Backstory: Moving the Montauk Coast Guard Station at Sea

The Montauk Coast Guard Station, a big four-square three-story clapboard building, sits on the shore of Star Island facing out to the boats in Montauk Harbor.

It hasn’t always been there, however. Originally, 100 years ago, it was built 10 miles from Star Island, on the ocean beach at Napeague halfway between Montauk and Amagansett.

In 1955, a young sailor named Carl Darenberg came back from the war eager to start his career back home. His dad owned a marina in Montauk.

Word around town was that the Coast Guard wanted to move the Napeague Coast Guard Station to Star Island in Montauk. They were accepting bids.

The winning bidder would jack up the station, slide a wooden platform with truck wheels under it and have a truck tow it east along the Montauk Highway through town, then head out to the Star Island Causeway to set it on its new spot. Buildings got moved around all the time back then.

Young Carl talked to some of the contractors bidding on this project, but then thought of a completely different way to do the job at half the price. He won the bid.

To do it, Carl told his dad, he’d need to borrow his dad’s fishing boat for a day. Dad thought the method absolutely nuts, but said he’d lend him the boat.

Carl and a mate boarded the fishing boat at 5 a.m. in the morning and motored it 10 miles not to the Coast Guard Station on the ocean, but to the Napeague Bay beach just north of the station a few hundred yards away. Tying up there, they walked across the Montauk Highway to the building to be moved.

The day before, Carl and some men he’d hired had slid a heavy wooden platform with wheels under the Coast Guard Station, then attached this rig to the back of a truck with a rope.

As dawn was breaking, Carl and his mate drove this rig north across the highway to the bay beach, boarded their boat, started it up and then, with the rope attached to the rig, pulled it into the bay. The Montauk Coast Guard Station, now floating behind the fishing boat, thus began its journey through the bay toward the Montauk jetties 10 miles away.

As Carl remembered it, everything went well for the first nine miles. But then a sudden wind sprang up. And the Coast Guard Station, pushed by the wind, began catching up with the boat. The rope went slack. Carl sped up, but the rope went slack again.

“It was a terrifying moment,” Carl would say when he told this story later.

The boat went as fast as it could go. But still the rig was catching up. The turn into the jetty and safety was still a half mile away. And they weren’t going to make it.

“The platform was going to pass us and drag us out to sea. We could cut the rope to get ourselves loose. But the Coast Guard Station would continue on.”

But desperation can sometimes lead to invention. And Carl thought up a plan.

Carl cut the speed of the engine, handed the wheel over to his mate, and told him to wait until the platform was alongside, then lash the boat tight to it. Carl then went to the gunnel and crouched down.

The mate, nearly hysterical, nevertheless did what he was told. And a moment after the boat and platform banged together, Carl leaped across to the platform, ran inside the building and began, one after another, to open the windows. He got them open on the first floor, then the second, then the third, and with that, just 100 yards before they’d have passed the jetty, with the wind howling harmlessly through the open windows, this strange concoction slowed down, made the turn, and then proceeded through the jetties to tie up at the docks at Star Island.

A perfect landing. And that’s the backstory of how the Napeague Coast Guard Station came to Montauk.

Have a East End real estate story? Want to share? Text us at 516-527-3566. We’ll call you back, and then write it up for this weekly column. –Dan