Fishing Boat Hits Tanker Just Outside L.A. Harbor : Collision: The Coast Guard is investigating the accident. One passenger on the sportfishing boat jumped overboard in fright, but no one was seriously injured.

A sportfishing boat and a tanker hauling jet fuel collided in the darkness just outside Los Angeles Harbor shortly before midnight Thursday, tossing the small ship like a toy and injuring seven people, none seriously. One passenger jumped overboard in fright.

The 35 passengers and seven crew members of the 80-foot fishing boat Shogun were hurled to the deck when the bow smashed into the Sealift Antarctic, a 564-foot tanker on its way to San Francisco, the Coast Guard said.

Forty barrels of jet fuel spilled into the sea. Some cleanup effort was made, but officials said the fuel evaporated rapidly and posed little threat to the environment.

Coast Guard investigators were investigating the collision, which occurred in calm, one-foot seas with six miles of visibility, Chief Petty Officer Mark Kennedy said. Both vessels were fully lighted and no others were nearby, Kennedy added.

Drug tests were scheduled to be given to those at the helm and in command, investigators said, but results were not expected for at least a week.

Passenger Terry Slechta was unreeling his line on the stern of the sportfishing boat and deckhand Vince Jenkins was 10 minutes from going to bed when they looked up and saw the huge tanker. It was as though a four-story building had risen up from the waters.

“A big building, that’s what it looked like. Just like that thing they brought King Kong home in,” Slechta said later.

Jenkins bolted for the front of the boat, which was two miles outside the harbor’s breakwater. The next thing he heard was “one big thud” as the Shogun plowed into the port side of the tanker six times its size.

Sausages and lentil soup splattered over the galley. Passengers sleeping below were heaved from their bunks as the bow of the boat crunched into the tanker. Nearly 2,000 gallons of jet fuel spit from the tanker through a hole no bigger than a half-dollar.

“If we had been hit in the midship, we would have all been dead,” Shogun passenger and part-time crew member Gary Hull said, still shaking. “We were such a little vessel at the mercy of such a big ship.”

When the sun rose Friday, the Shogun was sitting at Ports O’Call Village in San Pedro, its bow badly damaged. Its captain, 25-year-old Timothy Filson, was hospitalized with head injuries, but his condition was listed as good.

The tanker was anchored inside the breakwater with the hole in its midsection, a five-inch crack and a dented hull. None of its estimated 24 crew members was reported injured.

The tanker, a civilian ship chartered by the Navy and operated by Coast Guard-licensed merchant mariners, had loaded its cargo in the Port of Long Beach. It was heading toward San Francisco with 7.8 million gallons of jet fuel, officials said.

Navy officials said it was difficult to say whether the fishing boat would have shown up on the tanker’s radar because of its size and low profile. “That’s one thing the Coast Guard will be looking at--should they have seen it, or could they have seen it,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Steve Chesser in Long Beach.

Navy officials identified the tanker’s skipper only as Capt. Irish.

The Shogun, a 6-month-old charter sportfishing boat based in Ports O’Call, was bound for Catalina to catch squid for bait and then sail on to San Clemente for sea bass fishing. There were 35 passengers, four deck hands, two licensed skippers and one cook aboard, deckhand Jenkins said.

The Coast Guard was investigating whether radar aboard the vessel was operating at the time of the collision.

Most of the Shogun’s passengers, including one woman and a boy celebrating his 10th birthday, were asleep below when the vessels crossed paths about two miles south of Angel’s Gate, a main entrance to the harbor.

The few people who were on deck called out when they saw the ship, but it was too late, witnesses said. The boat began to pitch, and one frightened man leaped overboard, perilously close to the Shogun’s propellers. Crewmen tossed plastic bottles, empty jugs, trash, anything they could find to mark his position in the darkness, Slechta said, then returned to pick him up when the vessels unlocked.

“We had to keep yelling, ‘Where are you?’ It was so dark we couldn’t see anything. He would yell back, ‘I’m over here!’ Finally we got to him and it took five of us to get him out of the water,” Hull said.

Four Shogun passengers were taken to Long Beach Memorial Hospital. Mark Capanni, 42; Ishihara Takaji, 43, and Andrew Lynch, 27, were released after treatment for cuts, bruises and a possible broken arm, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Only the skipper was admitted. He declined to be interviewed Friday.

Times staff writer Nieson Himmel contributed to this story.