HNS-1 Sikorsky R-4 from Northwind off the Greenland coast. This deployment; in support of the International Ice Patrol, included the first helicopter landings at Thule, Greenland; Crozier Island and Winter Harbor, Melville Island. On 27 July 1946, Northwind was grounded on an uncharted pinnacle while entering Dundas Harbour, Devon Island, Nunavut but was refloated ten hours later without serious damage. Operation Highjump From December 1946 through January 1947 Northwind participated in Operation Highjump as part of Central Group (Task Group 68), under the command of Captain Charles W. Thomas, with one of the operation's primary missions being to establish the research base Little America IV. She was the only United States Coast Guard vessel to participate in the naval exercise and became the first U.S. Coast Guard cutter to cross the Antarctic Circle. She also completed the first major rescue missions of a submarine beset in ice when she twice broke out the damaged . Northwind also rescued , , and which were beset and damaged in the ice floe at the Antarctic Circle. The first helicopter flight to base Little America IV from Northwind took place on 15 January 1947. Her crew played the first baseball game, the first double header (all without lights), and the first golf tournament in Antarctica. First Bering Sea patrol During May to August 1948 Northwind conducted her first Bering Sea Patrol, the first in eight years, as the patrol had been suspended during World War II. She functioned as a "floating court" for a United States federal judge and staff, while U.S. Coast Guard medical personnel and United States Public Health Service officers on board provided medical and dental aid to hundreds of isolated Aleutian villagers. She also delivered and dispatched the U.S. Mail for remote Arctic outposts, lightships and lighthouses. She performed law enforcement, search and rescue, ice-escort for other ships and weather observation and reporting. Other duties of the Bering Sea Patrol were fishery monitoring, wildlife study, oceanographic and hydrographic research, re-supplying remote units, ethnological studies of the Aleuts, laying cables, and environmentally related missions. Northwind was a research platform for geophysical studies performed by scientists and students from universities in the Pacific Northwest, and California. In 1949 Northwind returned to the Arctic and in subsequent years served on several U.S. Navy expeditions to the region, 1950s In 1952 Northwind broke the polar icebreaking record for miles sailed north of the