Recruit training
- Honor Graduate: highest final overall standing in the recruit company.
- Highest overall academic average in the company.
Basic Training Honor Graduate Ribbon
The log.
Everything behind the first page, in order. The Coast Guard entries are drawn from the award citations themselves.
Leg 01 · Heading 000°
Water.
U.S. Coast Guard officer. Left the service as a Lieutenant.
Response officer and Chief of Enforcement
- Managed a helicopter-borne boarding team that ran security sweeps of large freighters, personally performing 78 boardings.
- When a tug grounded while pushing a barge carrying 30,000 gallons of fuel, mobilized a small boat and arranged an overflight, putting assets on scene early.
- Helped collect the evidence of falsified oil and garbage record books aboard the M/V Pacific Celebes. The owner pleaded guilty and paid more than $100,000 in fines and fees.
- Led the team that revised the sector's escort policy after a mishap, making operations safer on a restricted, high-traffic waterway.
AwardsCoast Guard Achievement MedalMeritorious Team Commendation, Fleet Week securityWritten commendation from the district commander
Maritime Search Planning
- Graduate of the school that trains the planners who run searches.
Command Center Chief, Great Lakes
- The command center oversaw 1,232 incidents, saving or assisting 1,959 lives and more than $3,000,000 in property.
- A district-record 110 search and rescue cases in one day: July 4, 2011.
- After the sailing vessel WingNuts capsized in a violent thunderstorm during the Chicago to Mackinac race, search planning and leadership that led to the rescue of six crew members.
- When a cutter lost 10 buoys over the side in a storm, used search tools to find and recover all ten.
- Helped write Coast Guard policy for searches on ice by foot and by airboat, and drafted the first operator's manual for the 22-foot Special Purpose Craft-Air.
- Built the command center's website and job aid so the watch had every resource in one place.
AwardsCoast Guard Commendation MedalCoast Guard Unit CommendationMeritorious Team Commendation, Frontier Sentinel 2011
Military Aide to the Ninth District Commander
- Planned more than 100 strategic engagements and 40 itineraries covering 27,000 miles.
- Avoided $30,000 in travel costs by combining unit and industry visits.
- Managed the commander's schedule through eight weeks of War of 1812 Bicentennial events across the Great Lakes.
- Organized meetings with congressional and state representatives in support of the five-year Great Lakes Maritime Strategy.
AwardsCoast Guard Commendation MedalMeritorious Team Commendation, War of 1812 Bicentennial
Operations Officer, then Executive Officer, Maritime Safety and Security Team
- Second in command of a unit of about 100 people, with budgets of about $40M.
- Part of the team that secured Seafair 2013, the largest annual maritime event in the Pacific Northwest.
- Earned the Boat Force Operations insignia.
AwardsMeritorious Team Commendation, Seafair 2013Boat Force Operations insignia
Junior Officer Leadership Course
- Founding instructor of the course.
Leg 02 · Heading 090°
Line.
Pipeline construction in West Texas and New Mexico.
Welder, then welding supervisor
- Supervised pipeline welding across more than 800 miles.
- Zero lost-time incidents.
- Learned the trade from inside the work before writing a procedure for it.
Leg 03 · Heading 180°
Plant.
Director of Operations for a turnkey mechanical and electrical contractor in Elyria, Ohio. May 2020 to October 2026.
A bigger company on a wider base
- Revenue from about $5.5M to $10.3M, with growth every year.
- About three quarters of the work came from one customer at the start. Helped add two more major producers.
Plants built on schedule
- Five overlapping plant builds in five states in late 2025, with up to 46 people on one site.
- Three oxygen plants delivered back to back in 2025, worth $4.5M.
- Lift supervisor on tandem lifts of 60-foot vessels weighing up to 120,000 lb.
- High-pressure and high-purity process piping, pressure testing and turnover, with the electrical package delivered alongside.
The company, written down
- Wrote the operating procedures for cleaning, welding, pressure testing, site setup and demobilization, trailer prep and job prep.
- Authored the company's ASME Section IX weld procedures.
- Tailored the HR policies to fit the company.
- Standard job-trailer checklists, test manifolds, forms, logs and weld maps, so every crew works from the same kit.
Oxygen and hydrogen lines for a NASA test facility
- Helped design the gaseous oxygen and hydrogen lines from scratch for NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, and fabricated the whole system, from the storage trailers and tanks to the test building.
- 1,000 feet of 2-inch Schedule 80 Monel 400 and 1,200 feet of 2-inch Schedule 160 316L stainless, running at 3,600 psi.
- A three-stage manifold on each line steps the pressure down from 3,600 to 600 psi.
- Wrote three new weld procedures with their qualification records, and got the welders certified for the project.
- The contract called for precision cleaning the company had never done. Researched the standards alone, wrote the procedure, bought the equipment and proved the shop could clean to it.
- NASA formally approved the procedure, putting the shop among the few contractors cleared to clean to that standard.
Software built in house
- Electronic forms in place of Excel purchase orders and proposals.
- A bid and proposal app that produces a finished proposal document.
- A material tracker for vendor ordering and purchase orders.
- The company's first inventory system: every part barcoded, with per-project checkout.
- A shipping and receiving dashboard on the shop floor.
- A bolt, flange and torque app that gives a fitter one card for the joint in front of them.
- A precision cleaning app that walks an operator through the procedure step by step, with the training deck, a time log, job records and the reference documents in the same place.
- An in-house ERP, built when nothing on the market fit, with job cost on 13 cost codes and daily field reports to ownership.
Nobody hurt doing the work
- Zero OSHA recordable cases across about 195,000 work hours. EMR 0.47.
- Daily risk assessments using the Coast Guard's GAR and PEACE models.
- Briefings, after-action hotwashes and quarterly safety stand-downs.
- Passed a major producer's new-contractor safety evaluation in 2025.
Leg 04 · Heading 270°
Credentials.
Qualifications I hold myself, so I can check the work as well as plan it.
- OSHA 30
- Lift Supervisor and Signal Person Qualified Evaluator (CraneSafe / NACB)
- ASME Section IX GTAW welder qualification, carbon steel 6G
- ASME Section IX GTAW welder qualification, 316L stainless 6G
- ASME Section IX silver brazing qualification
- Author of three ASME Section IX weld procedure specifications
- Oxygen-service cleaning certification
- National Search and Rescue School, Maritime Search Planning
- M.A., Leadership and Communication
- B.A., Sociology, and B.A., Criminology
Leg 05 · Heading 000°
That's the log. Now tell me where you are.
A few lines about your operation and what's breaking is plenty.