Boats Rescued From High Winds, Waves

Strong Santa Ana winds combined with 6-foot seas made last weekend the busiest this year for boat rescues off the Ventura County coast, Coast Guard officials said Monday.

Between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Sunday, Coast Guard crews based at the Channel Islands Harbor received eight distress calls, most from small boats overwhelmed by the wind and waves.

The Coast Guard crews performed five rescues; the Channel Islands Harbor Patrol and other boaters assisted with others. No one was seriously injured, said Petty Officer Marc Engelbrecht.

The first call came just after 9:10 a.m., when Bachian Haroutioun of Pasadena radioed for help as his 22-foot boat was struggling to turn back against the waves.

“They couldn’t find their way into the harbor and they were really scared,” said Petty Officer James Dubea, who piloted the Coast Guard rescue boat. “They had six people on board and they were pretty seasick.”

Twenty minutes after escorting Haroutioun’s boat into the harbor, the Coast Guard received another distress call involving a 22-foot boat, Slow Starvation, with a disabled motor. The boat was towed into Channel Islands Harbor.

The other distress calls involved a 12-foot boat capsized near an oil platform, two boats aground on the harbor breakwater, a 13-year-old boy who fell off the Port Hueneme pier, a 25-foot boat disabled four miles from Oxnard, and a 23-foot boat with engine failure off Goleta, Dubea said.

Engelbrecht said the Coast Guard station at the Channel Islands Harbor has answered 92 distress calls since Oct. 1, compared to 51 during the same period the previous year.