Former Resident Wins U.S. Coast Guard Award

A Canadian man who lived in Bermuda for 10 years has been awarded the United States Coast Guard’s Meritorious Public Service Award for his more than 25 years of voluntary service in remotely aiding ships in trouble while traveling the high seas, including his help in seeing a yacht named the Barbara stranded 120 nautical miles northwest of Bermuda make its way safely to port.

According to a report in The Globe and Mail, Herb Hilgenberg, a “former financial executive and mechanical engineer, picked up the signal on the marine radio he had set up in the basement laundry room of his home in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.

“After alerting the authorities to the Barbara’s plight, he told the ship’s captain to create a makeshift rudder using any large object that would float, like a foam mattress or a wooden door. Then he kept round-the-clock communications with the vessel for more than two days until the Coast Guard could get it towed to port.

“For that and countless other rescues over 25 years of voluntarily providing weather information and sailing smarts to ships travelling the high seas, Mr. Hilgenberg was presented in December with the United States Coast Guard’s Meritorious Public Service Award. An American Coast Guard spokesman said it was the first time he remembers the award going to a Canadian.

“Mr. Hilgenberg’s specialty was weather prediction. Using data provided by the U.S. Navy, the National Weather Service and the conversations he had with people on board ships travelling the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and sometimes even the Mediterranean, he could figure out better than almost anyone where a storm was brewing and how to avoid it.

“In its citation, the Coast Guard says he “selflessly volunteered up to eight hours a day bridging the gap in offshore weather and communications.”

It also says his conversations with as many as 80 vessels a day “prevented 100 to 150 mariners per year from unknowingly sailing into dangerous storm conditions and avoided potential United States Coast Guard sorties during treacherous weather.”

Mr. Hilgenberg’s interest in aiding sailors in trouble stems from his own interest in traveling the high seas, with a long history of sailing behind him, including a situation with his family on board that nearly ended in disaster due to an unforecasted storm.

Mr. Hilgenberg has always loved sailing. His wife shares his passion, and in 1982, the family sailed their 39-footer from New York to the Virgin Islands and got caught in a late-season tropical storm.

“Whatever information we got when we left was good. But it was only good as far as near-shore forecasts were concerned, not 100, 200, 300 or 1,000 miles out. So we just ran into that storm,” said Mr. Hilgenberg. “We survived. Some of the boats that we left with did not survive.”

“A year later, he took a job as a chief financial officer in Bermuda where he and his family lived for the next decade.“And I began to realize that, my God, we were not the only idiots who had run into this kind of a situation. It was happening every day. And that’s when I said maybe I can do something about it.”

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