ENCINITAS - Three times since marrying June 11 in a beachside ceremony at La Jolla Cove, Trevor Takayama and Torrey Trust have dodged disaster.

In August, the Encinitas couple fled an approaching hurricane while camping in a Costa Rican rain forest, on a summerlong honeymoon tour of Central and South America.

In October, the Witch Creek fire forced the newlyweds to evacuate the hilltop three-bedroom home she grew up in, near Manchester Avenue and El Camino Real in Encinitas.

Then, the day after Thanksgiving, rescuers plucked them from a lifeboat after the ecotourist cruise ship they shared with 152 others rammed an iceberg and slowly sank into the sea off Antarctica.

"We keep it interesting," joked Torrey Trust, 22, a recent UC San Diego film production graduate, in an interview Wednesday.

But after shivering in subfreezing temperatures for four or five hours in a lifeboat until a luxury cruise ship responded to the sinking MS Explorer's distress call, the honeymooners are glad to be back in San Diego County. They flew home Tuesday night.

"It's so good to be back," said Trevor Takayama, a 26-year-old biochemist. "When we got back it was sunny and 70. It was sunny and maybe 30 there."

The ecology-oriented cruise around Antarctica was part two of their global honeymooning tour. It was something Takayama's young wife had wanted to do for a long time.

"I really like penguins," Trust said. And, she said, "I wanted to see the ice before it melts because of global warming."

Little did she know, as it turned out, that global warming would possibly play a role in cutting short the cruise on the 12th day of what was to be a 19-day voyage.

In an Associated Press report of the rescue, Guillermo Tarapow, captain of the Argentine navy icebreaker Almirante Irizar said he had seen a huge increase in the number of icebergs roaming in the waters off Antarctica the last two decades. And he blamed climate change for that.

Takayama, who obtained a biochemistry degree from UC San Diego in 2003, said, "They say a lot more ice is coming out now, especially from the shelves."

Trust said the couple saw many icebergs.

"We saw one that was 26 nautical miles long that they believe was a part of the Larsen Ice Shelf that had broken off and had already drifted off to sea," Trust said. "It was still big and penguins were living on it."

Trust said the Explorer began its trek at Ushuaia, a port on the southern tip of Argentina. The ship cruised past the Falkland Islands as well as the icy continent of Antarctica.

According to G.A.P. Adventures of Toronto, the ship's owner, the voyage was inspired by the polar travels of Ernest Shackleton, the famed expedition leader who made repeated forays there before dying of a heart attack while trying to sail around the continent in 1922.

On this month's voyage, Trust and Takayama visited a beach on the Falkland Islands that is home to a half million black-browed albatross, followed southern right whales for hours and saw countless penguins on Antarctica.

"The wildlife was just so incredible," Trust said. "And the glaciers and the scenery were just unbelievable."

Everything was environmentally oriented. The ship avoided dumping human waste, according to Trust. Each day's events included four lectures on wildlife and a movie. One night, Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" filled the screen.

Trust was having the time of her life. So it was hard to believe when, at about midnight on Thanksgiving night, an obnoxiously loud alarm went off.

"Next thing we knew, the captain's yelling, 'Abandon ship, abandon ship!' over the loudspeaker," she Trust said. "And we were rushed into lifeboats."

There was nowhere to go.

"We had oars," Trust said. "But it was absolutely pointless to use them." She said the boats were packed so tightly with human bodies that oars could not be turned to move them.

Passengers and crew members huddled and waited in the darkness and cold. It helped that it was summer in the Southern Hemisphere, as the sun soon rose. Still, it was eerie looking over at the Explorer, still resting partly on the iceberg it had struck.

For a moment, Trust said, her thoughts flashed to a scene in the "Titanic" movie of the ship disaster that occurred nearly a century ago. But there was a huge difference: While the Titanic broke up and disappeared quickly from sight, the Explorer just sat there, sinking ever so slowly. And everyone safely made it to a lifeboat.

Around 7 a.m. or so, the 154 who had been aboard the Explorer were rescued by a cruise ship and taken to the Chilean Air Force Base on Antarctica. After spending the night in cots in a gymnasium, they were flown to Punta Arenas, Chile, on a Hercules C-130 military cargo plane.

Then Trust and Takayama flew home.

As chilling as the ordeal was, Trust said, "The fire was way more traumatic." After all, the 198,000-acre Witch Creek blaze forced the couple to evacuate for three days in October, as they sat by a television anxiously awaiting news of their home's fate.

"I grew up in this house. It was built a month before I was born," she said. "We had no idea where the fire was."

- Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 745-6611, Ext. 2623, or ddowney@nctimes.com.