07/06/2025: Surfmen, Smith Island, Banana Ball

0:07On the bow. Here comes a big one. Watch your head. On the side bridge.

0:14Bill Whitaker:Being a surfman is sometimes compared to being a Navy SEAL or in the Army Special Forces. But in truth, this is a more exclusive club, isn't it? Right, right, right, right. Reaching! Nice reach, Josh. Josh, get him on board! It is. There's a small number of us. We're training for the opportunity to save human life. It's all the motivation you need.

0:42Smith Island is a tapestry of marshland, winding creeks, and mudflats. Waterfowl outnumber people here. Then again, the population, having dwindled by more than half since the 1990s, hovers around 200. With no airport or bridge, everything, groceries, utility workers, doctors, even the pastor, comes by boat. Life on the island must abide by Mother Nature's fickle nature. If the weather is bad, you're stuck.

1:13It looks like baseball and feels like baseball. But then there's this, an umpire feeling the music, A batter on no stilts, gymnastics in the outfield, and on the way home. Longtime baseball writer Tim Kirchhen came to a game and he said, this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. I loved it.

1:45I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

2:04Bill Whitaker:The spot where the Columbia River spills into the Pacific Ocean at the border between Oregon and Washington State is where Lewis and Clark ended their journey of discovery in 1805, with Clark writing in his journal, Ocean in view, oh joy. But it's not all joy. In fact, it's one of the most dangerous inlets in America. Up to a million cubic feet of water can pour out of the river's mouth every second and run right into waves that have been moving across the Pacific for thousands of miles. As we first reported last fall, it's precisely because of this powerful aquatic collision that elite members of the United States Coast Guard come to this place once each year, determined to earn the coveted certification as surfmen.

2:57On the bow. Here comes a big one. Touch your head. On the side bridge.

3:05Bill Whitaker:On a wet February afternoon, we're on board a 47-foot U.S. Coast Guard motor lifeboat with Chief Eric Kelly at the helm, driving through breaking surf barely 100 yards off the beach. I have a nice wall right up here. And another one right behind that. Exactly. Go for Kelly! At the time, Kelly was chief instructor at the Coast Guard's National Motor Lifeboat School. This was the first day of class, and the three students on his boat were studying his every turn of the wheel and calling out approaching swells. Got a saddle, a starboard bow. Head it. Cut your head.

3:54Bill Whitaker:Six more trainees were on two other boats with other instructors. Kelly says everyone is here because this place, at the mouth of the Columbia River, consistently has some of the worst weather and highest seas in America. We exposed them to a tremendous amount of surf conditions over four weeks, more so than they'd get over years at their own unit. Morning shipmates, how are we? Good, sir. First thing that morning, Tim Crochet, commanding officer of the lifeboat school, had welcomed this class of nine students. And I promise you the instructors behind me are going to give you world class instruction, and they're going to help you become a better motor lifeboat operator, and we're going to get you closer and closer to certifying as a surfman.

4:37Bill Whitaker:Certifying as surfman, that's the goal of each of these students and the dream of thousands of other members of the Coast Guard. Being a surfman is sometimes compared to being a Navy SEAL or in the Army Special Forces. But in truth, this is a more exclusive club, isn't it? Currently, we have about 130 active duty surfmen right now. How many members of the Coast Guard? I think the Coast Guard's right around 40 ,000 people. 40 ,000 people and 100 surfmen. So that is a pretty exclusive club. It is. There's a small number of us. Certifying as a surfman means the Coast Guard trusts you to drive a lifeboat on the most challenging rescue missions in 20-foot breaking waves and 50-knot winds.

5:25Bill Whitaker:At the entrance to the school is a display of every surfman medallion called a check ever earned. So how far back does this go? It goes back to 1872. That's when the U.S. Life-Saving Service began saving mariners in distress. It became the Coast Guard in 1915 and now operates 20 surf stations where rescues may have to be made in breaking waves. On average, the Coast Guard makes more than 5 ,000 rescues a year. Where is yours? Mine is right back here. It's check number 407. Chief Instructor Eric Kelly, whose boat we were on, wears his surfman number. I understand you have a tattoo. I do, I do. I have my surfman number.

6:11I'm surfing 545. This is something that is very, very important to me.

6:15Bill Whitaker:At the opening session of the Motor Lifeboat School, Chief Kelly read the Coast Guard's surfman's creed aloud. I will never unnecessarily jeopardize myself, my boat, or my crew, but will do so freely to rescue those in peril. And he told the students they'd each need to have the creed memorized before the four-week course was over. It takes a lot to get there. It takes a person, a special type person, willing to put themselves into those situations where you're looking up at a 20-foot breaking sea and be like, I want to do this. I want to keep training in this. This class was all male, but there are nearly a dozen female surfmen.

6:56Most candidates come here first for a basic course, then heavy weather, and finally this surf class.

7:04Bill Whitaker:Derek Samuelson, Trenton Campbell, and Joshua Slaughter are the three trainees on Eric Kelly's boat. Most of us are going to be pushing pretty close to four years when we get certified. that's almost a college degree worth of training in driving these boats. It's something not a lot of people get to do. It's not that they get to do it, but that they achieve it. That they achieve it, yes. When we come here, our only job is to learn and drive and surf, so it's a great opportunity. This is a representation of the mouse as a Columbia. Jeff Smith is the curator of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which has a giant map illustrating how the mouth of the Columbia River has earned the title Graveyard of the Pacific.

7:50Bill Whitaker:All these little boats that you see are representative of the shipwrecks that have occurred. All of these? Yeah. We have 50 of them numbered, but there's many, many more. Thousands more over several centuries, with at least 700 lives lost. The skeletons of wrecked ships still litter some area beaches. So despite how treacherous this waterway is, it's a vital economic waterway as well. It certainly is. Of all the grain exported from the United States, just over 40 percent goes out the Columbia River. Every commercial ship coming into the river must have a local pilot come on board to guide it. This video shows how perilous it can be just to get that pilot onto one of those ships.

8:41Bill Whitaker:Imagine the dangers faced by Coast Guardsmen trying to rescue a ship or sailboat or fishing boat that's in trouble. I'm always a little bit, I don't know if starstruck is the word or awestruck, when I'm in the presence of the men and women of our Coast Guard. Because the job they do is just amazing. It's incredible. An incredible group of people. It's such a cool mission that we get to do. We get to go drive these awesome boats out and have the opportunity to save people in their darkest day. As he drove into ever stormier seas on that first day of school, it was clear Eric Kelly would rather be at the helm of his lifeboat than just about anywhere else.

9:28So you love this, huh? I absolutely love this.

9:31Bill Whitaker:But Kelly was also deadly serious about teaching his students how to read every swell. Watch that. Run from that. Running, running, running center of that helm. I'm going. They got that beat. Got a window right here. Nice little near side shoulder. Easing off. Let that come to me. I'm going to get right on the back. Pull. Follow that peak point. This is going to get super dynamic down here. These are shooting in every direction. When he couldn't outrun a wave, Kelly executed what may be the most important maneuver a lifeboat driver must master. Nowhere to go. Squaring up. Squaring up is pointing the bow of the boat directly into and through a breaking wave, sometimes a really big breaking wave.

10:20Bill Whitaker:We hit a couple of those yesterday. We got the spray. Absolutely. You went up, and the bow was up, and you saw a blue sky, and then all of a sudden you're down in a hole. What's the worst thing you could do in a situation like that? The worst thing you could do is not be square to that breaking wave. You could have a knockdown, which is when the boat goes underneath water but rewrites in the same direction, or even worse, a 360-degree rollover. Have you ever experienced that yourself? I haven't experienced a full 360-degree rollover. I have experienced a knockdown or two, and that's what they designed this boat for.

10:58Bill Whitaker:That design is seen in this demonstration video. But out in the surf, Eric Kelly was showing his students how to avoid ever having to test it on a real mission. How long before you let the students take control of the boat? So starting tomorrow, we'll do another demonstration of wherever we're going to train. and then students are on it for the remainder of the course. Hold on. Whoa! Every day for the next four weeks, the students took the helm, with Eric Kelly signaling approval when they did something right and correcting them when they didn't. We probably should have squared up to that one, but on the bow, guys.

11:39Touch it.

11:45Bill Whitaker:Students drove in every kind of condition and ran simulated missions like pulling someone, in this case a dummy, out of the water. Nice reach, Josh. Get him on board. Don't play it off. Don't play it off. All right, stand by to clear the recess. Sometimes a real rescue mission can supplant the simulations, as when the boats were making one last training run on graduation day 2023. Mayday, mayday. Sure enough, we heard a mayday for distress go out over channel 1-6, the radio frequency. I think I may be taking on water. Hurry up. By the time the three training boats spotted a white boat called the Sandpiper with one man on board, conditions had gone from mild to mad.

12:36At this point, we're facing 25, 30-foot, 35-foot breaking seas, 50 knots of wind. It's raining, hailing, and very, very dynamic.

12:47Bill Whitaker:Far too dynamic to have any chance of towing the vessel to safety. It was also graduation day for the Coast Guard's Advanced Rescue Helicopter School, and they dropped a rescue swimmer named John Walton into the water. You can see him paddling furiously. It was his first rescue and they deployed him and he was able to retrieve that individual off the sandpiper right as that 30 plus foot brake rolled that boat multiple times. It's hard to imagine how either the rescued or the rescuer survived that, but they both did. But really seeing how the Coast Guard worked together and have one of the coolest rescues I've had my entire career.

13:32Bill Whitaker:On graduation day. On graduation day for these future surfmen. Graduation day for the class of 2024 was far more placid. All nine students completed the course and all nine had memorized the surfman's creed. I will, to the best of my ability, pursue each mission with the commitment, compassion, and courage inherent in the title of surfman. They didn't all certify as surfmen that day. Most had to wait to return to their home units for their commanding officers to give them the nod. But two of the nine got a surprise. BM2 Casey, BM2 Campbell, front and center, please. Dorian Casey and Trenton Campbell had their commanding officers in attendance, ready to bestow the honor then and there.

14:21Bill Whitaker:It seemed every certified surfman on the West Coast had come, and they handed the coveted medallions, those checks, to one another. Surfer 494, Station Kooley River. 485, Station Morro Bay. 484, Station Humboldt Bay. 450, Station Kooley River. 407, Station Chetco River. And then to the two newest surfmen. Trenton Campbell accepted hugs from his trainers and fellow classmates and then headed back to his base, Station Quillayute River on the coast of Washington, ready to do what he joined the Coast Guard to do. The reason why we all want to be here is that dream to save a life. I think there's no better feeling than that.

15:10We're training for the opportunity to save a human life. It's all the motivation you need.

15:21Smith Island doesn't sit in the middle of Chesapeake Bay so much as it bobs there. Time marches on while the land recedes, turning to marsh as sea levels rise, storms come fierce, and erosion unleashes its ground gate. We talk often about what climate change does to faraway continents, countries, and cities. But its impact in the U.S. might be felt most sharply in a small coastal community we visited last summer, A Maryland island struggling to survive, where crabs are plentiful, crime is non-existent, and the residents, who trace their lineage and dialect back to the 1600s, might be among this country's first climate refugees.

16:03Not even 100 miles from D.C. and Baltimore, Smith Island is a tapestry of marshland, winding creeks, and mudflats. Waterfowl outnumber people here. Then again, the population, having dwindled by more than half since the 1990s, hovers around 200. With no airport or bridge, everything, groceries, utility workers, doctors, even the pasture, comes by boat, 40 minutes from the mainland. Life on the island must abide by Mother Nature's fickle nature. Tides, winds. If the weather is bad, you're stuck. Love people, love doing what I do, make cakes, crab cakes. So it is that native Smith Islanders like Mary Ada Marshall persist on a combination of spine, heart, and guts.

16:50How do you characterize this place to people who have never been here? All right. Well, I've been here my entire life. I don't feel isolated, but people that come here sometimes, they feel like, I can't get off. I can't get to my car. I can't. We learn we're survivors. We learn how to adapt with the weather. It's like a big family. But let me tell you something, if you do wrong, everybody knows it too. Here, the school bus floats. The ambulance flies. Incomes are modest. This is part of the poorest county in Maryland. The citizens live by an unwritten code based on personal morality. I'm wondering what role faith plays on Smith Island.

17:33Big part. That's the government of our island. It really is. We don't really have government much. I mean, we don't have any law. We don't need it. There ought to be a crime. No crime. A speed limit's a golf cart. I mean, how fast can you go in a golf cart? And here, I feel so safe. I do. I mean, I just feel like if I need anything, that I can pick up my phone. And I don't care what anybody's doing. They'll come and say, what's the matter? What do you need? That's golden. And you've got to have a lot of faith to live right here in the middle of this bay. The island was first chartered by Captain John Smith in 1608.

18:15Today, most residents can draw a direct line to the first Smith Islanders to brave a life here. Tyler, Evans, Marshall. The same last names adorning the weathered gravestones adorn the mailboxes now. Among those born and raised here, Eddie Summers and Mark Kitching. How far do your families go back? I said, my grandmother, the grandmother of the kitchen was originally in Evans, and she goes back to the Tyler and Evans' way back. In 1785, on the Tyler and Evans part of me, and Summers just came in 1870, around 1870. Here, the past courses through the blood, and also the brogue. Linguists come to study the singular accent, part Elizabethan English, part Southern.

19:04Can we talk about the accent? You know what I tell people about our accent? I'll say, we were here first. You all screwed it up. The accent is original, and so is the signature Smith Island backwards talk, saying the opposite of what you mean. It's about timing, tone, and it's best left to the locals. I walk off the boat and I say, Smith Island isn't anything special. How's that get received? I'll tell you to get back on the boat.

19:35Also learning the lingo, Shannon Abbott, a newcomer from New Jersey. I made our neighbors a casserole, I don't know, a few weeks ago. And they said, that ain't fair. And I'm like, okay, that means it's good. How do you explain this place to people from South Jersey? It's like that feeling when you were a kid, like that first day of summer vacation. And you're like, hmm, what am I going to do today? I'm going to go find bugs, make mud pies, whatever it is, stay out till, you know, the fireflies are out at night. That's what this place is to me. Transports you back to being a girl. Time has largely been frozen here for centuries.

20:16The economy and everything else on Smith Island was and is based in, on, and around the water. The skipjack sailors of Chesapeake Bay, who propelled only by sail, hunt the oyster. Walter Cronkite saw romance in Smith Island and its watermen. That was 1965. Not much about this culture has changed since. Same methods, same rhythms. Crabs in the summer, oysters in the winter. Modern-day watermen like Mark Kitching see the job, yes, as a means of income, but also as an inheritance. What do watermen mean to this community? Well, you know, going back, you know, you go back 75 years ago, that's all it was.

21:01There was no other thing but watermen. How many watermen now? We're down to about 20. By the turn of this century, fears surfaced that Smith Island might not last another century. Better job opportunities on the mainland caused an exodus. There are now so few children, the island's only school recently closed. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, erosion eats away up to 12 feet of shoreline a year, and the bay is trespassing on homes, rising tides that don't lift boats. In 2013, concerned about the island's bleak and vulnerable future, the state of Maryland earmarked$1 million, encouraging residents to relocate to the mainland.

21:46The deal? We'll buy your property and tear down the buildings. The homes on them had to be demolished and nothing could ever be built on them. And I said, that's the death of Smith Island. Surprisingly, or maybe not, community has always outweighed money here. Not one resident took the easy payout, and the state abandoned the plan. What was your reaction the first time you heard about the buyout offers that were coming from the government? You really want to know? I said, I ain't going nowhere. just like everybody else. Still, the moment was the equivalent of a foghorn blowing. A warning, Smith Island needed saving.

22:28Suddenly, watermen and retirees were learning how to apply for grants and lobby state legislators. And they've been strikingly successful, receiving more than$43 million for elevating roads, building jetties, restoring buildings, and drawing in tourists. But the environmentalists and climate scientists we consulted worry that even Smith Island grit is no match for a rapidly changing environment. Here we are, you know, getting to see a major thoroughfare on Smith Island. Hilary Harp Falk is the CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. She lives in Annapolis and travels all around the Mid-Atlantic, fighting to preserve the bay.

23:11But her work around Smith Island is personal. This is where she spent her childhood summers. These pelicans we see, you're saying these weren't here when you were a girl? No, so these nesting pelicans have been moving north. They're summering now in more northern places. As a result of a changing climate. Correct. How does the rising sea level here in Chesapeake Bay compare to other bodies of water? Right now we're expecting in Maryland to see an increase in sea level rise by 1 to 2 feet by 2050 and more than 4 feet by 2100. For the record, that means the Bay has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast.