09/16/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/19dZJUHaLx/?mibextid=wwXIfr
On February 18, 1952, four Coast Guardsmen took a thirty six foot wooden boat rated for about a dozen people out over the Chatham Bar in a nor'easter. They came back with thirty two men aboard. 🌊
Two tankers broke in half off Cape Cod that same day. The Fort Mercer managed to get a distress call out. The Pendleton did not, because it split so suddenly that nobody had time to reach a radio. Its bow and its stern drifted apart in the dark with most of the crew alive inside the stern section and nobody ashore yet aware they were there at all.
Bernard Webber took out the motor lifeboat CG-36500 with Andrew Fitzgerald, Richard Livesey, and a fourth man who happened to be at the station that day waiting for a ride to his own posting. Crossing the bar the windshield went in and the compass went over the side, so Webber ran the rest of it on dead reckoning through seas reported at forty feet and more. They found the stern in the dark, held the boat under it as it rolled, and took men off a rope ladder one at a time. Thirty two of the thirty three aboard came off. The ship's cook did not. Then they turned a boat built for twelve, carrying thirty six, back toward shore with no compass, and made it.
All four crewmen received the Gold Lifesaving Medal. The boat itself was eventually retired, left to rot, then recovered by volunteers in the 1980s and restored. It is still afloat on Cape Cod, and you can go and stand on the deck that carried thirty six men home. 🚤
Have you come across the Pendleton before, or is it one of those stories that never quite leaves the Cape?
