A 54-foot wooden Chinese junk making a voyage from Honolulu to Taiwan with five Hawai'i residents aboard was rammed by a freighter in a storm and sank off the coast of Taiwan Saturday, family members of the crew said yesterday.

After five hours clinging to the wreckage of their ship in high winds and high seas, all 11 crew members were rescued.

One crew member, Thomas William Cook from Okinawa, was seriously injured, said John Hunter II of Kane'ohe, whose son John Hunter III was aboard the vessel, the Princess TaiPing.

The Hawai'i residents aboard the TaiPing, which left Honolulu for Taiwan Feb. 16, were identified by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Honolulu as Hunter, Jason Arnold, Larz Stewart, Elizabeth Zeiger and Jack Durham. None was seriously injured. The captain of the vessel is Nelson Liu, of Taiwan.

The TaiPing was crafted according to specifications culled from texts dating back to the Ming Dynasty. It arrived in Hawai'i in January from San Diego, part of a journey from Taiwan to the U.S. West Coast and back.

On Jan. 21, Capt. Liu and his crew joined the Hokule'a for a side-by-side goodwill trip from Ala Wai Boat Harbor to Diamond Head and up and down the Waikiki coastline. While it was here, Hawai'i crew members joined the TaiPing.

Yesterday, they told their family members that they were in a storm on Saturday with high winds and seas of 15 to 20 feet, about 20 or 30 miles off the coast of Taiwan. At about 2:30 a.m., they could see the lights of Su-ao Port, Taiwan.

Then they saw a large freighter near them.

They said they established radio contact with the freighter, which assured them that they were not on a collision course. Then, they said, the freighter suddenly veered into them, sliced the TaiPing in two and continued on without stopping to render aid.

The crew members clutched the stern section of the junk all night before being rescued by Taiwan coast guard helicopters the next morning.

Crew member Elizabeth Zeiger told her mother, Jane, in an e-mail that authorities in Taiwan had identified the freighter as the Champion Express.

Patty Durham of Manoa, wife of crew member Jack Durham, said her husband told her the freighter was flying under the Liberian flag.

Elizabeth Zeiger's e-mail sent to her mother, Jane, said:

"We were on watch at the 12-6 a.m. shift and at about 2:40 a.m. this huge ship suddenly changed course after staying parallel with us for about an hour and started heading straight for us ... he just crashed and ripped right thru the center of the boat ... We literally watched the entire ship get demolished ... It seemed like we were going to get sucked under it, but after it finally passed we were still alive! We all grabbed on the ship and just waited while the huge swells crashed over us and tried to hang on to the pieces of the wreckage. ... We thought that they were going to send us a rescue boat, but they never did, and we just sat there, held on, and waited in the darkness for the sun to come up. ... Tom Cook had a massive back injury and his head had a huge gash."

She then describes the rescue craft arriving:

"We got airlifted to the Taipei hospital and stayed there all day, and it was an absolute miracle that we all 11 made it out of there, alive, with basically bruises and scratches, except for Tom, who is still in the critical unit at the hospital."

John Hunter II and Jane Zeiger said that after the freighter rammed the junk, 10 members of the crew were clinging to the stern section and only Cook, who was badly injured, was on the bow section. Somehow, they said, Cook managed to swim toward the stern section as the others pulled him to them.

John Hunter II said his son kept Cook's head above water all night to keep him from drowning.

John's mother, Ann, said of her son: "He sounded very well though what he had been through. He's a very strong person. He called it a miracle that they had survived."

John Hunter III will graduate from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa in May with a degree in geography.

They are "walking miracles," Jane Zeiger said last night from her home in Southern California. She said Elizabeth recently graduated from UH with a degree in agriculture. "They're alive, that's all we care about."

Patty Durham said her husband, a retired attorney, told her that the crew members were getting new passports issued and hoped to be back in Hawai'i by "next weekend."

Jessica Lee, director of the Taipei Cultural Office here, said she was told an official investigation of the collision is under way in Taiwan.