Our new 44-foot MLB was picked up from the Coast Guard Yard outside Baltimore in early 1967 by a crew from Station Lake Worth Inlet and driven all the way down the Intracoastal Waterway to Peanut Island which sits in between Palm Beach, Riviera Beach and Singer Island. I arrived a few months later on a mutual change of station from Baltimore and it was a great boat in heavy waves.

However, many of our rescue calls were in Lake Worth or the ICW and the MLB threw one hell of a wake when going full bore at 14-16 knots and numerous private boats were damaged at several marinas during my six months at the station. A couple of the coxswains (BM1 Bill Abney and BM3 Alfred Hill) would go full bore in wide sections of the ICW back to the station after a mission and then turn the boat hard to the left or right and cut the throttles so we would get hit by our own six foot wake. The boat was so buoyant that we would roll from side to side numerous times with a portion of the deck on each side going under water two or three times.

One time BM3 Alfred Hill was coxswain and we were coming back from a rescue mission down near the town of Lake Worth and a huge yacht was traveling fast southbound and throwing one hell of a wake behind him. He showed no intention of slowing down so BM3 Hill gave our MLB full power and the entire boat came almost out of the water when we hit the yacht's wake. We were leaving a larger wake and the yacht really got whacked by it. BM3 Hill turned around and we pulled the yacht over for operating unsafely. The owner refused to let BM3 Hill onboard because he was black so another crewman wrote them up. The incident was pursued by the Coast Guard District's legal division and the owner was fined substantially for refusing to let BM3 Hill onboard for an inspection.

Motor Life Boat CG-44371 was transferred to CG Station Ft. Myers in the late 60's as I recall, probably due to the wake problems in the Intracoastal Waterway. However, the ocean at Palm Beach had far larger waves than anything Ft. Myers would get from the Gulf of Mexico so I wonder about the usefulness of the MLB at Ft. Myers.