It’s hot, rainy, cloudy, muggy, almost unbearable. But for some this is perfect weather because . . . : Surf ‘s Up : Hurricane Turns Fishing Trip Into Nightmare for Seven Men

For seven Southern California fishermen, Hurricane Darby turned a pleasure cruise into a two-day nautical nightmare that destroyed their yacht and brought them to the brink of death.

“It was like being in the center of a 12.5 earthquake for 12 hours with no break,” Edward Ragone said Wednesday from aboard the Chiquita Roma, a merchant vessel that carried the crew of the Oasis to shore late Wednesday night. None of the men were seriously injured.

“There were so many times we could have gone down and if we went down we all would have been dead,” said the 54-year-old Lake Forest man. “It was just one minute at a time, one wind at a time, one crash at a time.”

Ragone and the others set off July 1 for a weeklong fishing trip off the coast of Mexico. After three days of what owner William Holecamp called “excellent fishing,” the weather started getting rough.

The 65-foot Oasis was about 25 miles from San Benedicto Island on Sunday when it ran into serious trouble, said Holecamp, a 42-year-old businessman from Long Beach. With eight-foot seas and high winds, he said, the crew decided to head back to San Benedicto rather than continue on to Cabo San Lucas as planned. But then things got worse.

A huge wave spilled over the bow, sweeping it clean of equipment and disabling one of the ship’s two engines, Holecamp said. Water flooded the cockpit, and electrical fires broke out on the bridge and in the engine room as night fell. Three hours later, water smacked the side of the boat, blowing out the windows of the salon.

“With waves coming at you 30 feet high, you’ve lost control of the boat,” Holecamp said. “Everybody on board thought we weren’t going to make it.”

Somehow, Captain Lance Ekberg of Huntington Beach and his first mate, Jonathan Halford of Newport Beach, regained control with the remaining engine, and at 2 a.m. Monday the Oasis found calmer water just off San Benedicto. The Chiquita Roma, carrying a load of bananas from Honduras, responded to a distress call from the Coast Guard and arrived about 12 hours later.

After climbing across stormy seas on rope ladders, the men were finally safe aboard the Chiquita Roma.

The Oasis, a brand-new boat worth about $1 million, sank after the crew abandoned ship.

“It was a great feeling, I tell you, to get onto this big ship,” said Hal Neibling, 50, a surgeon from Long Beach. “It was like coming home to mother.”

Darby troubled at least two other boats from Southern California, officials said.

Ten passengers aboard the Tutor, a 60-foot shipping vessel from San Pedro, were saved by a merchant vessel and are headed toward Panama, Coast Guard Officer Brenda Toledo said.

A 45-foot sailboat carrying five people from the San Diego area was dead in the water near the eye of the storm--about 450 miles southwest of San Diego--Wednesday, Coast Guard spokeswoman Liz Brannan said. Coast Guard planes had been dropping pumps and life rafts to the Hosanna all day Wednesday, and another merchant ship, en route to Tahiti, was expected to pick up the passengers at about midnight, she added.

As they napped and took walks along the deck of the Chiquita Roma on their way to Port Hueneme, the survivors of the Oasis--who also include Richard Macklin, 46, and Michael Thomas, 45, both of Huntington Beach--were thrilled to be alive.

“We just went through a life-and-death situation for 18 hours, so we’re a tight group,” Ragone said. “We were friends before, but now we’re really close.

“We’ve got a good story to tell, but we would have traded it for a good day of fishing,” he added.

Before the storm hit, the men had three good days of fishing off the coast of Mexico. “We had it all nicely fileted and packed away,” Holecamp said wistfully. “Now it’s returned to the sea.”