SAN ANTONIO — Sometime in the coming months the phone is going to ring at Ryan Newhall's house in a quiet San Antonio neighborhood. It'll be Dave Shoemaker calling from Seattle to say, "C'mon, time to go fishing."
And for the first time since becoming a commercial fisherman six years ago, Newhall doesn't know if he'll want to go.
Still fresh in his mind is what happened the last time out — leaping off a burning boat and then bobbing in the frigid Bering Sea for more than two hours, struggling to just stay afloat in 15-foot swells and to keep a crewmate from drifting away to certain death.
The memories torment him: the despair of going unseen by three rescue boats and a helicopter, the resignation to dying in the middle of nowhere.
"I just remember begging him, 'Please God, please don't let me go out like this. Don't let me die like this,' " recalled Newhall, a wiry, red-haired 29-year-old who grew up in suburban San Antonio. "It was by the grace of God that we were saved."
Three others aboard the Seattle-based fishing boat Galaxy weren't so lucky when the 180-foot vessel inexplicably exploded while chasing cod far off the Alaska coast in late October.
Twenty-three people were rescued — 15 from a life raft and six more from the Galaxy itself — before it sank. Newhall and Ann Weckback were the final two survivors, and in Weckback's case, only because Newhall boosted her up each time her near-limp body slipped through the life ring that kept them afloat.
"He saved my life," said Weckback, a 24-year-old federal fisheries monitor. "He could have left me and tried to get to the raft, but he didn't."
Newhall's tale begins with the engine-room explosion that blew him and two others through a hatchway and into the churning sea.
"I knew I wasn't standing up any more," Newhall said. "The next thing that I actually realized is that I was looking up and seeing light, but I'm underwater."
Clad in heavy cotton sweats, he swam to the surface and caught hold of a line thrown by a crewmate while the Galaxy pitched violently in the swells.
After making it back on the Galaxy, Weckback says Newhall was dazed and wobbly, and that she and others helped him into a survival suit that would give him more buoyancy and protection from the cold water. She'd given her own to another crewman who'd been pulled from the sea.
Weckback says she was told to jump overboard to a canopied life raft, but she decided to stay to take care of Newhall and hope they wouldn't have to abandon the Galaxy. But the fire continued to burn closer.
"She was screaming at me, 'Red, we've got to jump. We've got to jump,' " Newhall said. "She jumps right into darkness . . . I turn around for one more last look, to make sure maybe I don't have to jump, and the fire is right at my feet."
He grabbed a life ring, and jumped 30 feet below, swimming to Weckback, who was clinging to a buoy dressed only in her pajamas, a pair of rain pants and hiking boots.
The life raft was still in sight and the pair tried to catch up, but their arms and legs seized up in the sloshing, 48-degree water.
"I'm starting to actually panic now," Newhall said. "I'm yelling at her, 'We are going to die if we don't make it over there. You have got to swim, you have got to swim.' She keeps telling me, 'I'm trying, Red, I'm trying."'
The raft soon disappeared around the bow, and Newhall and Weckback were carried in the opposite direction. Then Newhall saw the lights of a boat on the horizon, but rescuers on the vessel didn't see Newhall and Weckback.
A second boat appeared and motored right by. And a third. Then a Coast Guard helicopter buzzed overhead. It was late afternoon.
Weckback says she doesn't remember a lot of the time adrift, but recalls the moment their spirits hit bottom.
"(Newhall) said, 'Ann, we're going to die out here,"' she said. "And I said, 'Yeah, we totally are."'
The Galaxy was so far away it looked no bigger than a rowboat when a fourth set of lights came into sight, but Newhall didn't get too excited. "I realized how small we were and that we were not going to be found," he said.
When the boat was within 300 yards, Newhall shook off his pessimism and turned on a flashlight from his survival suit, waving it for all he was worth.
The boat began to turn away — only to come back around again. They had been spotted by a searcher high on the forward mast. Newall roused Weckback, who by that time was purple and babbling incoherently, he said.
"At that point I said, 'I told you we weren't going to die,'... and she looks at the boat and she just starts laughing," he said. "I mean, it was just like the best feeling of my life. It's like, 'We are rescued!"'
Since then, he's been living quietly with his parents, fiancee Ashley Petteway and his daughter Anika, who's almost 2. But the sea is beckoning.
"This is what pays for my house and my car, this is what my daughter's going to college on," Newhall said. "This is something where I've gotten very accustomed to the money I make. But I'm still undecided."
Shoemaker, whose forearms were badly burned while he radioed a desperate mayday as flames consumed the Galaxy's wheelhouse, knows he'll be going back out, and that he wants Newhall by his side. He is recovering from his injuries in a small town near Seattle.
"I'd give my left leg to have him there with me," said Shoemaker, a fishing-boat captain for more than two decades. "I said, 'Red, when I get back on the water, I'm calling you.' And he said, 'Call me."'