PORT ORFORD - This tiny fishing town may have lost four of its own, but when it comes to living up to the word “community,” Port Orford has found its heart.

It's just one of the reasons, one of the unspoken-yet-understood reasons, that brings people such as skipper Rob Ashdown, Mark Wagner, Josh Northcutt and Louis Lobo together. The four commercial fishermen were lost at sea when the F/V Ash capsized near Rogue River on Saturday.

This is the town in which Lobo hoped to find a new start.

Louis

Lobo, from Las Vegas, visited his mom in Brookings periodically during the past 10 years and moved to Gold Beach in October. He lived in Brookings for awhile after his motorhome burned. A few introductions later and he met Ashdown.

Lobo was one of the crew who went to San Francisco with Ashdown to bring back the newly purchased boat to Port Orford to be converted to a commercial crabber.

“Š he worked on the boat nonstop, as he knew how important the boat (Ash) was to Robbie and his family,” Jean Bennet said in an e-mail to Ashdown's wife, Cecil, “and it meant a new start for Louis; he was honored to be chosen as a crew member.”

Lobo had no experience fishing, but Ashdown was ready to give him a chance. Lobo was looking forward to it, Bennet said, because he'd loved the sea - and fishing and crabbing - ever since he was a child.

Though he was the newest member of the crew, he seemed to fit right in, according to friends of the fishermen. A digital picture taken in November shows them all, smiling, dressed in the bright orange of traditional raingear, brown Extra Tuf rubber boots, hooded sweatshirts and baseball caps or knit caps, working on crab pots to get them ready to fish.

Josh

Northcutt, though, never wanted to leave Port Orford because he thought it was so beautiful, said Lisa Purkey.

But Northcutt also had another reason: his daughter, Amaih, the 4-week-old baby girl Purkey gave birth to in November. “He was very proud of her, very happy,” Purkey said.

The Ashdown house has become something of a gathering place - it always was, anyway - for Purkey, Mark Wagner's fiancée, Jamie Justice, and friends and family of the fishermen. Food, donated by grocery stores in Gold Beach and Port Orford and treats cooked by friends filled nearly every open flat space and every refrigerator and freezer shelf Thursday.

Pictures of the fishermen were passed around from mothers to sisters to friends. It's not long before the babies, too - Amaih and 7-month-old Sierra, Wagner's and Justice's daughter - were passed around from friend to friend to be held. More food arrived, on a plate or in a dish, accompanied by hugs, and visitors passed sometimes silently out the door.

And the subject always came back to the fishermen.

“He had a little bit of a wild side,” Purkey said of Northcutt, “but he mellowed the last month or so. And he loved to fish.”

Northcutt had missed a few crab seasons in the past but loved jigging - using a fishing pole to catch live rockfish in shallow waters - and was looking forward to crabbing, even though it's considered the most dangerous fishery on the West Coast because of the time of year in which it takes place.

As Amaih took a snooze at Cecil Ashdown's house and there was a break in activity, a silence settled.

“One time he told me he expected to die fishing,” Purkey said quietly.

She said she never expected it, though, and always thought he would return to land. Just two nights before he left on the Ash, she told him that she wanted Amaih to know her daddy and Northcutt replied, “She will.”

Mark

Like Northcutt, Mark Wagner was a new father.

Though Wagner was not a young father, he was a natural one. He was very caring and loved his niece- and nephew-to-be, Felicia and Tyler, Justice said.

“The night before he left, Felicia was sitting on his lap, watching TV,” said Justice's sister, Cheryl Lonberger. “He will be well-missed.”

Justice and Wagner recently decided that Justice should be a stay-at-home mom. She left her job at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort. Wagner was looking for a good job that would keep him close to home. Fishing for the Ashdowns, a longtime Port Orford fishing family, seemed a good fit.

Justice, Lonberger and Justice's mom, Margaret Nicholls, shared a laugh as they remembered Wagner, even as Justice was trying to be serious.

“He was a very people person,” Justice said seriously, describing his work background and how he came to settle in Port Orford. “He loved to surf, loved to fish. He was very into his family. He wanted to teach his daughter to surf.”

Lonberger and Nicholls nodded their heads in agreement as Justice paused, remembering.

“He was a romantic,” Nicholls said.

“Yeah, he would buy her flowers all the time,” Lonberger said. Then, with a chuckle: “I was so jealous.”

Nicholls said Wagner “didn't buy just one dozen (roses), he bought three or four.”

Justice blushed at the memory and recalled other times when Wagner had shown how much he loved her and Sierra.

“He always put us first,” Justice said.

Rob

To many, Rob Ashdown, the captain and owner of the Ash, was considered a good guy.

It's easy to list the things he did in the community. He was a volunteer firefighter, was president of the Port Orford Fishermen's Association for many years, worked with the Boy Scouts and coached T-ball and basketball. Youth in the community often gathered at the Ashdown house and Rob would be out shooting hoop or playing volleyball with them.

“If there was a volunteer position open, he'd fill it,” his wife, Cecil, said Thursday after most of the visitors had left her kitchen.

After nearly a week in the maelstrom of making arrangements, communicating with families of the crew, receiving visitors, ferrying kids to basketball practice and, on Thursday, to the emergency room in Bandon with her son who was hurt in an ATV accident, Cecil welcomed a glass of water and a quiet interlude.

And she laughed.

She recalled easily the good times with Rob. How, for their anniversaries, they'd hire a babysitter and escape for the weekend. It's from one of those getaways that she found the picture of Rob she likes best and the one she will display at the memorial on Saturday. In it, he's holding a coffee cup, his blue eyes and smile betraying his relaxed mood.

There are lots of pictures of him on the boat, fishing, but in them, he's too serious, Cecil explained. This one is different. This is how she will remember him.

Granted, the circumstances under which she's having to persevere are not what she would have chosen - it's not what any of the families of the fishermen or the community as a whole would have chosen. But at the same time, when it comes to commercial fishing, the possibility of having a loved one lost at sea is a reality, and one that every fisherman faces at one time, in some way.

Cecil is facing it head-on, the same way fishermen deal with the ocean. Rob fished for years and she was there with him, whether they were in the school kitchen, cooking food for the annual salmon barbecue or helping with gear and taking care of fishing permit paperwork.

But December means it's crab season.

“The season had opened, it was time to go,” Cecil said. “It was time to set the gear.”

The Ash was on its first fishing trip after being refurbished. Ashdown had his first load of crab pots to take out and set in the ocean. The boat, too big to be hoisted out of the water at Port Orford, would have to fish out of another port. Ashdown chose Gold Beach.

For many fishing families, December is tough. Crabbing has an atmosphere all its own, with the months of gear work building to a rush to the ocean when the right mix of weather, price and quality come together. The anxiety and excitement builds, with the pressure of Christmas adding another element of hope for a good season.

There are no presents under the Christmas tree in Cecil's dining room. There are a few, somewhere else in the house, but she, like other families, was waiting on “the first crab check.”

Justice and Wagner, too, were waiting on the first crab payment to find a new place to live.

In the meantime, Cecil said, Radio Shack has donated gifts to her kids, Robert Jr., 19; Perry, 16; and Devon, 14. Toys for Tots has donated gifts to children of the other fishermen's families.

As she, Justice, Lonberger, Nicholls and Purkey talked, donations of other items arrived. A truck pulled up, left a load of firewood and left. Two men showed up with gravel in a dump truck to fix the potholes in the Ashdowns' driveway. One of the skippers of another boat popped in and asked what anyone needed - then looked around at all the food and started to leave.

“Diapers,” someone said.

He left, returning minutes later with two big sacks of diapers for the babies.

Cecil is amazed at the support.

“Wow,” she said.

But it's not closure. She has that, in a way - a way the other fishermen's families likely don't.

“(Rob) wanted to be buried at sea, but didn't want to be cremated,” she said, smiling. “He always told me that if he went first, I should wrap him in a towel, take him out on a boat at night, and weight him down.”

She laughed haltingly at the thought. “Can you believe that?”

Others ask questions about when searchers expect the bodies of the fishermen to be found, but there is no clear answer. It could be days. It could be weeks. It could be never.

For Rob, that is Cecil's wish.

“I don't want them to find him,” she said. “He's in his final resting place.”