merged with the Revenue Cutter Service to form the U.S. Coast Guard. Barco earned a Gold Lifesaving Medal for managing the daring rescue of the crew of the sailing schooner Jennie Hall, which ran aground during a severe winter storm off Virginia Beach in 1901.
In 2010, Charles "Skip" W. Bowen, who was then the United States Coast Guard's most senior non-commissioned officer, proposed that all cutters in the Sentinel class should be named after enlisted sailors in the Coast Guard, or one of its precursor services, who were recognized for their heroism. In 2014 the Coast Guard announced that Bailey Barco would be the namesake of the 22nd cutter.
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