Fairfield High Grad Serves On Navy’s Oldest Warship: One of the first questions Navy Lt. Cmdr. Eric Coop was asked after he was assigned to the three-masted Navy frigate USS Constitution as its executive officer was whether he was afraid of heights. That was because the Solano County native was expected to be able to climb the Navy’s oldest warship’s rigging – all the way to near the top of its 220-foot main mast. “The first couple of times, it was not very comfortable,” Coop said of climbing the shaking rope rungs. But he soon got used to it and said that the view of Boston from the top of the mast was pretty good. Coop was also struck by a mild historic coincidence about the 226-year-old frigate that was built to protect a young America’s merchant fleet ravaged by the Barbary pirates, who made a lucrative living from attacking ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Oceans, and then holding the crews for ransom. “The Constitution spent time patrolling off North Africa to deal with pirates,” Coop said. “In 2009 and 2010, I was deployed to do basically that same mission off of Somalia.”
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 11:35:17 +0000
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