Remembering the 36 Foot Motor Lifeboat

In this episode Master Chief McAdams describes the Coast Guard 36 foot motor lifeboat and what it was like to operate one. He reads a poem he wrote to sum up his feelings and memories of those voyages.
If you enjoyed this video please press the like button and leave a comment. The Chief loves to hear peoples reactions to his stories and it motivates us to keep taking the time to make these videos.
Chief McAdams is a legend in the ranks of the United States Coast Guard. His career spanned twenty-seven years from 1950 through 1977. During that time, he operated numerous patrol and motor lifeboats. He commanded stations, wrote training manuals, and assisted in designing and testing new boat designs. Throughout his career Chief McAdams is credited with participating in over 5000 rescues and saving over 100 lives. Chief McAdams received numerous awards and medals, including The Legion of Merit, Gold Lifesaving Medal, Coast Guard Achievement Medal, Coast Guard Commendation Medal, The Coast Guard Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal. Over the years, numerous articles have been written about the Chief’s adventures in magazines such as Men’s Magazine (1954), Life Magazine (1957), True Magazine (1971), and National Geographic Magazine (1974). Chief McAdams has been mentioned in numerous other books and training manuals. This book is a chronological history of Chief McAdams’ experiences throughout his career in the Coast Guard. The stories are all true memories, eliciting emotions that run the gamut from exciting to frightening, hilarious, and devastating. These are the stories behind the legend of Chief McAdams.
This video is just one of the many stories the Chief likes to share with anyone who will listen. You can read more stories about Master Chief McAdams in the book: Master Chief Thomas McAdams: The Stories That Made the Legend Triumphs and Tragedies at Sea. You can purchase the book on Amazon by clicking on the following link: amzn.to/4a896Cc

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From Surfman #119: Thanks Mac for that excellent review of the venerable 36 footer. Now do the 44 😀.

[@davewickstrom8143]

Watching Mac’s video reminded me how cold we would get while on boat calls on the 36 if it was choppy and we got wet. Even rain gear would have been better, but we never had it. Also reminded me of this call on the 44. I was standing patrol on the Yaquina Bay Bar on a fairly nice, but cool, breezy fall day in 1969. The ocean swell was small with a little wind chop on top, and the bar was calm. There were hundreds of the “Tupperware fleet,” (small pleasure boats and day trollers) crossing in and out across the busy bar. The radio interrupted my peace to tell me to respond to a boat that was taking on water a few miles north of the whistle buoy. I punched the throttles to the wall, and the crew started getting the dewatering equipment ready for action. We were on scene in what seemed like a matter of minutes, but it was too late. The skipper, the only person on board, was already in the water, clinging to the side of his sunken boat. We fished the shivering man out of the water and were debating about whether or not we could save the boat. It was an old, heavy, fiberglass craft that was trying its best to turn turtle and head for Davy Jones’ Locker. I put a line on it and tried for a while to parbuckle the boat, a common operation to.pull it up far enough to put pumps aboard, but with no success. The skipper was very upset about his boat, but finally admitted that it was a loss, so we abandoned our effort, let it slip below the surface, and watched it disappear out of sight. I spun the 44 toward the bar, and talked with the skipper about what had happened to cause his boat to sink. He stood on the coxswain flat and described how he had retrofitted scuppers through the hull to let water out that splashed in. The trouble was that, when the wind kicked up a heavy chop, he discovered that he had installed them backwards. Scuppers are basically a one-way valve that lets water out, while not letting it come in. His let the water in, and wouldn’t let it out. The skipper was shivering in his wet clothes, so I told him to go below. My crewman wrapped him in a wool blanket, and he sat down on a seat in the warm forward survivors compartment. I made the hour run back to the bar, and was instructed to bring the man to the station where an ambulance would take him to the hospital for observation. My seaman went below to tell the skipper of the plan, but came storming back up saying the skipper was unconscious. I turned the coxswain seat over to the engineer, and went below. I checked for a pulse, and there was none. I started cardiopulmonary rescue procedures on him, alternating between chest compression and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The bottom line is that he didn’t survive. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. This was in the fall of 1969, and hypothermia, or “death by cold water immersion” was not well understood. It was still called “exposure,” by us lay people, but was being studied by doctors. We originally thought that he had died from exposure, but he actually died from a heart attack. We now have a much better understanding of death by cold water immersion. The truth is that cold water kills, but hypothermia is just one way that it does, and it’s not the most common way. If you find yourself immersed in cold water, four things happen to your body that you should understand. The first phase of cold water immersion is a “Cold Water Shock Response.” It’s a stage of uncontrolled gasping, and increased heart rate. It can be deadly all by itself, and of all the people who die in cold water, it’s estimated that 20 percent of them die from this. They drown by panicking as they breathe in water in that first uncontrolled gasp. If they have heart problems, the cold shock can trigger a heart attack. Surviving this stage is about getting your breathing under control, and staying calm. We wore wetsuits (after the CG got them for us) if we knew we were going to have to go into the water, but would still wrap a towel around our necks before jumping into the cold Pacific Ocean water to prevent that sudden shock response. The second stage of cold water immersion is called “Cold Water Incapacitation.” Long before your core temperature drops a degree, the veins in your extremities (those things you swim with) will constrict; you will lose your ability to control the muscles in your arms and legs. They will just quit working well enough to keep you above water. I have been there, and done that. Without some form of flotation, the best swimmer among us will drown in cold water without ever experiencing hypothermia. Over 50 percent of the people who die in cold water die from drowning following cold water incapacitation. “Hypothermia," the third stage, can kill, but that only happens in about 15 percent of cold water deaths. You have to have been exposed to cold water, or have been in wet clothes after you get out of the water for a long time to get hypothermic. Vasoconstriction and shivering help keep you warm by shunting blood to the core, and can keep you alive for hours if you are in good physical condition. What probably happened to the skipper in this case is called “Circum-Rescue Collapse,” What I didn’t know at the time is that “out of the water is not out of trouble.” I should have immediately made him take his cold, wet clothes off, wrapped him in a warm blanket, and made him lay down and stay down whether he wanted to or not no matter how good he felt until a doctor in an ER told him he could stand up. Cold water immersion does things besides making everything colder. Victims are physiologically different for a while. One of the things that changes is called heart-rate variability. The heart’s ability to speed up and slowdown has been affected. Moving around requires your heart to pump more blood. Just being upright and out of the water is so taxing, that any number of other factors collide and the heart starts fluttering instead of pumping … and down you go. After (sometimes hours after) rescue, victims of cold water immersion pass out, experience ventricular fibrillation or go into full cardiac arrest. Victims of immersion hypothermia are two things: lucky to be alive and fragile. Until everything is warmed again, out of the water and wrapped up in a blanket is not good enough.