Newport man’s life takes new tack

A little more than a year ago, Craig McCabe was a proud bachelor — and even prouder of his boat. His 65-foot yacht Heather won the award for best music in the 2005 Newport Beach Christmas Boat Parade. He had lived aboard it for eight years, moving around Southern California as the whim hit him.

McCabe, 59, was riding high. But last January an unexpected swell tossed him into the ocean off Long Beach without a life jacket and all his priorities changed.

“The sun came out, and I walked out on the bow of the boat, thinking I was a pretty cool dude, like the king of the world,” he said in an interview this week. “Five seconds later, I fell in.”

The story of McCabe’s six-hour ordeal, with him nearly drowning before his brother Lance miraculously found him, made national news. But McCabe says the bigger story is how it deflated his ego, made him a committed Christian and drove him to start a new career he sees as a way to bring hope to others.

“It’s just changed my life,” he said. “I thought I’d better try to listen better to what God has in mind. If you look at your life, what you’re supposed to accomplish for your own benefit, you’re missing the point.”

McCabe has told the story hundreds of times, for Kiwanis clubs and church groups. What still amazes him the most is the way his brother borrowed a boat and unwittingly made a straight line to him, finding him in a vast ocean almost before he started looking.

“God is not necessarily subtle,” he said chuckling.

McCabe told reporters at the time that he meant to go back to an earlier job, doing legal work on behalf of victims of abuse. But when “those doors didn’t open,” as he puts it, he followed a friend’s advice and started a reverse mortgage business, Retirement Funding, in Newport Beach.

McCabe sees the business as a way of helping the elderly, who often have only their homes as a source of financial support.

He brightened when asked about Ken Barnes, the fellow Newport Beach resident who was trapped in his damaged sailboat off the coast of Chile last week while trying to circle the globe.

“I’ll tell you a funny thing — [Barnes] was smart enough to stay in the boat,” McCabe said. Sounding more serious, he added, “I have a lot of sympathy for him.”

Near-death experiences like his or Barnes’ are far more common than people think — some just get more attention than others, McCabe said.

“I just happened to do it on a big yacht in a media capital,” he said. “It happens to thousands of people. It could be an accident, a medical problem, anything — it isn’t until you face death that you think of what life’s all about.”

McCabe, who now lives on Balboa Island, put his yacht up for sale after the experience; it has not yet sold. He said he hasn’t been on the water since the incident, though he is careful to say fear isn’t the reason.

“I’ve been busy with other things,” he said, like his business and regular church attendance at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. He doesn’t have much interest in trying to duplicate his boat parade award either — “except maybe with something Christian-themed,” he added.