Coast Guard Returns Five Plucked From Sinking Boat : Rescue: Crew of 45-foot ketch Hosanna was on a planned six-week voyage to the South Pacific when water began leaking into the vessel.

A prayerful group of five San Diego-area sailors returned to terra firma Saturday afternoon aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Morgenthau, profusely thanking their rescuers as they tearfully fell into the embrace of family and friends.

“How do you ever thank people like this?” Sally Collier said as she motioned toward crew members of the Morgenthau while hugging her bruised but otherwise unbattered husband, Moses (Mo) Rodriguez, after he danced off the powerful 378-foot cutter.

“What a way to come back into town!” Collier said.

Rodriguez was one of the five lucky sailors plucked from the 45-foot ketch Hosanna early Thursday morning as it foundered in rough seas about 450 miles southwest of San Diego.

“I love you! I love you! I love you!” a misty-eyed Collier exclaimed to her husband, promising him a pizza party Saturday night to celebrate the safe return.

Similar tears of joy and relief from well-wishers greeted the Hosanna’s other crew members--Robert and Joan Smalley, Marilee Barnkert and Robert Peishel--as they walked down the gangplank of pier 4 at the 32nd Street Naval Station.

The Hosanna and its crew were on a planned six-week voyage to the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific to deliver the sailboat to missionaries working for the Assemblies of God Church.

But less than three days out of San Diego, problems developed Tuesday with the sailboat’s auxiliary engine that caused water to begin leaking into the vessel--all at the same time high seas and strong winds from Hurricane Darby picked up.

The crew managed to stem the leak, and decided to come back to San Diego. But a second leak sprang in the engine, which is cooled with salt water, and Rodriguez said that things became touch-and-go.

“Yeah, we were frightened, and for a while, I didn’t know if we were going to make it,” he said, adding that the crew had three plastic buckets “which were going full-time” to bail water from the boat. The electrical- and hand-pumps were not working, and the regular radios were also out of commission.

“Thank God for the EPERB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon),” which sent the Hosanna’s position to the Coast Guard by way of a tracking satellite, Rodriguez said.

“We had hoped that we could keep bailing until dawn and then stabilize things” but the waters were too turbulent, said Joan Smalley, who along with her husband, Robert, had refurbished the Hosanna earlier this year as a project for their church.

Two Coast Guard Falcon jets from San Diego and a C-130 cargo lane from Sacramento dropped three pumps and a radio to the crew Wednesday morning. The Morgenthau was diverted to the Hosanna while on its way back to San Diego after having earlier helped rescue two other crews in the same vicinity.

A three-man crew from the Morgenthau took a small craft from the cutter and rescued the five early Thursday about 3 a.m.

“It was a little dangerous because you’ve got 35 m.p.h. winds and 8-foot waves, and it’s dark,” Capt. Robert T. Glynn said at dockside Saturday.

The five sailors were given “hotel-type service” aboard the cutter to help them recover from their physical and emotional ordeal, Glynn said. The Hosanna was put under tow behind the Morgenthau, then transferred to the cutter Tyee on Friday morning. It is due in San Diego on Monday.

“I just thank God that I live in a country with all of the resources to rescue us like this,” Rodriguez said.