Four Men, One Wooden Boat, 32 Sailors in a Nor'easter

On the night of February 18, 1952, four young Coast Guardsmen from Chatham, Massachusetts, took a 36-foot wooden motor lifeboat into a nor'easter that almost nobody expected them to survive. They came back with 32 men aboard, and the boat they used is still afloat on Cape Cod today.

A Tanker Broken in Two

Before dawn that morning, the 503-foot tanker Pendleton, loaded with kerosene and heating oil, cracked apart off Cape Cod in a full gale with snow and seas as high as 60 feet.

The break was so sudden that the ship never sent a distress call. Thirty-three men were left on the drifting stern half, listening on a radio receiver as rescuers raced to a second broken tanker, the Fort Mercer, farther offshore.

The Chatham Coast Guard station had spotted both halves of the Pendleton on radar. An amphibious DUKW sent out to reach them was too small to make it.

Three Volunteers and a Boat With No Name

Boatswain's Mate First Class Bernard "Bernie" Webber was ordered to take out motor lifeboat CG36500. More experienced men, aware of the risk, had made themselves scarce.

His crew was engineer Andrew Fitzgerald and seamen Richard Livesey and Ervin Maske, who was stationed on the Stonehorse lightship.

Crossing the Chatham bar, a huge wave smashed the windshield and tore the compass off its mount. Snow blew straight through the broken window into Webber's face as he steered.

After about an hour, he sensed something ahead in the dark. The boat's small searchlight picked out the name PENDLETON on the heaving wreck.

Down the Ladder, One at a Time

The tanker's crew threw a Jacob's ladder over the side. Timing each wave, Webber brought the little boat in again and again as men jumped onto its bow or fell into the sea, where his crew hauled them aboard.

After about 20 survivors, the boat began to handle sluggishly. Webber kept going anyway. In the end 32 men were packed into a boat that, according to the Orleans Historical Society, was designed to carry about half that number.

Only one man on the stern did not make it: the ship's cook, George "Tiny" Myers, described by the Orleans Historical Society as the inspiration of the Pendleton crew.

Finding the Way Home

With no compass, Webber radioed in. Officers began debating whether to move the survivors onto a cutter at sea. He switched the radio off and decided to run with the wind and waves until he could put the boat on a beach.

Soon a flashing red light appeared. The searchlight lit up the buoy that marked the turn into Chatham's Old Harbor and safe water.

A crowd of Chatham men, women and children met the boat at the fish pier and helped survivors and rescuers ashore.

Webber's wife, Miriam, was home sick that night. When fisherman John Stello told him what she had said on hearing the boat was back, it was: "Tell Bernie to get his butt home just as soon as possible!"

All four crewmen received the Gold Lifesaving Medal. The story became the 2016 Disney film The Finest Hours.

The Boat Is Still There

CG36500 was built in 1946 at the Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay, Maryland, and retired in 1968. In 1981 it went to the Orleans Historical Society, where volunteers restored it and relaunched it with Webber and his wife in attendance.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. The society calls it the only operating survivor of its class on the East Coast.

Today the boat is berthed at Rock Harbor in Orleans, where its 2026 summer berth opened on May 22, with talks and tours aboard on summer weekends. Volunteers care for it.