On a January night in 1980, in the narrow channel that Fort De Soto's mortars had been built to guard eighty years before, the Coast Guard suffered the worst peacetime disaster in its history. The buoy tender Blackthorn, outbound from Tampa after a yard overhaul, collided with an inbound oil tanker, was ripped open by the tanker's anchor, and capsized in less than ten minutes, taking twenty-three of her fifty crew. Most of them were very young. One of them, an eighteen-year-old seaman, spent the last minutes of his life making sure others could live.
USCGC Blackthorn was a 180-foot seagoing buoy tender of the Iris class, built by the Marine Iron and Shipbuilding Corporation in Duluth, Minnesota, to a preliminary design by the United States Lighthouse Service, and commissioned in 1944. Buoy tenders are not glamorous vessels; their work is the patient, essential maintenance of the navigational aids that keep every other ship off the shoals. Over her long career the Blackthorn served on the West Coast out of San Pedro, then shifted to the Gulf to work out of Mobile, Alabama, and finally Galveston, Texas, which was her homeport at the end. Through the winter of 1979 and into 1980 she lay at the Gulf Tampa Drydock Company undergoing a major overhaul, including work on her main propulsion generators, with a largely young crew, many of them new to the ship.
On the evening of 28 January 1980, her overhaul complete, the Blackthorn got underway from Tampa, outward bound down the channel for Galveston. What followed was not a single blunder but a cascade of small misfortunes in a crowded, narrow waterway. As she ran down the channel she was overtaken by the Soviet passenger liner Kazakhstan, and in maneuvering clear and moving back toward mid-channel to resume her course, she came into the path of the inbound tanker SS Capricorn, a 605-foot oil tanker then standing into the bay. The Capricorn began a turn to her left. The two ships could not arrange to pass port-to-port and could not raise each other by radio. The Capricorn's pilot blew two short whistle blasts, the signal for a starboard-to-starboard passing, and the officer of the deck aboard the Blackthorn ordered evasive action, but there was no longer room or time to avoid it.
The collision itself, remarkably, was not the catastrophe. The two ships struck almost head-on, the much smaller Blackthorn running down the port side of the tanker, and no one aboard the Capricorn was harmed. What sealed the cutter's fate was the tanker's port anchor, a thirteen-thousand-five-hundred-pound mass of steel hanging at the Capricorn's bow. As the ships scraped past and separated, that anchor caught and embedded itself in the Blackthorn's hull, and as the vessels pulled apart it tore the cutter's port side open like a can. Flooding instantly and fatally, the Blackthorn rolled over and capsized in under ten minutes. Six crewmen were trapped in the skin of the ship as she turned over; several more trapped themselves in the engine room trying to escape. Of the fifty aboard, twenty-three died and twenty-seven survived. It remains the worst peacetime loss of life in the history of the United States Coast Guard.
Among the crew was William “Billy” Flores, an eighteen-year-old Seaman Apprentice only months out of training. As the ship rolled and the water climbed, Flores and another seaman began throwing life jackets to the men already struggling in the channel. The other seaman abandoned ship; Flores stayed. He took off his own belt and used it to strap the life-jacket locker door open, so that the remaining jackets floated free and rose to the men overboard, and then he turned back to help the wounded and trapped seamen still aboard. He was still at that work when the Blackthorn went under. His full story is told on his own page; it is enough to say here that a teenager gave his life buying survival for his crewmates, and that the Coast Guard later named a ship for him.
The capsized hull lay in the channel until it could be raised for the federal investigation that followed, an inquiry that reshaped Coast Guard rules on channel navigation and watchstanding. Once the investigation was complete, the Blackthorn was towed out and scuttled in the Gulf of Mexico, where she now rests as an artificial reef, a destination for recreational divers and anglers, the old buoy tender ending her service by becoming, herself, a kind of navigational landmark on the sea floor. The collision happened roughly two miles south of the St. Petersburg shoreline where Blackthorn Memorial Park now stands, and each year on the twenty-eighth of January a ceremony there reads the names of the lost. Families still come: Colleen Humphries, who lost her brother George Rovolis Jr., has spoken at the memorials, and survivors such as Jeff Huse have returned to stand with them. Off the Pinellas coast, the underwater Circle of Heroes memorial added a statue of Flores in 2020.
The waters off Fort De Soto absorbed two catastrophes within four months in 1980. The Blackthorn went down in January. On 9 May 1980, in a violent squall, the freighter Summit Venture struck the Sunshine Skyway Bridge itself, dropping a span and sending vehicles into the bay; thirty-five people died. The two events are often blurred together in memory because they happened so close in time and place, but they were separate disasters: the Blackthorn a ship-to-ship collision that cost twenty-three Coast Guardsmen, the Skyway a bridge allision that cost thirty-five travelers. Together they made 1980 the darkest year in the modern history of the bay's mouth, and they are the reason the channel Fort De Soto once guarded against an enemy that never came is remembered, instead, for the losses it took on two ordinary days of peace.