It’s been more than three decades since Ron Valiquette and his two-man crew survived 55 hours of punishing hurricane-force winds and waves in a yacht off the Oregon coast.

And it’s taken nearly that long for Valiquette to muster the emotional might to tell the story.

Valiquette, of Polson, has detailed his extraordinary experience in a new book, “Dancing with Celia — Surviving a Pacific Coast Hurricane.”

Celia began as a tropical storm that intensified into a Category 3 hurricane that hit land at Tillamook Bay in summer 1980.

“No one ever survives” that kind of storm, Valiquette said about the force of nature that generated 160 mph winds and 10-story-high storm swells that nearly obliterated his 58-foot motor yacht.

“I don’t know how we made it,” he reflected. “We had God riding with us. Everything happened so profoundly.”

The trauma of those harrowing hours, when Valiquette and his crew honestly didn’t know if they’d live or die, kept the story buried deep inside him for years. His daughter Renee, who worked as a magazine editor in Seattle, begged him for years to write about the experience.

“She tried to get it out of me,” he said. “I’d think about being so close to death for 55 hours and I’d fall apart, and I’m a very strong person. I’ve been in car crashes, boat crashes, been attacked by a grizzly.”

In those other encounters, though, the ordeal was over in a matter of seconds. In Hurricane Celia it was prolonged terror.

“Every second of that 55 hours I knew it could be over,” he said.

Finally, after some soul searching, Valiquette decided the time had come to tell the story.

Valiquette and his wife, Val, were in Marina Del Rey in Southern California in April 1980 when they caught sight of a 58-foot motor yacht they couldn’t live without. They bought the luxury boat and named her the Fantasy Isle. It was meant to be their retirement home of sorts, and they already had started mapping out trips up and down the Pacific Coast.

The couple loved spending time at sea and had sailed across the South Pacific over a three-year period. Valiquette, a Navy veteran who later worked as a developer and commercial contractor, had spent lots of time at sea.

After toiling for a month to make the Fantasy Isle ship-shape, the Valiquettes headed from Marina Del Rey to the Channel Islands Marina in Oxnard, Calif., where Val got off to return to Seattle to care for her elderly mother-in-law. Valiquette picked up a couple of experienced seamen, Leonard and Roy, and at his daughter’s request, agreed to take a newlywed couple on an impromptu honeymoon cruise.

They decided to treat the honeymooners to a nice dinner in Monterey before heading out, and in hindsight that diversion was just long enough to trip up their time schedule.

“Had we not done that, the hurricane wouldn’t have caught us,” Valiquette recollected.

Later, about eight hours after they departed from Eureka, Calif., they were picking up a tailing sea and Valiquette noticed it was building. They couldn’t make emergency contact because VHF radios only reach about 25 to 30 miles.

“In those days we didn’t have satellite and computers,” he said.

Then the starboard fuel tank broke loose and had to be fixed.

And the storm got worse.

“Changing course would have been suicide,” Valiquette wrote in the book. “Running 90 degrees to this sea was the only way we could survive ... we were now in hammering rain and horrible seas; the skies with pitch-black.”

The force of the water smashed the yacht’s windows. They lost their dinghy and the antennas. Still, Valiquette believed in his boat.

“It was well-tooled,” he said. “I’ve had other pleasure yachts and none of them would’ve made it.”

By the time 52 hours had passed, the crew was spent. Valiquette said he was “beyond exhaustion.

“The passengers and crew were counting on me,” he wrote. “Their lives were in my hands. I had gotten them into this mess. Somehow I had to get them out of it.”

The Fantasy Isle headed for Tillamook Bay but couldn’t get across the bar. It was low tide, exposing the floor of the bar in several spots. Crossing it would have made the boat hit ground and flip like a cork.

It seemed hopeless when the Coast Guard, like a voice from heaven, came in over the radio. They’d heard the Mayday signal.

“We’re not going to make it out here,” Valiquette informed the emergency responder. “Our yacht is taking on water. We’re just barely keeping afloat and with one more incident, we are going down like a lead rock.”

In what Valiquette calls “an act of unprecedented bravery,” the Coast Guard rescued the crew. The 11 crewmen of the Coast Guard at Tillamook Bay Station were given medals of honor for their rescue efforts, and Valiquette later dedicated a memorial to the rescuers.

The near-death experience didn’t keep Valiquette off the water, though. Within a month he and his wife were cruising to Alaska.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.