It was always fun taking the 44'MLB into heavy surf in day light. But all that drove them will tell you it is not so much fun at night when all you see in front of you is a wall of water so high that you pull yourself up out of your chair closer to the wind sheld in order to see the top of the wave. That was the case one night. I ran 44's off the eastern shore in the early 80's. back then we didn.t have loran on GPS, even the radar hardly ever work all that good. So all navigation on the small boats was dead reconning. (I can remember many a night after running search patterns 50 miles off shore and when I would finnaly see the light house on Assatigue Island I felt all worm and fuzzy inside one more time.)sory, Back to the story. Any way It a real nasty night and I get the call theres a yacht in trouble off Ocean City Maryland and we have to go try and help. By the way Station Ocean City said they couldn't go because they were haveing problems with the radar that day. So we jump into our exposure suits and get under way.
I had a course plotted from our sea bouy to the Ocean City inlet sea bouy but as we made our way out the channel we couldn't find a single aid to navigation in our inlet let alone the sea bouy we made three passes in and out of that inlet that night each time looking for some starting point to take a bearing from but there was nothing and the weather just kept getting worse. On the last run back in the inlet we where completely engulfed by a wave that broke from the stern past the bow. As it turned out the next morning all the bouys got washed up on the beach that night. And the yacht was actually inside the jetting and not off shore so the crew from Ocean City brought it in.