At right, Philip Ruhle Sr., who, was missing at sea after his fishing boat sank off Cape May, N.J., Wednesday night. He is pictured in April talking about a new fishing net he had developed. The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

The patriarch of a Rhode Island fishing family and a well-known advocate for the Northeast fishing community has been missing off Cape May, N.J., since Wednesday night.

Capt. Philip Ruhle Sr., 56, went down with his 80-foot fishing trawler, Sea Breeze, alone in the wheelhouse trying to gain control of the dangerously listing boat as his two-man crew attempted to raise a port outrigger dragging in the water.

Only moments before, the boat had suddenly heeled in the 8-foot seas, catching the men unawares. “Everything happened so fast,” crew member Rayford Carr, of New Bedford, told the Coast Guard later.

The men fought to right the boat as it lurched 45 degrees and the swells came over. But the trawler, with 100,000 pounds of squid bound for Cape May sloshing in the hull, quickly rolled, Carr told the Coast Guard.

Carr and crew member Anthony “Tony” Hendrickson swam free and clung to the overturned boat. The emergency radio beacon had floated away; Hendrickson swam for it and activated it to alert the Coast Guard.

In the hours of waiting for rescue, the men looked for Ruhle to surface. They’d last seen him in the wheelhouse, trying to save his boat. “We was hoping the captain would come up. ‘Please, please swim under the boat,’ ” Carr told the Coast Guard. “But it never happened.”

The Coast Guard plucked Carr and Hendrickson off the capsized trawler that night and searched for Ruhle yesterday by air and sea. Ruhle’s family and friends gathered in Rhode Island, and waited.

In a lifetime on the water, Ruhle had lost two boats at sea. His son believes he did not want to leave this one.

PHILIP RUHLE SR., of North Kingstown, has been on fishing boats soon after he was old enough to walk. He is a third-generation fisherman, like his father and grandfather, and followed by his 34-year-old son, Phil Ruhle Jr., whom he’d taken fishing when he was a small boy.

Ruhle Jr. became his father’s partner on the stainless-steel trawler Sea Breeze, based at the Parascandolo wharf in Newport. It’s a “proven boat,” he says, that they’d bought nine years ago and rebuilt together.

And, like his father, Ruhle Jr. began passing down the tradition to his own 7-year-old son, also named Phil. He and the boy recently spent two weeks netting squid off Cape May. “If I didn’t think it was safe, I wouldn’t bring my kid,” Ruhle Jr. said yesterday, with family at his home in Peace Dale. When Ruhle Jr. brought the Sea Breeze into Cape May on Monday, it was Ruhle Sr.’s turn. The father headed out with Hendrickson, 21, who’d just begun fishing with him, and Carr, 50, who’d fished with them enough to be a family friend, Ruhle Jr. said.

The father and son had last spoken at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, after a good day at sea. Ruhle Sr. and his crew had netted 100,000 pounds of shortfin squid, which is used for bait and worth about 15 cents a pound, according to Mike Parascandolo Jr., of the N. Parascandolo & Sons Inc. fishing wharf.

Two days of fishing meant $15,000. His father was happy, Ruhle Jr. said. “The price [for fish] was up. Fuel was down a little. And he had a boat full of meat,” Ruhle Jr. said. His father said they were about 80 miles from the Cape May inlet, bound for Lund’s Fisheries to unload its haul, and the weather wasn’t bad, Ruhle Jr. said.

The captain and his crew ate dinner, and then he and Carr went to rest while Hendrickson went on watch, Carr told the Coast Guard later. He and Ruhle were taking the night watches as the trawler motored on autopilot.

Hendrickson saw the wind come up and the seas hit the sides of the boat, Carr told the Coast Guard. Then, Hendrickson shouted that the boat was sinking.

Carr said he and Ruhle ran to the wheelhouse as the boat listed. “It happened so quick,” he said in a videotaped interview with the Coast Guard. “The captain was at the wheel, trying to get the boat turned into it, to pop it back up.”

The boat had heeled so far that the port outrigger, ordinarily 15 feet in the air, was in the water, Carr said. Ruhle sent him out to help Hendrickson get the outrigger’s weight up. “By the time I got [to it], the boat capsized,” Carr said. The captain didn’t have a chance to get out, he said.

Sometime before 10 p.m., the Coast Guard station at Atlantic City called Ruhle Jr. to tell him that the Sea Breeze’s emergency beacon had been activated. Later, he was told that the Sea Breeze was found upside down, about 45 miles east of Cape May.

Out on the 164-foot-deep seas, the two crewmen saw the flashing lights of a Coast Guard helicopter coming toward them from the Atlantic City station. Carr was plucked out of the water first, and a second helicopter came for Hendrickson. Ruhle was missing.

The Coast Guard searched for him with rescue crews from the air stations in Atlantic City and Elizabeth City, N.C., and an 87-foot cutter out of Norfolk, Va. At sunset last night, there was still no sign of him. Coast Guard officials said they planned to search through the night.

WORD TRAVELED about Ruhle’s disappearance. Lund’s Fisheries was expecting the Sea Breeze early yesterday morning when Ruhle Jr. called to tell them the news.

“The Sea Breeze was one of the nicest and well-kept boats, and they were one of the most experienced crews. These guys are on top of their game,” said Wayne Reichle, a salesman at Lund’s. “[Ruhle] is one of the last people I’d think this could happen to.”

While some of the boats coming into Lund’s reported squalls, no one heard any May Day calls that night, Reichle said. A Coast Guard spokeswoman said there were no distress calls there over the last 24 hours.

Carr told the Coast Guard that the captain didn’t have time. “It happened in a second. By the time we got to the wheelhouse, in seven to ten minutes, it sank,” he said.

There were thunderstorms, and a weather buoy about 20 miles east of Cape Henlopen, Del., the nearest to the Sea Breeze, showed 6-foot seas and sustained southerly 15-knot winds, gusting up to 19 knots, said National Weather Service meteorologist Anthony Gigi. A computer model showed 8-foot swells where the Sea Breeze sank, he said.

The vessel’s load was heavy but not unusual, said Ruhle Jr. “We’ve made 4,000 trips with that weight and it was like another day at the office,” he said.

Some question the refrigerated seawater system designed to keep the squid at 30 degrees in 10 big tubs below deck, and whether the load’s shifting could have caused problems. But Ruhle Jr. doesn’t believe that. “It’s different, so a lot of guys are scared of it. But everybody down South uses it,” he said.

Parascandolo wonders whether there was a “freak sea,” something happening so fast there was no time to react.

Ruhle’s son believes something gave way on the boat. The vessel was handling the heavy weight. It was handling the weather. But then something else happened, the “rule of three.”

“I don’t care what anybody else thinks happened,” Ruhle Jr. said. “I know something else let go. That third thing.”

bjeffers@projo.com