Coast Guard boat crew trains in heavy surf

A Coast Guard boat takes on punishing waves off the US east coast.

Dramatic video posted by the US Coast Guard shows their 42ft boat being pounded by waves during a training exercise.

The video — shot on 9 February — shows the coast guard boat from Air Station Cape Cod in Chatham, Massachusetts, being tossed about in 12-foot waves off of Chatham’s North Beach.

The Chatham coast guard station is the same station whose lifesavers became the subject of the recently-released movie “The Finest Hours,” which chronicles how a rescue boat battled horrific conditions in 1952 to rescue 32 men from the sinking SS Pendleton oil tanker.

According to the station’s executive petty officer, the boat crew shown in the video were practicing how to break waves. The station uses the smaller 42ft vessels to navigate waters off the Chatham coast due to the number of shifting sand bars that lie in the shallow waters.

The scene in the video is reminiscent of the challenge the crew of Coast Guard Motor Lifeboat CG 36500 faced when they responded to the Pendleton oil tanker that had broken in two on a reef off the Chatham coast. The four men in the coast guard boat managed to recover 32 of the ship’s 41 crew and bring them back to shore in what is considered one of the most daring rescues in US Coast Guard history.

Coastguard responds to sinking fishing boat