The waves were five feet high when Gunner's Mate 1st Class Jacob Frasier and other sailors from the U.S.S. Typhoon (PC-5) teamed up with Coast Guardsmen for a boarding operation on the northern Arabian Gulf one day last fall. The Coast Guard coxswain rode a swell too high and swamped the boat on the down-slope.

"The coxswain told her guys to inflate their stuff," Frasier says, referring to the Coasties' underarm personal flotation gear. Sitting on the bridge of U.S.S. Hurricane (PC-3) moored at Virginia's Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek in April, Frasier, 28, raises his arms to mimic the constricted poses of the poor Coast Guardsmen. "You should have seen them. Their weapons were all in the faces."

With the boat swamped, the coxswain losing control and the Coasties all but imprisoned in their floats, Frasier and the other sailors were near panic. The Dallas native says he started bailing with his tactical helmet, which had holes drilled in it to save weight and so made for a poor bucket.

Meanwhile, one of Frasier's shipmates, a Gunner's Mate 3rd Class, aimed his weapon at the rising water at his feet, as though threatening to shoot it, and screamed, "What's going on?"

Back on the Hurricane, Frasier laughs, perhaps because swamped boats are the least of his worries. For Frasier and other sailors assigned to the U.S. Navy's eight coastal patrol boats, wild rides on rough seas, dangerous boardings of suspicious ships and harrowing rescue missions on hostile waters such as the Arabian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden are facts of life.

Frasier's former ship Typhoon is one of five Navy patrol boats forward-deployed to the Arabian Gulf to protect Iraq's two offshore oil platforms and to board and search suspicious vessels. Thirteen Little Creek-based crews take turns flying out to man the five deployed boats on six-month rotations. Three additional boats, including Hurricane and U.S.S. Thunderbolt (PC-12), are at Little Creek for training.

One hundred and eighty feet long and displacing just 320 tons (versus more than 8,000 tons for a destroyer), the patrol boats, called PCs by their crews, are among the smallest Navy fighting ships. Their small size means they can maneuver in waters that are too shallow and too crowded for destroyers and cruisers, making them ideal for operations on the Arabian Gulf and in other littoral waters where the world's pirates, smugglers and insurgents hide. But for their crews of just 30, the PCs are a lot to handle -- and so are their diverse and dangerous missions.

PC sailors must wear many hats. Besides the gunner's role indicated by his rank, Frasier also serves as assistant section leader, master helmsman, ammunition administrator, conning officer and small boat coxswain -- and he's working on his officer-of-the-deck qualification. This is far more responsibility than most big-ship sailors bear, but it's typical of PC sailors, and it's a preview of things to come for the Navy-at-large. Today's destroyers have more than 300 people aboard, but to save money, the new 3,000-ton Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, is designed for a crew of just 75. Manning an LCS will demand the same flexibility and broad responsibility that today's PCs sailors demonstrate every day.

"I'm basically a diesel mechanic," says Thunderbolt Engineman 3rd Class Cody Edgett, 21, from upstate New York. "I also do air-conditioning and refrigeration, potable water, fire party and VBSS" -- or Visit, Board, Search and Seizure. For the latter, Edgett spent five weeks at a special school, learning tactics and qualifying on firearms. While deployed last year, Edgett says, "we boarded tankers, tugs, dhows (small fishing boats) ... searching for any contraband."

Some boardings had unexpected results.

"On one boarding, [we found] a guy [who] had fallen on the well deck and broke his ankle," Edgett recalls. "Our [medic] gave him advice and helped him out. On another [boarding], on a dhow, we found a guy with a kidney stone and helped him out too."

PCs aren't big enough to accommodate dedicated VBSS parties, so the duty is spread across the crew, only adding to the overworked sailors' responsibilities.

"I like the challenge," says Bosun's Mate 1st Class Gary Jeter, 32.

Jeter is an Atlanta native currently assigned to Thunderbolt for training. In addition to VBSS and handling the ship's small boats, Jeter stands watch on the bridge as an officer of the deck, a task that on larger ships is assigned only to commissioned officers. "You've got to maintain safe navigation of the ship when you're on the bridge," he says. "You're in charge of everyone's lives."

Boardings come with big responsibilities, too -- and they can be scary. Just getting aboard a vessel sometimes requires scaling a 50-foot ladder over raging seas while wearing heavy gear. Then there's the language barrier between the search parties and the crews of the ships being searched. "You've got to rely on body language," Jeter says.

A tragedy during Jeter's last deployment to the Arabian Gulf drove home the danger that PC crews routinely face. On April 24 last year, sailors and Coasties from U.S.S. Firebolt (PC-5) were preparing to search a dhow when it exploded, killing Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Pernaselli, Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher Watts and Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class Nathan Bruckenthal and wounding several others.

Jeter had been assigned to the same search duty just a day earlier.

Frasier has had his own encounters with mortality while on deployment. On April 29 last year in the Gulf of Aden, Firebolt and other ships from the U.S. and German navies came to rescue of a sinking dhow packed with 135 Somali refugees. When Firebolt approached, the dhow capsized. The rescuers pulled 89 survivors from the water. Typhoon arrived on the scene just in time to help recover some of the dead. Frasier recounts hauling children's corpses from the sea.

The small size of PC crews means more work and greater responsibility for sailors, but it also means stronger relationships that help them cope with the challenges of dangerous deployments, according to Hurricane skipper Lt. Comm. Brent Devore, 34.

"With a crew of 30, this is a family," Devore says.