Dynamic wetting is fundamental to many coating processes. In hot dip galvanization, an unstable contact line can generate wetting defects and air entrainment in the coating, limiting the quality of the final product. While the literature focuses mainly on capillary-viscous flows, which are amenable to analytical treatment, some configurations, such as dip coating, operate in inertia-dominated conditions. This work presents an extensive and unprecedented experimental characterization of the interface and contact line dynamics on a surface entering a liquid bath in inertia-dominated conditions using laser-induced fluorescence (LIF). Moreover, we complement the analysis with particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) underneath the gas-liquid interface to study the interaction between the liquid flow and the free surface. Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) of the interface displacement is presented and analyzed in combination with the velocity field dynamics, enhanced by physics-constrained Radial Basis Functions (RBFs).