Her keel was laid down by
American Ship Building Company,
Lorain, Ohio 10 November 1967 and she was launched 4 May 1968.
Vigorous was commissioned 2 May 1969 and her current homeport is
Portsmouth, Virginia. Her initial homeport was in
New London, Connecticut where she was moored at the
United States Coast Guard Academy. She was decommissioned for modernization at the
United States Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay,
Maryland, in early 1992 and was recommissioned on 11 January 1993. During the
2010 Caribbean Games in
Mayaguez,
Puerto Rico, the
Vigorous maintained a security zone in Mayaguez harbor. On 11 February 2013, the
Vigorous stood by the disabled 102,000-ton cruise ship
Carnival Triumph adrift in the
Gulf of Mexico waiting to be towed. On Sunday, 10 February 2013 at 5:30 a.m. CST, the
Carnival Triumph suffered a fire in her aft
engine room. Although the fire was
automatically extinguished and there were no injuries to passengers or crew, it resulted in a loss of
propulsion and power to all support systems. With 4,229 persons on board, raw sewage began to back up into the lower passenger deck areas. This caused the media to dub the event "The Poop Cruise." A Coast Guard supplied emergency generator was providing minimal electrical power, while the ship was adrift about 150 miles off the northern coast of the
Yucatán Peninsula in the
Gulf of Mexico. The ship was originally expected to be towed to the Mexican port of
Progreso. However, after being carried north by currents while awaiting arrival of large, seagoing
tugboats, she was towed to
Mobile, Alabama instead.
Vigorous escorted
Carnival Triumph during her tow. During May 2014, the
Vigorous was spearheading the search for the
Yacht Cheeki Rafiki one thousand miles east of
Cape Cod, which went missing on a delivery voyage from
Antigua to
Southampton, England. The overturned hull of the
capsized Cheeki Rafiki was found on the evening of 23 May 2014 with the
keel broken off and the uninflated life raft inside the hull. All four sailors on board were presumed lost at sea. ==Awards==