In January 1973, when he was 19 years old, the Fort Dodge man enlisted in the United States Coast Guard.

He said the smaller Coast Guard suited him better than the much larger Navy.

“Coast Guard is elite,” he said.

Its diverse missions include search and rescue work and maintaining the aids to navigation that ship captains rely on. Rentz got to experience some of all those roles during his service.

And he helped to rescue a man whose small boat was flipped over by a wave off the coast of Oregon.

His father and grandfather were both Navy veterans. His grandfather served in World War I and his father served on PT boats during World War II.

He said his father “was pretty proud of me” when he enlisted in the Coast Guard.

Rentz, a native of Algona, was a recent graduate of Algona High School when he entered the service.

He took his first airplane ride to go to basic training at Alameda, California. After nine weeks of basic training, he crossed the country to Portsmouth, Virginia, where he boarded the Coast Guard cutter Ingham. He was assigned as an engineer apprentice and worked in the engine room of the 327-foot-long vessel. The ship sailed to the Caribbean Sea and took up what the Coast Guard called an “ocean station.” Rentz explained that while on ocean station, the ship cruised around a section of sea, ready to rush to the assistance of any other vessel or aircraft that got into distress in the area. He said his ship’s ocean station duty was one of the last such assignments the Coast Guard had.

After two months aboard the Ingham, Rentz went to engineer school in Virginia. That training, which fully qualified him to work on ship engines, took about a year and a half.

After completing that school, he was assigned to the Cape Henlopen, a 95-foot search and rescue ship based out of Petersburg. Alaska.

Then he was switched to a ship called a buoy tender based out of Ketchikan, Alaska. Buoys are markers in the sea that alert ship captains to hazards like sand bars or shallow channels. A buoy tender is a vessel used to transport the sailors, tools and supplies needed to maintain buoys.

Rentz said he was at sea for about a week at a time as his ship and crew checked on buoys throughout the Bay of Alaska. He said that bay had some rough water, including 40- to 50-foot seas on occasion. Despite the huge waves, Rentz never got seasick on the buoy tender or any other vessel.

Next, he was assigned to a 44-foot-long motor life boat based out of Florence, Oregon. That boat was one of the smallest in the Coast Guard and had a crew of three.

“That was kind of fun, but it was really intense,” he said.

His boat was stationed at an area where a river empties into the Pacific Ocean, creating some treacherous currents.

Rentz said he was on duty aboard the motor life boat every other day, for four hours at a time. And when he was on duty, he was on the boat, ready to respond to a distress call at a moment’s notice.

Once while he was on lifeboat duty, a small vessel was coming in to dock at a jetty when it was flipped over by a huge wave that struck it from behind. Rentz and his lifeboat crew responded. They pulled the man out of the water and towed his overturned boat into shore.

“I saved a life out there,” he said.

Toward the very end of his Coast Guard career, Rentz maintained one of the oldest and most picturesque aids to navigation — a lighthouse. His job was to make regular maintenance checks of the Heceta Head Lighthouse north of Florence, Oregon. He said it’s an often photographed lighthouse that appears in lots of books and calendars.

He was discharged from the Coast Guard in January 1977.

But he would have one more encounter with the very first ship he sailed on. About 30 years after he served on the Ingham, he found it in Charleston, South Carolina, where it was being repaired and repainted before it became the centerpiece of the USCGC Ingham Memorial Museum in Key West, Florida.. He went aboard for a visit.

“It was just freaky because it smelled the same,” he said.