A choppy sea and a youthful mistake.

A hero at hand and a disaster averted.

Mike Hebert was doing his best to enjoy his family and the sun on an unseasonably chilly day at Crystal Beach on Monday when the boy he had been watching in a rubber raft seemed to run into trouble.

The boy's father was trying to reach 12-year-old Ryan Dispenza, but the current was too strong. The youngster was 50 to 75 yards away and drifting farther by the second.

He was desperately trying to paddle the raft with his hands.Hebert, 37, did not have to think about his response. Eleven years as a Port Arthur policeman -- honored as officer of the year in 1992 and 1993 -- trained him for moments like this.

He grabbed the top half of his wet suit and his surfboard. His pursuit seemed futile. He paddled hard; the raft continued to ride wind and currents out to sea. Hebert pulled close, but the water was so cold. His shoulders started to cramp. He stopped.

"They shouldn't have to be looking for two people out here," he thought.

He started back.

Ryan cried out for help.

"He started to dog-paddle, and I could see the end of the raft flip up, and I was afraid he was going to turn it over," Hebert said.

He renewed his rescue effort and caught the raft.

Ryan told Hebert what had happened. He had lost one of his oars almost immediately and could not make headway toward the shore with the one remaining paddle. So he waited to be rescued. Easier said than done. Hebert tied the raft to his surfboard and tried to tow it back to shore. No luck.

Then, he got into the raft with Ryan and tried to paddle it back. Still nothing.

Hebert lowered his sights. Instead of trying to get back to the beach, he paddled just to keep the raft from drifting too far out into the Gulf.

The man and the boy talked about police work. Hebert told Ryan about patrolling Port Arthur. Ryan told Hebert about his mother's job at the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department.

They talked about religion. The two Catholics prayed the "Our Fathers."

They made each other laugh, joking that they would have to float to Mexico to be rescued.

The water waved and crested. The raft rose and fell. Occasionally, the sea would leap up and cover them in a chilly splash.

"We were cold. So cold," Hebert said. Lips turned blue. They shivered. Hebert's wet suit could not warm him. Ryan's T-shirt and shorts didn't bother trying.

Time crept so slowly that at times what felt like 45 minutes turned out to be only five. Hebert contemplated hurling his watch into the water. Even with his mind anguished, the policeman tried to calm the sixth-grader. Hebert pointed the direction to watch for a Coast Guard boat -- toward Galveston. But most of the time, they couldn't even see land.

In the end, that was not where help came from. It came from above. With the steady thud, thud, thud of a rotor, the reassuring orange underbelly of the Coast Guard helicopter signaled the end of their ordeal -- the longest two hours they had ever spent. They were three miles from shore.

A Coast Guard utility boat pulled up, and the man and the boy clambered aboard. They wrapped themselves in warm blankets and rode to shore.

Wrapped in a warming suit known as a "bear suit" at the University of Texas Medical Branch Hospital, Ryan turned to Hebert.

"Hey, Mike," the boy said. "Thanks for saving my life." Back at his family's beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula, Hebert insists, "I'm not a hero.

"It's the Coast Guard that are the heroes," he says. "It was the Coast Guard that saved both of us."

Almost nobody believes him.

"If that officer hadn't been there, I'd hate to think what would have happened," said Ryan's mother, Dedrell Dispenza. "He's a hero to us."

Port Arthur police Sgt. Ken Carona wasn't surprised by Hebert's actions. "That's just the kind of officer he is," Carona explained. "We're pretty proud of him."