USCG Boat

The federal government bought a prime waterfront plot at Wrightsville Beach in 1901, decades before establishing a Coast Guard station there in 1969. For years beforehand, odd-looking 36-foot motor lifeboats operated from a modest Light Attendant Station, their crews maintaining navigation buoys while piloting self-righting, self-bailing rescue vessels that could flip completely upright in six seconds. These wooden workhorses, with their 2,000-pound bronze keels, saved countless lives from an open cockpit where crews faced the same brutal conditions that imperiled the mariners they rescued.

The federal government, in other words, sat on a piece of oceanfront real estate for the better part of six decades before finally getting around to using it, which is either patience or bureaucracy, depending on how charitably one wants to read a deed dated 1901. In the meantime, the actual rescuing got done from a Light Attendant Station whose main qualifications were a dock and a good view of Banks Channel. The boats did the heavy lifting: no cabin to hide in, no roof overhead, just a windshield that folded down and a keel heavy enough to right the whole vessel before a sinking man could finish panicking. By the time the government finally built its proper station in 1969, the job had already been getting done for years by three-man crews and a boat that treated capsizing as a temporary inconvenience rather than an ending.