By Amanda Fisher

About Featured Alumni: Each issue we feature an Alum to show in depth how SMEA has been part of their career trajectory in order to celebrate their accomplishments and to inform and inspire current students and our alumni about their education. In this issue, we feature an alumna whose career so far has been with the US Coast Guard (USCG).  SMEA has benefitted enormously from the mid-career officers and officers mustering out of the USCG.  Amanda Fisher SMEA in mid-career and graduated in 2010.  She is now retiring after 21 years of service and is contemplating how to share her expertise with SMEA and launch the next stage of her career. – Dave Fluharty

My journey to the University of Washington’s School of Marine Affairs represents a continuation of the values and interests that led me into a 16-year career in the United States Coast Guard.  As a small child, raised by her grandparents in Southern Texas, I was fascinated by the ocean from about six years old.  Movies like Jaws and The Abyss, rather than scare me, excited me to learn more about the real creatures these movies inspired, and a desire to be like the characters that explored this world.  Despite quite humble means, my grandparents encouraged my interests, even supporting my efforts to earn my scuba certification at 16.  When I accepted an appointment to the US Coast Guard Academy, my interest was driven by a desire to become a scientist and pursue my studies in marine science, and honestly I knew very little about the Coast Guard itself.  It ended up being one of the best decisions I blundered into, though not without challenges.

I appreciated the discipline and work ethic that the Academy instilled in me, which I honestly needed at 19 years old, but I graduated grateful to have escaped my small town, and I loved my coursework focusing  on biological and physical oceanography within my major. Unfortunately, I intensely disliked the highly structured, fiercely competitive environment of a service academy, and I initially vowed after graduation never to go to school again. My first ship, the Coast Guard CutterMellon, was stationed in Seattle, and immediately fell in love with all the Pacific Northwest had to offer.  I worked as a deck watch officer, travelling to more than 12 countries in Southeast Asia and Central and South America, where we conducted fisheries compliance boardings and counter-narcotics interdictions.  That was also my first experience with fisheries boardings in Alaska.  I remember being on the maritime boundary line on Christmas Eve of 2005, in 35-foot seas and 70 knot winds, a hurricane in another part of the world, and feeling very small on our 378-foot ship, until I saw a little 90 foot crabber out there, and really hit home how hard fishermen work at sea for a living.

My next assignment was aboard Coast Guard Cutter Monomoy, deployed out of Bahrain to serve in the coastal waters and rivers of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2005-2006.  At that time the newly forming insurgency was beginning to implement suicide attacks using fishing boats loaded with explosives against the two principal Iraqi offshore oil terminals, and we primarily provided security presence for that critical infrastructure – monotonous but tense work.  Beyond that, we curtailed localized piracy and thuggery against the indigenous Madan artisanal fishers and Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Iranian coastal fishers, arresting a pirate kingpin and reducing local pirate attacks and banditry by 70% at the end of our year there.  At that time, the Somali piracy attacks against international shipping were beginning to assert themselves as well, and we began deploying our patrol boats around the Horn of Africa to the Somali coast to provide counter-piracy presence.

From there I returned to my hometown of Corpus Christi, TX, where I served as Commanding Officer of a coastal patrol boat, Coast Guard Cutter Steelhead.  I learned a lot in those two years, mainly how to listen to the more experienced crew that I was privileged to lead, as we conducted over 200 safety and compliance boardings on US shrimp fishing boats, and interdicted Mexican lanchas conducting Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing in US waters.  In my free time I also began graduate course work in Marine Biology at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi’s Hart Research Institute, which included a research trip to the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve in Quintana Roo, Mexico studying disease occurrence in gorgonian corals.  I found I enjoyed my studies at the graduate level so much, I resolved to pursue them, outside the Coast Guard if necessary, following my command tour.  Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and I was selected by the Coast Guard to attend the University of Washington’s School of Marine Affairs, joining the class of 2010.

I immediately found the environment at UW about as different from a service academy as you can get, and much more to my liking in a way that rekindled my love for academics.  Our tight knit class quickly bonded, and I loved the challenge of the coursework at SMA and SAFS.  It was a transformative experience, particularly learning about the details of policy analysis from Dave Fluharty, contextualized through the example of the National Marine Sanctuaries from Bob Pavia, population dynamics from Ray Hilborn and Tim Essington, and having my eyes opened for the first time to the real scale and human impacts of climate change from Ed Miles, which profoundly affected my life.  I was also able to complete a certificate program in International Development, focusing on fisheries management from the EvansSchool, which I found rewarding but believed at the time to be something I would never put to much use.  Little did I know what lay ahead!     Following graduation I was assigned as Commanding Officer of the Southeast Regional Fisheries Training Center in Charleston, South Carolina, where I led a team of 10 instructors in training federal and state law enforcement officers in the gentle art of differentiating between a red snapper and a red herring.  In all seriousness, we trained about 3000 officers annually across the mid Atlantic, East Florida and New England in the intricacies of federal fisheries law and fishing vessel safety compliance.  As part of those duties, I served as the Coast Guard representative to three National Marine Sanctuary advisory councils and two Fisheries Management Councils, where my education from SMA left me well-prepared to grow into the role of a law enforcement advisor, working with the council and staff to craft well-founded regulations that were scientifically informed, easy for the public to comprehend, and enforceable.  My education in policy analysis proved instrumental in evaluating various policy alternatives before the Council and assisting development of new ones, resulting in new regulations for gear markings and breakaway systems on pot gear designed to protect right whales, among other initiatives.

After that tour I served aboard Coast Guard Cutter Dauntless as Executive Officer, returning to my home waters on the Gulf of Mexico several times, now armed with a much bigger, more capable ship and crew to conduct counter-IUU operations and board US shrimp boats.  Following that tour, I was selected to serve as a detailee to the Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and the Coast Guard, working for Senator Bill Nelson’s (D-FL) staff as a fisheries and Coast Guard policy advisor.  I was fortunate to have a chance to see fisheries policy and law formulation, now at the National level, and assisted the passage of several bills, including the $12B Coast Guard Authorization Act, the Dungeness Crab Act and the IUU Fishing Act of 2015, which ratified and implemented several enforcement mechanisms in international fisheries fora, including the Port State Measures Agreement, giving port states useful new enforcement mechanisms for the first time to deter IUU-fishing.  Proving how small the world is, I was also lucky enough to work with my classmate and friend, then-LCDR Wendy Lewis, SMA ’10, who served as the NOAA detailee to the Majority side of the Committee.

From there, I was assigned as a liaison to the US State Department’s Office of Marine Conservation and NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement, in part to assist the implementation of the PSMA.  I was pleasantly surprised to put my education at the Evans School to work as I led the design and implementation of a novel 5 day regional counter-IUU fisheries law enforcement workshop with 5 Southeast Asian partners, including for the first time, Vietnam.  I applied the lesson I learned in class to never assume what a host country needs, and began the project by doing thorough pre-production scoping surveys with each participant country to determine what their needs were, and tailor the training to best suit their experience level.  Additionally, I managed the US’s growing portfolio of bilateral “Shiprider” law enforcement agreements, now in effect with 21 partner countries, that enables us to provide a US vessel as a platform to assist partner nations in accessing and enforcing compliance in their EEZ.  We also enacted new agreements with Fiji, Vanuatu, Cote d’Ivoire, and the recently concluded agreement with Papua New Guinea, and initiated US contributions to the UNFAO’s Global Record of Fishing Vessels.  It was an incredibly challenging but rewarding experience.

In the midst of that tour, following years of reflection and growth, I took the necessary step of transitioning gender, during a very difficult policy environment that saw no less than 4 major reversals of military policy during my transition that left me constantly in doubt whether I would continue to have a career or be arbitrarily discharged just a few years short of my pension eligibility.  The experience was made unnecessarily much more stressful that it needed to be, but it also challenged many things in my life that I had previously taken for granted, including my assumed privilege, that ultimately helped me grow immensely as a leader.  And while the overall political environment was, and remains, quite alarming in its treatment toward Trans people, I never felt anything other than support from my teams at the State Department, NOAA, and the Coast Guard.

I began my final tour in Seattle, where I planned to conclude my service and start my next chapter in life in my favorite city I’ve been fortunate to live in.  In 2019 I began my tour as External Affairs Officer for the 13^th Coast Guard District, leading a team of 10 international, tribal, governmental and media affairs specialists in liaising with our partners and the public.  It was an incredibly rewarding experience, including serving as the external affairs lead for the NEPA and CERCLA actions supporting the largest real property infrastructure project in Coast Guard history, the expansion and modernization of Coast Guard Base Seattle to serve as a homeport for the new generation of Polar Security Cutters arriving over the next few years.

In summary, my education at SMA not only taught me about the world of marine affairs and policy, but how to think critically about problems, evaluate and iterate our work as we go, and most importantly, listen to others.  In addition, I am proud to call my classmates among my closest friends, including some that I am fortunate to live minutes away from and see on a weekly basis and many who attended our recent wedding this summer.  SMEA should be proud of the leaders it has grown, and the lifetime of friendships and relationships it continues to foster.