HUNTINGTON BEACH : Coast Guard Rescues 3 After Night Adrift

Three men who spent the night adrift in their disabled 19-foot motorboat were found Monday by the Coast Guard and towed to Huntington Harbour.

Scott Woock, 32, of Huntington Beach and roommates Doug Cuthbert, 24, and Seth Foti, 21, had spent the day shark fishing aboard the Orca--which belonged to a friend--and were headed in about 5:30 p.m. when the boat’s 200-horsepower engine failed a mile west of the oil platforms off Huntington Beach.

“We had fuel, and the engine would start, but it wouldn’t continue running,” Woock said. “It was some kind of electrical problem . . . and it seemed like something we could try and fix.”

Cuthbert is an electrician, and the trio had a set of tools on board, but they were unable to fix the engine.

“Darkness was coming on, and we said, ‘well, here we go,’ ” Woock said.

The boat’s radio antenna was broken, so the fishermen had no way of contacting anyone. They fired one of their three flares when they spotted a boat a couple miles away but got no response, Woock said.

“We took shifts, each one of us staying up for an hour while the other two slept,” he said.

At 1:30 a.m., the men thought they had been found when an aircraft circled overhead and seemed to be shining a searchlight on them. Woock said that he signaled with a flashlight but that the plane flew off and no rescue boats arrived.

An hour later, a boat appeared to be headed straight for them, Woock said, but veered away after they fired their second flare.

“It changed course and went off for Catalina,” Woock said. “It was pretty evident that we would be out there for the evening.”

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard was preparing to launch a search for the Orca at dawn. It had been notified of the missing fishing party by Foti’s father, Dominick Foti, when the boat had not returned by 9 p.m.

About 6 a.m., the men were awakened by the welcome sound of a Coast Guard helicopter hovering overhead. They had been found--eight miles off Newport Beach and about 10 miles south of where they had first gone adrift. A boat showed up an hour later to tow them into Huntington Harbour.

“There was kind of a worry, but we were trying our best to be reasonable,” Woock said. “If it had gone into tonight, and we still hadn’t been found, then we would have been worried.”