A Nightmare for Owners’ Dream Boats : Storm: Up to 30 small craft, from yachts to dinghies, were sunk or damaged along the coast, leaving those who lived aboard them homeless.

Jim Eakins awoke in a strange hotel room Friday morning with the disquieting knowledge that he had lost his home.

Literally, lost it.

The 28-foot wooden powerboat he had lived on for five years had simply vanished, ripped from its mooring in this week’s stunning storm and tossed wildly through Los Angeles Harbor. Eakins had no clue where his floating home might be.

But buoyed by a noontime pitcher of beer and the chummy gabfest in Wilmington’s Chowder Barge, Eakins said he was sure his home had survived the tempest. He had heard rumors that the Coast Guard had snagged the boat and towed it to safety. And he planned to go looking just as soon as he finished lunch.

In searching, he would have plenty of company.

The thundering deluge that swamped basements and flooded streets throughout Southern California also knocked loose countless boats. From luxury yachts to flimsy dinghies, many vessels could not stand up to the lashing rain and fierce winds.

Up to 30 boats sank or suffered serious damage while moored in marinas from Santa Barbara to San Clemente.

“It was like pinball. We were just trying to herd them off to the sides of the harbor and tie them off as best we could,” said Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Steve Denning, who headed rescue efforts in Los Angeles Harbor. “As soon as we got one tied up, another whole clump would go streaming by. It was crazy.”

Even old salts admitted that the two-day storm had scared them. Still more alarming was the prospect that a downpour predicted for this weekend would wallop vulnerable marinas again.

A few veterans proclaimed that they would not let the second storm frighten them. “There’s a lot of times when the weathermen are wrong,” Bill Nicholas, 42, said as he worked on his white-and-green yacht in Huntington Harbor.

But warily watching the cloud-streaked sky, many dock hands and boat owners labored Friday to secure their moorings. “It’s better to take more precautions than you need . . . than to be one precaution short,” said Mike Kenney, 45, a powerboat owner in Newport Beach.

On that theory, crews spent hours sealing windows, digging up tarpaulins and moving boats to sheltered coves.

“Don’t even ask me how I am,” Robert Perel, co-owner of the Leeward Bay Marina in Wilmington, said as he strode over his gap-toothed docks. Twelve-foot waves had punched holes in nearly every dock in the marina, and Perel was worried that another blow would land this weekend.

“We’ve been here a good 30 years and we have never seen anything like this,” he said. ‘We have to act in emergency mode.”

The emergency hit Leeward Bay Marina hard. A listing mast and blue-and-white hull poked up from the murky water, the last traces of a 22-foot sailboat that had flipped in the winds and plunged under the waves. Two other boats had also sunk. And in the Chowder Barge, a flannel-clad boat owner nicknamed Stretch said the wind dashed his 30-foot boat so hard that it now featured a hole “big enough to go through sideways.”

The destruction and chaos seemed to disenchant some novice boaters.

In Marina del Rey, powerboat renter Laura Bohn said she was rethinking her dream of adopting the live-aboard lifestyle for good. “The winters are just too rough,” she said.

And onetime fisherman James Rose, 28, vowed that this week’s drubbing would be the last of his star-crossed encounters with the sea. A year ago, he was nearly killed in a nighttime collision with an oil taker. This storm sank one of his family’s fishing boats in Long Beach Harbor.

“It’s highly emotionally draining,” Rose said. “To have this happen one time right after another is a pretty good indication that I have to stay away from the water.”

Despite the devastation, however, most boat dwellers insisted Friday that they would not abandon their sloshy neighborhoods.

Their beds may rock in the wind. Their television reception may flicker in the rain. And their neighbors may indulge in noisy midnight joy rides. But to dedicated live-aboards, marinas become real communities, with laid-back atmospheres that are tough to leave.

“This isn’t a push-push world like you guys live in,” Eakins said, dismissing flatlanders as a passel of stressed-out clock punchers.

At 48, Eakins works as a dock hand and occasional fishing boat crew member. But often he just hangs around the marina, spinning yarns with his buddies and puttering with the boats. He lets his brown and gray beard grow shaggy, and he wears torn-up, faded blue jeans.

“I used to work in the refineries but I thought, there has got to be a better life,” he said. “At the rate I was aging there, I would have been 60 by now. Here, I feel a whole lot better. I’m even thinking about going disco dancing.”

For Eakins and other live-aboards, storms present a kind of challenge. He vowed to stick out the weekend rains in the marina--if he ever retrieves his boat. “We all help each other,” he said, sounding as if he would relish the chance to tough out a whopper with his fellow live-aboards.

In Marina del Rey, 33-year-old Kyla Schneider also said she enjoyed rocking and rolling in winter storms. “You batten down the hatches, get a couple of videos,” she said. “You feel like you’re on the high seas.”

Nevertheless, Schneider said, she plans to move to solid ground next month--to a house with a real bathroom.

Times staff writers James Rainey and Nancy Hsu contributed to this report.

* TAKING PRECAUTIONS

Crews clean up damage and get ready for next storm. B3