12 Rescued From Santa Cruz Island After Boat Runs Aground in Storm : Weather: Lightning and thunder prompt calls to police from residents fearing the Iraqis had attacked Ventura County.

A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter team rescued a dozen people early Monday after their boat ran aground off Santa Cruz Island during a thunder and lightning storm that struck the Ventura County coast.

The overnight storm dropped little rain, but spawned brilliant lightning flashes and rolling thunder that awakened scores of county residents.

Many people jarred from their sleep apparently feared that Ventura County had become a new front in the Persian Gulf War.

“They thought they were missiles,” said Port Hueneme police dispatcher Kristen Cornejo, whose department received several calls inquiring about the disturbance.

Coast Guard officials received an urgent distress call at 2:18 a.m. from the Paintmaker, a 42-foot cabin cruiser that crashed onto a 10-by-100-foot rock about a quarter of a mile off Santa Cruz Island. The ship’s captain, Larry DeDonato of Delano, tried to anchor the boat in 12-foot swells off the island’s coast, but the anchor apparently would not hold.

Susie Rodriguez of McFarland, who was on the boat, said the group had set out from Channel Islands Harbor on Sunday for a day of scuba diving and then anchored off Santa Cruz Island for the night. The weather turned bad about midnight, she said, and eventually tossed the boat onto the rocks.

“We didn’t stay on very long after it hit,” said Rodriguez, 37, who was traveling with friends from northern Kern County. “The boat was rocking violently back and forth. We were lucky we could step off onto land.”

As the craft took on water, its occupants--seven adults and five children--donned wet suits and life jackets and scrambled onto the rocks, huddling together in a cove to avoid the crashing surf and 30-m.p.h. winds while awaiting rescue.

Lt. James Hasselman, the helicopter pilot, said a storm pocket was dropping such heavy rains that he could not see the stranded boaters as his craft hovered 15 feet above them.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Thomas M. Smylie, a rescue swimmer and paramedic, was lowered onto the rocks in a basket when the helicopter arrived about 3:30 a.m. from its Los Angeles base. The boat was still lodged on one of the rocks with a gaping hole in its hull, he said.

“It looked like the S.S. Minnow on ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ ” said Smylie, whose crew took the stranded boaters to a waiting Coast Guard boat dispatched from the Channel Islands station. “They were safe, but they were all cold and scared, real scared.”

Dozens of county residents who were jolted awake by the storm called police to find out if the area was under attack by the Iraqis.

Between 2 and 6:30 a.m., the Oxnard Police Department received two dozen to three dozen calls from people curious about the rumbling sounds and the quick flashes of light, Lt. Gordon Hubbard said.

“It really did light up the sky,” said Hubbard, who noticed the storm as he was driving to work at 6 a.m. “The sky looked like it did on TV,” which has been running footage of the allied bombing raids over Baghdad.

At least one of the callers sounded “really shook up,” Hubbard said. “The majority, as soon as they found out it was thunder, they just laughed.”

For all the noise and alarm it generated, the storm was all bark and no bite. It dropped less than 0.05 inches of rain on Silver Strand Beach and Santa Cruz Island, and no measurable rainfall in the county’s inland areas, according to county flood-control rain gauges.

Tom Johnston, a Ventura climatologist who does research for the county Flood Control District, said the storm was the result of “a pocket of cold air that got pinched off in the upper atmosphere” and caused more turbulence than precipitation.

“It created unstable air conditions and produced lightning and thunder, but not much rain, because the air was pretty dry,” Johnston said. “It mostly evaporated before it got to the ground.”

Although the drizzle had stopped by noon, gusting winds reaching 25 m.p.h. swept through parts of the county and offshore for much of Monday.

The system was expected to move farther south today.

Times staff writers Tina Daunt and Carol Watson contributed to this report.