The men were sunburned and exhausted, having driven some 14 hours to get home to Sonoma County and reunite with families they didn't think they'd ever see again after jumping from a sinking ship into a dark and menacing sea.
They were anxious to share their stories, but reticent about revealing too much. They are fishermen after all, who prefer to drink beer and swap stories about the big hauls and near misses rather than talking about their own survival.
Gathered around a dining-room table in a Sebastopol home Friday, they described their terror and their joy, as well as their pain and their guilt of leaving Mexico without two of their friends, who remain missing in the Sea of Cortez.
"You don't want to leave your friends there," Dennis DeLuca, 57, said.
DeLuca, Warren Tsurumoto, 50, and Dave Levine, 53, were among those on board a boat chartered by 27 Americans - most from the Bay Area - when it capsized before dawn Sunday in a fierce storm off the Baja California coast. A fourth Sonoma County man, Jim Miller, also survived.
Seven men have yet to be found, including Russ Bautista of Penngrove and Shawn Chaddock of Petaluma. As Mexican and U.S. authorities continued searching for the men Friday, their buddies reflected on the circumstances surrounding the doomed voyage.
Tsurumoto's mother's home, where the three survivors shared their experiences, is almost 800 miles and a world away from San Felipe, where the men boarded the 105-foot Erik on Saturday for what was supposed to be a six-day fishing adventure.
Seated behind her husband, Joan DeLuca put a hand to her mouth and began crying when he recalled being rescued and reaching her on an Internet connection. Until that call, she didn't know whether the Sebastopol construction and engineering manager for AT&T was alive.
"It was awful," she said.
The mood had been very different when the men departed Sonoma County for the long drive to Mexico. Bautista, who the men referred to as "captain" or "commodore," was the group's leader, having been on the trip several times before.
Miller, 70, has been Bautista's neighbor for nearly 30 years and the men have been on numerous fishing trips together. This was the second time Miller had joined him on the Baja excursion. The trip was affordable - only $600 per person for the entire week.
The fact the adventure required a long drive to Mexico didn't bother them. "We'd go anywhere to get a tug on a line," Levine said.
Fish stories and beer
After arriving at their hotel in San Felipe, about 120 miles south of the Mexican border on the eastern shore of Baja, the men broke out the coolers filled with ice-cold beer and sat around swapping fish stories. The next day, July 2, they boarded the Erik.
Levine, who lives in Bodega Bay and works heavy highway construction, described the boat as a "rust-bucket." After Bautista, a retired Pacific Bell worker, showed him around the vessel, Levine asked him when the crew was going to give the men a safety orientation.
"He said, &‘You just had it. This is Mexico,'" Levine recalled.
Despite the boat's condition, the men said they felt safe heading out because several in the group had been on the same trip before and because the boat was not going to be out of sight of land. The boat had nine small fishing boats attached to it that they figured could be used in an emergency.
The weather was perfect - sunny skies and calm water, like that of a lake. The mood remained jovial through a dinner of fajitas and drinking on the upper deck.
But then the wind started to kick up and the boat began to toss.
Worry over foul weather
Most of the men had gone to their cabins for the night by the time Miller, a retired electrical superintendent, headed back on deck. He and a few others couldn't sleep because of the heat and their unease over the increasingly foul weather.
Miller and five other men, including DeLuca and Bautista, were assigned to cabin 9, which was on an upper deck behind the bridge.
Miller watched as waves struck the boat's port side and then cascaded over the top. The water began filling the fish hold, where the hatch had been left open, as well as the interiors of the smaller fishing boats called pongas, which were left uncovered.
With each successive wave, more water stayed in the boat, until the vessel began to list to one side. Miller said that's when one of the men said they were in trouble.
Miller said he rushed to his cabin and turned on the lights. He said his bunkmates thought he was joking when he told them to get out, but then, realizing he was serious, they began hustling.
Miller said the last time he saw Bautista, he was rushing out the cabin door dressed only in his underwear and carrying a life vest on one shoulder. Miller watched him leave while struggling to pull on cut-off shorts.
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