4 Saved in Nighttime Rescue : Navigation: The foundering craft was just two feet above the waterline when the Harbor Patrol arrived. A boat the salvagers were towing disintegrated.

Four men on a sinking boat in pitch-black darkness narrowly escaped death Friday morning when they were rescued as only two feet of the bow and bridge remained above water.

The men had spent all day Thursday at sea, trying to salvage a boat they were towing from Dana Point to Long Beach for use by the Boy Scouts, when their own craft suddenly began to sink about 1 a.m. Friday, said William Cape, who runs the Sea Scout Boat Inc.

Cape put out an emergency mayday call at 2:09 a.m. as water threatened to submerge his 36-foot Chris Craft cabin cruiser. But by the time the Sheriff’s Department’s Harbor Patrol reached the wayward ship at 2:54 a.m., three miles offshore between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, only about two feet of the flying bridge and bow remained above water.

“I’m no crybaby, but it’s nothing I care to do again,” said Cape, 48, who has been boating for two decades. “It was scary-spooky. You think a lot of weird things when you’re out there in the water. You wonder, ‘Are they going to find me? Are they going to see me? What am I going to do if the rest of the boat goes under?’

“You know it’s going,” Cape said, “you just don’t know how long before it goes the rest of the way.”

All four men were wearing life jackets, but Cape has a tube in his throat to help him breathe that malfunctions if water gets inside. Another passenger, Gilbert Upchurch, 47, does not know how to swim.

A long, dark night in the calm, 63-degree water might have killed all four, authorities said.

“I didn’t know what scared was until then. I’m not a person that scares easy, but that’s a different kind of scared,” said Upchurch, who lives in Utah but is vacationing in California. “I learned to pray real hard. I got to looking, and that’s an awful lot of water. That’s the first time I was ever glad to see a sheriff come.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Kleeman, one of two officers who rescued the men, said the incident was among the most frightening he has seen in 11 years on the Harbor Patrol, though no one was hurt.

It took nearly an hour for Kleeman and his partner, John Luderman, to find the sinking boat because Cape had given an incorrect location when he called for help. Cape thought he was a mile offshore directly west of Newport Harbor, but in fact the boat was about three miles out and 6 1/2 miles southwest of the Newport Harbor Patrol station.

Before they found Cape’s crew, Kleeman and Luderman contacted two fishing boats that they thought were the sinking craft, and lost all radio and radar contact with Cape.

“We could not find any boat resembling their description in the location they said they were in,” Kleeman said. Almost by accident, Kleeman followed a florescent light that turned out to be the flares and flashlight Cape’s crew were wildly waving.

As to what might have happened if the search had been delayed any longer, Kleeman said, “I don’t even want to think about that part. I’m just real happy that it turned out the way it did and that they’re OK. That was the key: no injuries.”

Neither Cape nor police know what went wrong with the cabin cruiser, which also had been donated to the Sea Scout Boat Inc. about a year ago, Cape said. On Friday, a private towing company hauled the damaged boat to its port in Long Beach.

Coast Guard spokesman Trent Jones said that white planks believed to belong to the sunken boat turned up off the shore of San Onofre.

Cape’s company, Sea Scout Boats, has collected about 100 donated boats and refurbished many of them for use by the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and other charitable groups.

On Wednesday, Cape, Upchurch and a volunteer carpenter and mechanic had gone to Dana Point to retrieve a leaky boat someone had offered to donate. After working on the 33-foot Bellows/Stewart power boat Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Cape’s crew set off for the six- to eight-hour trek to Long Beach about 10 a.m. Thursday.

But two hours into the journey, the smaller boat began to fall apart.

Carpenter Robert Sage, 47, tried to repair the Bellows/Stewart, but the damage grew worse until it disintegrated into “about 5,000 pieces,” Cape said. Eventually, the crew gave up on saving the smaller boat and concentrated instead on plucking chunks of wood and other debris onto their vessel so as not to pollute and endanger the waters.

Everyone was resting from the harrowing day when Cape noticed his own boat tilting to one side. He checked the engine room and found water leaking in. Within 10 minutes, the water had risen a foot. He called for help.

“It just kind of makes you realize how much you depend on everything being together and how much you depend on each other,” said Sage, of Orange. “I just hoped I wouldn’t have to swim all the way to shore before we could find somebody to help us.”

Cape said he was thinking of the movie “Jaws” as he huddled on the footbridge waiting for the rescue boat. Upchurch was busy reviewing his life’s memories. Sage and Robert Santora, the mechanic, were busy worrying about Upchurch.

“It didn’t bother me,” said Santora, 55, of Long Beach. “I can swim . . . I’m the type that swims out beyond the limit anyway.”

Added Sage: “Now I’m looking forward to the next great adventure.”

The Sunken and the Saved

Four men were rescued after one boat sank without warning and another was on the verge of sinking off the coast near Newport Harbor early Friday. What is known so far: The boats: A 33-foot, wooden Bellows / Stewart built in 1920s disintergrated; a 36-foot wooden Chris Craft cabin cruiser built in 1963 was damaged but saved. What happened: The Chris Craft was towing the Bellows / Stewart from Dana Point to Long Beach for repairs. The Bellows / Stewart began falling apart and ultimatel disintergrated. After spending hours trying to repair the Bellows / Stewart and then picking pieces of it out of the water, the Cris Craft crew found that their own vessel had begun to sink. The aftermath: Debris of the Bellows / Stewart is floating on the water; the Chris Craft was towed by a private company to Long Beach.

The victims were checked for injuries by the Harbor Patrol and released without treatment. Source: Orange County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol Chris Craft crew.