Coast Guard captain Norman Edwards has died

Funeral services were held in Amagansett Monday for Norman C. Edwards Jr., a descendant of three centuries of Long Island mariners and its last whalers who distinguished himself as a Coast Guard captain, commercial fisherman and conservationist.

Edwards, an East Hampton town trustee who championed a winter-flounder hatchery to restore the depleted species, died Jan. 19 after a yearlong battle with brain cancer. He was 64.

Family and friends at a ceremony at the Amagansett Presbyterian Church remembered Edwards as a sea captain at the top of his field whose quiet confidence, generosity and patience inspired many.

"He was the 12th in a long line of East Coast mariners to harvest the Atlantic," said his son Samuel Edwards, himself a Coast Guard officer.

Norm Edwards descended from the same Edwards family that arrived in East Hampton from Maidstone, England, in the mid-1600s. His forebears fished local waters for generations, and his great-grandfather, Joshua Edwards, caught the right whale whose skeleton hung in the American Museum of Natural History for decades. His great uncle, E.J. Edwards, took the last whale caught in Atlantic waters in 1918.

"It's just something that gets in your blood," Edwards himself said of the sea in a 1997 Newsday interview, while living in Juneau, Alaska. A year later, he retired from the Coast Guard and returned to Amagansett, to fish commercially and later, to win election as an East Hampton trustee. He brought intelligent urgency to the role through establishment of the winter flounder hatchery.

Edwards graduated from East Hampton High School and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, where he earned a bachelor's degree in oceanography. He later earned a master's in physical oceanography at Florida State University at Tallahassee.

The 1997 Newsday article told of Edwards commanding the Coast Guard cutter Vigorous when it stopped a 26-foot sloop bound for Jamaica.

"Intelligence had informed them the boat was carrying drugs, but a 2 ½-hour search turned up nothing. Later, the sloop radioed that its generator had quit and asked if the Coast Guard had a spare. This time, the boarders carried tools and found the hull was four inches deeper than it should have been. When they drilled into it, the bit came out with white powder - the sloop was carrying 254 kilos of cocaine."

Another Coast Guard officer at yesterday's service, Vince O'Shea, recalled Edwards' careful escort of a Chinese fishing vessel poaching in U.S. waters. The ship returned to port in Shanghai and his effort set the model for firm but respectful relations between the U.S. and China on fishing agreements, O'Shea said.

Edwards is survived by his wife, Lynda Edwards of Amagansett; four children, Samuel Edwards of Scottsdale, Ariz., Elan Eddington of Tokyo, Sarai Timothy and Zachariah Edwards, both of Juneau; his mother, Elsie Edwards of Amagansett; a sister, Linda Baker of East Hampton; a brother, Bruce Edwards of Richmond, Va; and 11 grandchildren.

A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints in Riverhead, Edwards also was remembered as a man of faith, whose last words, to his daughter Sarai, were, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."