Most of us know fishermen who have been plucked off the deck of a sinking vessel, or scarier still, out of the water by a Coast Guard helicopter.

We also know folks who weren’t.

Closing the Coast Guard’s air rescue station at Newport, Ore., is a bad idea, and people there are rightfully bent out of shape about it.

Assurances that modern direction finding equipment speeds the Coast Guard in its efforts to locate vessels in distress are none too comforting. If you’re in the water, determining your position is but the first step in the rescue process, and that’s doubly true if you’re injured, hypothermic, or both.

Nor is the agency well served by its assertions that its response times will meet or beat federal requirements. Fishing vessels have been known to sink in minutes, and they can capsize in seconds. When this happens, survival may depend most of all on the proximity of rescuers.

Recent years have found fishermen taking increased responsibility for their safety, often at the behest of the Coast Guard. But the ocean can be an extremely hostile environment, and there are always going to be those nights of ice, to borrow from Spike Walker, when we depend on the Coast Guard to live up to its mission of minimizing loss of life at sea.

The Newport Fishermen Wives have launched a petition drive in an effort to get the Coast Guard to reconsider, and they have the support of both of the state’s U.S. senators as well as four of its five representatives in the U.S. House.

I hope you sign it, wherever your home port is. The helicopter was installed at Newport because it was needed, and with all due respect, that need is not a function of the Coast Guard’s budget. And as someone who recalls a time when there was a helo in Rockland, Maine, the one thing you can be sure of is that if Newport loses the chopper, it will never get it back.