- When I started researching the many shipwrecks of the outer banks, I found story after story after story.

And they were so fantastical that if Hollywood made a movie of those today, using those exact details, people would say, oh, you're making this up, but here's the key, these were real stories.

- Make no mistake, if you are into the water, there is no way to be more part of it than diving.

You're in the water, you're surrounded by it.

You might as well be on the moon.

- I think the rescue swimmer drop in the Coast Guard is one of the best jobs that they offer.

There's just no boring days.

Really.

- Back in the day, the early ships captains did not trust their instruments to them.

The safest thing to do is stay with inside of the land.

Well, that's disaster to do along here because of all these shows.

- Sometimes when you're too close to a thing, you don't pay attention to how special it is.

Like the people who served in the Coast Guard and the lifesaving service, - I always knew my father had this love of the Coast Guard.

There's this great picture of him I have where he's opening the doors to this Cookhouse museum and he's smiling.

Yeah, and I know why he is smiling, how much this station meant to him personally and how much this station meant to the black community.

- My father spent a large part of his life in the US Coast Guard.

They're a tradition that goes back on the outer banks from the start.

And some of those guys made the ultimate sacrifice going out in conditions that most people would not even consider.

You know?

And that's their job.

- The reason this area is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic is multifaceted.

It's actually got the Labrador current coming from the north, the Gulf Stream coming from the south, and they meet right here.

There's huge amounts of energy that's being carried in there and it's not only water energy, but it's also carried sand.

And when they hit, they explode.

- I'm Mark Corbett.

This is Panda Daniels off the Diamond Shoals, which can be 20 feet deep, you know, just very shallow within a couple miles.

It can drop off to thousands of feet.

- The the short break is extremely dangerous.

It hits all these different swells that can come in from different directions.

I've never heard of a place with rips like this.

- The group that we have is called the North Carolina Shipwreck Project.

It's been my intention to dive every shipwreck.

You can dive on the outer banks, which is probably impossible.

I have personally been to 69 shipwrecks and I think there's somewhere between 90 and a hundred that you could actually dive on.

We're trying to document what they look like so that people can actually see these things.

Sometimes I like to get down and just look up at a great big shipwreck and marvel and you're like, wow, this is cool.

Some of these shipwrecks are kind of like they're frozen in time.

It's not in a museum, but because not everybody can go out there and look at it, it also hasn't been ransacked like it probably would if it was on land.

- So my 11th dive ever was my first dive off of haters and it was the Proteus.

We go down and you couldn't see the shipwreck 'cause there were so many sand tigers above it.

It's a vastly different experience to see these creatures in their element and to witness this manmade mechanical structure that once was on the surface.

And it's become its own ecosystem.

- We don't have that many coral reefs around here, but these shipwrecks are turning into them.

Our two most popular deep wrecks are the Em Clark, which is a tanker that sank after being torpedoed in 1942.

And the USS monitor, which is arguably the most famous shipwreck in the East coast of the United States.

You're in two totally different eras.

You're on a giant oil tanker on one of them, and you're on a civil war ironclad.

On the other one.

The vessel that we dive the most is called the Dixie Arrow.

11 people died on it, including a guy named Oscar Chapel who held the vessel into the wind so that the other crewman could get off and he burned alive at the helm.

This is where we go to look at the wonders of the ocean, but at the same time, it's a grave.

- Anytime you hear the word keeper, people automatically say, oh, that's the guy in charge of the lighthouse.

Which is quite correct.

But what most people do not realize is that during this same period of time, there was a sister service and we realized we needed a group of people to go out and save the, the shipwreck victims.

And that was born as the United States Lifesaving Service in 1871.

Eventually it becomes known in 1915 as the United States Coast Guard, which everybody has heard of.

Our, our first attempts were disastrous.

We modeled after the British volunteer stations, then we had a national service that came in the the mid 18 hundreds and it was just corrupt with cronyism finally because of two major shipwrecks that occurred here on the coast of, of North Carolina, Huron and the Metropolis.

It occurred within 20 miles of each other and within two months of each other, almost 200 people drowned within sight of people on the shore seeing that America was outraged.

And they said, you gotta clean this act up.

Fortunately, they hired Sumner, the only superintendent of the lifesaving service for 1878 until 1915 when it merged with the revenue cutter service to form the Coast Guard.

- So I'm a helicopter rescue swimmer.

I exclusively fly on helicopters and we're in a crew of four people.

It's two pilots a flight, me and a rescue swimmer.

You know, the life saving station and the life saving service that started out in this area eventually led to my job.

So it's cool how Coast Guard and Aviation came together to create the helicopter rescue swimmer program.

- Richard Etheridge, you know, in his becoming the commander of this station in 1880, you know, he really opened up the door for blacks here to be in the early Coast Guard.

- The island was truly an experiment because it was only like 15 years after the Civil War that you have a black man that was in charge of a highly coveted position.

Before he could get that job, he had to get people that did not look like him, to stand up and say, you are the best qualified on the coast.

- So I always say the Richard Ridge story, it's really a much broader story.

You know, it's the story of the enslaved.

- Eventually we had 29 stations about six miles apart.

In the 44 year history of that service.

These men responded to over 178,000 lives in peril on the sea of which they saved over 177,000.

When we talk about heroes, these were real heroes.

- The rescue occurs in the middle of the night.

Okay?

It's October 11th, 1896.

They spot the ES Newman around nine o'clock and the rescue doesn't end until one in the morning.

The story is that the other stations had stopped beach patrol 'cause the storm is so bad.

Richard Ethridge still has someone in the watch tower.

Theodore Meekins, he sees something, it's a flare and he calls Richard Ethridge and they see another flare and that kind of gets crew into action.

Well, the island is a wash, it's a hurricane, it's a storm.

They couldn't use a surf boat.

- Surf boats were designed for heavy surf.

If you talk to surfers today on their surfboards, they'll tell you sometimes it takes a couple of hours to get past the breakers.

So imagine launching a boat in that.

And, and these were all hand powered with the men called with Armstrong Engines, - You know, but Richard Ethridge was a problem solver and he ends up, you know, getting two of his best swimmers to tie ropes around themselves while the other Richard Ethridge and the crew kinda hold on from the shore.

- Well, I can only imagine someone telling me to tie a line to one of my shipmates and swim out because you have a wooden ship that's coming apart, it's dark, you don't have any, any exposure.

Shoot, no fancy flashlights and nobody's coming for you.

- And they end up saving all on board.

And the captain, his wife, he had his 3-year-old son and he also had these six other crew members.

- Although time separates us, I wish to thank Richard Ether and the crew for the courage, dedication, and humility whenever Daniel Gardner would've been his grandfather, Sylvester Gardner that was on the, the Newman talks about the island story.

He gets a tear in his eye because he realized very quickly that if Richard Ethridge and his crew were not successful, his father would've never been and he would never been.

That's the beauty of the Coast Guard doing its job off.

- There are many dramatic stories of heroism, but one in particular that's so touching a shipwreck that was off the coast of Cape Hatteras was an enormous storm.

The crew is looking at these 8, 10, 15 foot waves and they're saying to themselves, we might not get past this.

And this is what breaks me up when I read this.

This crew took out the small little possessions in their pockets and they made out a simple will and they handed it to one of the guys to keep it back at the station.

They were prepared to do that.

- So there, there is a sense of respect for like someone's final resting place.

- Some of these shipwrecks, there was a lot of loss of life.

Like we dived the Huron USS Huron up in Nags head, but close to a hundred people died on that shipwreck.

The U 7 0 1, there's still half the crew in the stern section.

- Keep keeper Patrick Ethridge.

He was an old salt, they was going out for a rescue and, and one of the, the surfman said, captain, we may get out there but we're never gonna make it back.

And he very looked at him and said, son, the Blue Book says we gotta go out.

Don't say a damn thing about coming back.

- I love rough weather 'cause it makes me alive because it makes you pay attention.

- You have to be able to handle the depths, you have to be able to handle the current and be able to stay calm under pressure.

As soon as you hit the water, everything else shuts up.

Nothing exists outside this breathing loop.

- There's a lot of excitement building up in a case when you have a confirmed boat, a confirmed person that you're gonna get out to 'em, you come on scene and you start.

It's not always what you hear.

I've seen it get up to about 30 feet.

People shouldn't be out in those situations, but sometimes they're caught so far offshore that they just can't escape.

Like sometimes if they lose calms or don't have the proper emergency equipment, sometimes just finding 'em miss hard enough and then you're hovering over 'em and the flight me will hook me to the cable and I'll start hoisting down to the boat, the boat's rocking side to side.

And that flight mech is trying to time you, getting your feet on the deck safely without getting hit by a mast or stanchions or anything like that.

Your heart's definitely pumping and you know, that's, that's, that's what that a lot of us signed up for and, and kind of love being in that spot and seeing what you could do and, and getting to help people in those situations.

- There's still a great deal of teamwork that goes into the diving that we do.

There is this sense of like, you're self-reliant, but you're also team focused.

Team oriented.

You're not some maverick out there on the water by yourself.

- You know, you see like fighter pilots drinking in a bar.

They're friends, they trust each other with their lives.

You've got that going on in diving.

- We are all going through the same storm, but we are in different size boats.

Everybody's got a storm they're going through.

When we come together to help one another, that's when America can truly be strong.