Tough day at the Chatham Break: a capsized boat, and the windows blown out of another

David Wiener and his son Hans were returning to Pleasant Bay Thursday through the infamous Chatham break, a maze of water crashing over shoaling sandbars, when they found themselves riding the face of a 10-foot breaking wave. The steepness proved too much for their 23-foot center console boat. “The nose (of the boat) went down and (the boat) pulled right,” Hans Wiener said as he sat wrapped in a towel near the fishermen’s monument after the two men were rescued by Harbormaster Stu Smith and Assistant Harbormaster Thomas Deeg. Their boat wasn’t the only vessel to feel the power of the Chatham break Thursday. At 6:30 a.m., Tim Linnell was heading out at sunrise for a day of fishing for dogfish and skates. His vessel, Perry’s Pride, is substantially larger than the Wieners’ boat and built to take the pounding the ocean can dish out a hundred miles or more offshore. Following in a line of vessels headed out through the break, Linnell’s wheelhouse windows were blown out by the last in a set of four waves when his vessel didn’t recover in time from the previous swell. Video Read the story here 16:15

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