CLEARWATER -- Two miles off Bradenton Beach, Coast Guard flight mechanic Mike Anderson heaves "Rescue Randy" out the door of a helicopter. Soon, the 200-pound doll is floating off in the green-blue waves below.

Zellner pulld the rescue dummy onto a Jayhawk after being hoisted from the water. Zellner says he enjoys the free falls.

In a sleek black-and-red wet suit, 22-year-old rescue swimmer Mike Zellner poises himself at the door, legs dangling out. Anderson grips his life vest from behind. The pilots hover the roaring aircraft about 25 feet above the sea.

Anderson taps Zellner's shoulder three times. Then the swimmer is gone, free falling into water so deep he can't swim to the bottom. Anderson, 32, the life link between the swimmer and the pilots, watches Zellner carefully and speaks into a headset:

"Swimmer is in the water."

"Swimmer is okay."

Within moments, Zellner swims about 75 yards, grabs the drifting doll and attaches it to a harness. It's over in less than five minutes; and Zellner and Rescue Randy are back on board, safe and sound.

Even on a clear day during a training mission with calm waters, the men and women of Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater exhibit skill and courage. In a word, what they do is cool.

Way cool. But for the men and women who work at the Coast Guard's largest and busiest air station, training is not for show. It's essential preparation for the hundreds of missions they conduct throughout the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic every year.

Eric Kalita uses a heat lamp while performing maintenance on a Guard helicopter.

The pilots and swimmers launched from Clearwater are best known for their high-profile search-and-rescue missions that pluck stranded boaters or drowning swimmers from the sea, at times hundreds of miles from safety.

Search and rescue -- or SAR, as the crews call it -- is the reason many say they joined the Coast Guard. And it keeps them busy. As of Friday, the Air Station had conducted 532 search-and-rescue missions since Oct. 1. And much more goes on at Air Station Clearwater, from chasing drug smugglers through the Caribbean to cleaning up an oil spill in the Galapagos to rescuing hundreds of Haitian migrants marooned on a Bahamian island.

"We're not St. Petersburg's hometown air station," said Commander Paul Ratte, operations officer for the station. "We're sprinkled through the Caribbean on a typical day."

The air station's motto: "Anytime, Anywhere." It's a bit extra on the Coast Guard motto, "Semper Paradus," or "Always Ready."

Says helicopter pilot Brian Hopkins, "We're always ready -- anytime, anywhere."

Life on station

Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater opened in 1976 when the operation was moved from Albert Whitted Airport in St. Petersburg. The 41-acre base is tucked in the northwest side of St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport and has 600 personnel and 18 planes and helicopters.

It's home to more than 70 pilots and 500 enlisted personnel, many of whom perform continuous maintenance and inspections on the aircraft. Extreme temperatures and saltwater constantly threaten the station's 12 HH-60J Jayhawk helicopters and six HC-130H Hercules planes.

Elmer Gloner, a seaman with the Coast Guard, holds the flags that stand for unit awards at the Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater.

"Clearwater aircraft are probably beat up the worst in the Coast Guard because we deploy to the Caribbean," said pilot Joe Uzman, who is also a helicopter maintenance officer. "There's a lot of corrosion."

Coast Guard service members, who are under the wing of the U.S. Department of Transportation, give new meaning to term "multitasking." Every day, pilots double as public affairs officers. Some oversee maintenance on the aircraft. Other pilots organize special events for morale.

Rescue swimmers maintain and repair survival gear. These highly fit and typically gung-ho rescuers even know how to use sewing machines.

There are no civilian contractors working on aircraft, said Ratte, the operations officer.

"The people who work on the aircraft also crew the aircraft," Ratte said. "It's all tried and true."

The air station is much like a Department of Defense military base, with its barbershop, fitness center and lounge. The galley serves 200 meals, and issues 50 to 60 flight meals daily. Last year it was named the best galley in the Coast Guard by a team of inspectors that included local five-star chefs.

A cadre of 27 carpenters, plumbers, machine technicians,welders, masons and mechanics take care of the station's 26 buildings and its vehicle fleet. Every Wednesday, the carpenters report to a local Habitat for Humanity site to get on-the-job training as they help build houses.

The service members live in and around Tampa Bay, from Hillsborough to Pasco counties. No one "lives" at the station, except the day's ready crews, two teams of 11 that pull 24-hour duty and sleep in two barracks buildings.

When an emergency arises, the ready crew at the station launches within 30 minutes, around the clock, even on holidays.

"We're a firehouse," Ratte said. "It's a 24-hour watch. Our intent here is to provide a credible search and rescue response all the time. There's a crew ready on Christmas. There's a crew eating turkey on Thanksgiving."

All in a day's work

Although vital, it's not the collateral duties that get pilots and rescuers excited at Air Station Clearwater. It's what happens when the alarms sound -- when they are called on to save people.

"Best job in the Coast Guard. Nothing like it," said Zellner, the rescue swimmer. "We're the glory hounds."

"Sometimes you get so pumped up," said swimmer Chuck Ferrante, 23. "It's so much fun."

They tell stories that are stuff of nightly news clips.

Ferrante recently helped rescue a man on a freighter off Egmont Key who was crushed by a pipe. The newness of every day is part of the appeal, Ferrante said.

"We could have boats sinking or a fisherman with an arm mangled in a winch," Ferrante said. "You can be out flying, and all of a sudden you have an SAR case."

The other side of operations at Air Station Clearwater is law enforcement.

Two satellite stations in the Bahamas are operated and manned by Air Station Clearwater as part of Operation Bahamas Turks & Caicos, or OPBAT, which works closely with numerous governments in the Caribbean. Two crews of 16 each rotate on two-week tours to Nassau and Great Inagua, where they live in double-wide trailers and primarily conduct day and night air hunts for drug smugglers with the Drug Enforcement Administration and for migrants with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The helicopters chase drug smugglers making their way to Florida.

Helicopter pilot Nicole Brown videotaped one such mission launched from Great Inagua from 1998. A fast boat with three Jamaican drug smugglers can be seen racing through the water as the helicopter pursued it from above and two Coast Guard boats sped alongside it.

Eventually, the chase ended when the drug smugglers set fire to their boat in an attempt to destroy the drugs; and the smugglers jumped overboard.

"These things, they don't happen often; but when they do, it's so exciting," Brown said.

In between the training, rescues and tours to the Bahamas, Air Station Clearwater squeezes in some noteworthy extras. After Tropical Storm Allison this summer, the station sent a helicopter and two planes to Houston to search for injured and transport rescue crews.

They were called on in January to assist in an oil spill cleanup off the Galapagos Islands. And last summer, two crews were deployed aboard a C-130 plane to save a little boy who had been badly burned in Bolivia during drug-related violence and needed to get to Shriner's Hospital in Texas. The crews spent 29 hours in the air.

Last spring, Air Station Clearwater played a major role in evacuating nearly 300 Haitians who ran aground on Flamingo Cay in the Bahamas as they were trying to illegally enter the United States. The Haitians were found severely dehydrated and malnourished.

Master Chief Marvin Wells has spent 23 years in the Coast Guard, 10 of them at Air Station Clearwater. He is in his third tour here.

"My thing is, I love helping people," Wells said. "I like to feel I am making a difference. The feeling of locating someone out there in the water or on a raft is unbelievable."

- Times staff writer Deborah O'Neil can be reached at 445-4159 or at deborah@sptimes.com.

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