Video: Rescue swimmers get training along the Pacific coast

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CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT, Wash. – This time of year the Washington Coast gets hammered by powerful winds and impossible surf.

That's why the United States Coast Guard has a school there. Those who graduate will join one of the most exclusive rescue units on the planet.

On a recent November day, a Coast Guard training instructor nervously watched his students fight for their lives off the Southern Washington coast. His class was knocked around by crushing waves, just like his graduates were earlier this year in the Bering Sea. Coast Guard rescue swimmers there successfully loaded four survivors from a sunken Seattle-based fishing boat into helicopter rescue baskets.

That's a rescue swimmer's job - to go in when others need to get out, and that requires training in the worst of conditions.

Helicopter crews at Coast Guard Air Station Astoria know all about those conditions. The violent Columbia River Bar creates the perfect training conditions. Swimmers are dropped into the frigid, boiling surf. They take turns being the victim and the rescuer, showing swimming skills developed during months in the pool.

They are becoming part of an exclusive fraternity that can snatch back lives the sea has claimed.

The instructors picked a ridiculously bad weather day to test the swimmers last week. They watched as students struggled through the surf to a menacing sea cave which was prominently featured in the recent film "The Guardian."

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Coast Guard rescue swimmers get geared up for training.

"Well right now, there's so many currents coming into the cave, it's like a washing machine, a stone washing machine," Coast Guard Senior Chief Petty Officer Clay Hill said.

The swimmers had to pick a wave and ride it right on to the rocks at the cave entrance. One wrong move could have left them crushed against the wall and pulled out to sea.

But this session was a success. Everyone went in and came out in one piece, although some were exposed to the frigid sea when their equipment was torn on the jagged rocks.

The trainees laughed it off and headed off to the next exercise - and maybe to graduation. The washout rate in this program is high.

Those who make it will have part of our rugged and natural coastline to thank for taking them right up to the edge of the real thing.

Just this week a rescue swimmer from Air Station Astoria was credited with saving a woman who was stranded on rocks near Arch Cape on the Oregon coast. Her companion was swept away and drowned before the swimmers arrived.