They Almost Went Down With the Ship : Rescue: Southland fishermen lost their boat in Hurricane Darby, but escaped with their lives.

The only thing worse than facing a hurricane on land would be to meet one, as five Southland fishermen did, in a 65-foot boat at sea.

“Absolutely,” said Bill Holekamp, who lost his new boat, Oasis, but was thankful to escape with his life.

One engine gone. Pumps unable to keep up with the water pouring into the boat. Sea anchor ineffective. Life rafts useless. Try to inflate them in 100-knot winds and they would blow away like balloons.

Mike Thomas recalled jolts of electricity coursing through the knee-deep water in the cabin.

Ed Ragone figured that “if we didn’t drown, we’d be facing the sharks in the morning.”

Pick your death. Rick Macklin, resigned to it, said: “I was just hoping it wouldn’t be painful.”

Otherwise, Hal Neibling said, it was a wonderful fishing trip.

All except Ragone, a self-described “novice fisherman,” are longtime fishing buddies in their 40s. They met the Oasis at Manzanillo, Mexico, after its trip through the Panama Canal, fresh from the Donzi boatyard in Florida. Along with skipper Lance Ekberg and first mate Jay Halford of Huntington Beach, they rode its maiden voyage smack into Hurricane Darby at the Socorro and San Benedicto Islands, 378 miles off the coast of Mexico in July--the start of the hurricane season.

“We went down there knowing that,” Macklin said. “When we originally planned it, it was going to be earlier. But we thought we had the communications to be knowledgeable about the situation. We thought we had the speed to outrun it.”

Also, when they arrived at the islands, they noticed a Mexican naval vessel had been secured for heavy weather with fore and aft anchors and four cables strung to rocks ashore.

“But when we were boarded (for a routine check) they professed to have no knowledge of any bad weather approaching,” Neibling said.

Even on the night of July 4, before Darby arrived, Holekamp said: “The weather report we had indicated a storm 400 miles south moving at eight knots. But by dawn’s early light we were involved with the lead squall line of the storm.”

Given more warning, they would have headed for Cabo San Lucas about 200 miles north.

“But you can’t make more than 10 or 12 knots in those conditions,” Holekamp said.

So when Darby, moving at 19-22 knots, caught them at the islands, there was no place to run, no place to hide. They tried the lee side of San Benedicto until a monster wave wiped out one engine and most of their electronics, causing loss of headway and control and taking them back out to sea, where they fought a 30-hour battle of survival until rescued by a banana boat.

Before the hurricane, Macklin, who lives in Huntington Harbour and owns some auto-parts stores, shot videotape showing a bountiful catch of marlin, wahoo and tuna. “Two days of fabulous fishing,” Ragone said. “Stuff that would take two months to catch in our local waters.”

Then the tape shows heavy seas, and someone is heard on the audio saying: “Eight-five knots of wind here. We’re driving the boat with swim masks on, and we’re just having a grand old time.”

The next segment shows them sitting around the salon in life jackets, appearing apprehensive. The final segment was shot by a crewman on the banana boat as they climbed aboard, like men who had cheated fate.

Each man deals with fear in his own way. Neibling, a Long Beach oral surgeon, wrote a straightforward account for the Tuna Club newsletter, but Macklin said: “I don’t think he really illustrated how scared everybody was. We all thought we were going to die.”

None of the five denied he was scared--”terrified,” in fact, several said--but all agree that nobody panicked. Thomas said all were heroes, especially Ekberg and Halford, “to stay down in the bilge and work on the engines as long as they did. For me, it was really frightening to get down there and see all that water, and water pouring in. I could imagine being stuck down there and having a wave inundate the boat.”

Added Thomas: “Those guys stayed down there and kept the boat going and rigged extra bilge pumps and cannibalized hoses from other places and rigged up stuff so it would drain out. That was heroic. A lot of people might just have given up.”

Despite the heavy pitching and rolling, Ekberg and Halford managed to restart the starboard engine so the boat could be pointed into the wind back toward San Benedicto. But at about 11 o’clock in the black of night, another huge wave hit broadside, smashing through the windows of the salon and causing the group’s most serious injury.

Ragone was standing on the bridge, next to Holekamp at the helm. He had time to yell “Oh, . . . ,” before the wave hit, knocking him into Holekamp. The blow caused Holekamp to throw the helm into the wind, perhaps averting a rollover.

Thomas, also of Huntington Harbour, is an emergency room physician at Whittier Christian Hospital.

“I saw it coming toward me,” he said. “It was real tubular, where the top kind of curls to form a tube. That’s what that wave was like when it burst through the windows. The leading edge was full of glass. It filled the salon with two or three feet of water and shorted out the control panel.”

Thomas’ left forearm was gashed, but he wasn’t concerned about that.

“We had two big 30-kilowatt generators pumping juice into the control panel,” he said. “The couches were thrown in front of the door, and all the lights went out. There were flashes of electricity going through the room, kind of like ‘Star Wars.’ I’d touch a piece of paneling or the counter top and the wood would give me a jolt. Each step I took I could feel something zapping me.”

But there was one worry worse than those of drowning, electrocution or bleeding to death.

“I think the worst fear was that we were going down,” Thomas said.

And that meant the same unspoken fear to all: sharks.

Ragone, a Lake Forest resident who owns a printing business, said: “The night before we had been out there playing with the sharks with the lights on. We’d put meat on the ends of ropes and dangle it for them.”

Curious, he threw one an empty beer can. It ate it.

“That area’s just thick with sharks,” Thomas said. “Every time we tried to fish with live bait we’d get a shark instead of a tuna. And some of our tuna, a shark would take a big hunk out of it before we’d get it up to the boat. I knew if I went in the water they’d be on me real quick, so I was not anxious to abandon the boat.”

Macklin said: “At that point, we were trying to figure out how to get those life rafts open.”

In those winds, the self-inflating rafts probably would have been as useful as the Jet Skis and the Boston Whaler that had been ripped off the foredeck by waves.

Macklin reflected, “My dad drowned in a boating accident. He was an explorer and went over a waterfall in Venezuela. I was thinking, ‘This is too weird.’

“I guess you can say you get so scared you fear for death, and then you accept it and you aren’t scared. That’s sort of how I felt.”

Neibling wrapped Thomas’ arm in a T-shirt until it could be treated.

Mayday calls were being broadcast every two minutes, with no response. They also heard Maydays from San Pedro commercial fisherman Salvatore Russo some distance away. Russo and his nine-man crew survived on a life raft, but also lost their boat.

Ragone had a vague recollection of an incident in June of 1974 when Orange County Supervisor Ronald Caspers, his two sons and seven others were lost on a 63-foot boat caught in a storm in the same area. No trace was found.

Ragone said: “We had a pact that if anybody went over, we’d go back and try to find them.”

A noble thought, but . . . “in reality, that would have been impossible,” Ragone said.

“Suddenly, when it looked bleakest,” Neibling said, “a Coast Guard C-130 (land-based search-and-rescue plane) was raised . . . only 50 miles away.”

Later, Thomas said: “When that C-130 flew over in the middle of the night and we could see the lights on it, that was an emotional lift, because we did feel kind of isolated.”

Neibling sewed up Thomas’ arm with 30 stitches. At 11:30 the next morning another C-130 dropped a pump by parachute, but the chute became tangled in the boat’s propellers. Halford dived into the turbulence to try to free them, without success--and they couldn’t get the pump to run, either.

The plane radioed that the ship Chiquita Roma was seven miles away. But because the captain was concerned about inshore rocks, the Oasis, with its limited power, had to limp back out to sea to meet it.

The ship’s captain, Rick Bautista, aligned his boat broadside to the wind to provide a lee side for boarding and lowered two ladders and a cargo net. But on the first pass the crippled Oasis crashed into the steel side of the rolling ship with no one managing to get off.

On the next pass they attached fore and aft lines, but the Oasis was still rising and falling 20 feet in the waves. Holekamp, a Long Beach resident, was nearly crushed between his boat and the ship.

But all seven transferred safely, and the Oasis was abandoned and set adrift in the waning storm. The Chiquita Roma continued its voyage to Port Hueneme, where the fishermen disembarked two days later.

“The boat was sinking as we left it,” Holekamp said Thursday. “I don’t have any information otherwise.”

Ragone said the Coast Guard told him their chances of surviving those conditions in that size boat were “less than 1%.”

Holekamp plans to order another just like it.

“That boat saved our lives,” he said.

The adventure has not discouraged any of the five from going back to sea. Macklin went white-water rafting a week later--and broke his hand. Thomas says his injured arm improved his golf game “because now I can’t swing as hard.”

Thomas said: “I usually don’t remember dreams, but for the first couple days I dreamt about suffocating . . . getting caught in a cave-in and not being able to get out. For a couple days I kept imagining that wave breaking through the window. I could still hear the noise of it.”

When he went fishing near Santa Catalina Island a week ago, he had to dive under the boat when a fishing line got tangled in his prop.

“There were fish around, including a big hammerhead. In the past it didn’t bother me much, but I did get real antsy. I was peeking around, looking for a shark to show up.”

Holekamp said he watched TV reports of Hurricane Andrew this week with a fresh perspective.

“You realize that with all these things we’ve built and all we know, Mother Nature’s still in charge. The forces of a hurricane are unbelievable. It’s a terrifying experience.

“But if you can keep a level head, you can survive.”