After hammering the Jersey Shore with gale-force gusts and hindering the search for three missing fishermen, a dangerous nor'easter spawned from the remnants of Tropical Storm Ida today threatens beach towns with their worst flooding in over a decade.

"This is going to do some damage," said Stewart Farrell, director of the Coastal Research Center at Richard Stockton College near Atlantic City. He warned that after a relatively benign era, the Shore may be in for a long and adventurous winter.

By nightfall, onshore winds had buffeted the Shore for 36 consecutive hours, a pounding that was expected to continue into tonight with gusts up to 60 m.p.h.

"They're going to wipe out some of that beach," said Lee Robertson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Mount Holly.

Ten-foot waves crashed onto the beaches yesterday, chewing away dunes up and down the coast. Back-to-back nor'easters last month already had carved tall cliffs into dune lines in Ventnor, Ocean City, Sea Isle City, and elsewhere.

Raw northeast winds and periodic rain were forecast to continue inland today, with minor flooding possible along the lower Delaware River, but bigger issues were anticipated on the coast.

Cape May County could experience its worst storm flooding since 1994, the weather service said, as onshore winds drive waves landward and inhibit back-bay waters from draining. Two to four more inches of rain could fall, which would exacerbate flooding at high tides, said weather service meteorologist Mark DeLisi. The county declared a state of emergency.

High tides will occur just before dawn and around nightfall today.

Wave heights up to 18 feet were reported about 30 miles off Cape May yesterday, Robertson said. They complicated the search for three commercial fishermen aboard the Sea Tractor, which evidently encountered storm-agitated seas on Wednesday night.

The Coast Guard last heard from the 44-foot boat at 7:35 p.m., but a rescue helicopter found only an empty life raft with a strobe light attached.

"It makes you sick to your stomach to know that you're going home and they're still out there," said Pete Marshall, a deckhand on the Captain Jeff, a boat that joined the search and located an empty cooler.

The Sea Tractor is registered to Kenneth Rose Jr., 49, of Newport, N.C. The Coast Guard said the two others on board were his father, Kenneth, 75, and Larry Forrest, 55.

The Sea Tractor, which docked at Cold Spring Marina in Cape May, probably was returning from a fluke-catching trip, locals said. The 11-day fluke season ended at 6 p.m. Wednesday, according to a dock manager at the Lobster House in Cape May.

Yesterday, a small crowd gathered at the Cape May Fishing Pier outside the restaurant.

"I feel for those guys," said Anthony Patton, 38, of Villas, who often crews on commercial vessels out of Cape May. "They were good guys. I hope we see them again."

Dennis Niglio, 48, of Lower Township, said the younger Rose had asked him to join the Sea Tractor crew.

"It could have been me out there, too," Niglio said. "That's the thing about fishing. You never know how close you come to maybe never coming home again."

John Cole, manager of a Point Pleasant Beach fishermen's cooperative where the Sea Tractor had sold its catch in recent years, called the missing men "hardworking."

"All we can do is hope for the best and say a prayer for them," Cole said.

Yesterday, the air search continued until just after 5 p.m., but the rough seas forced the Coast Guard to recall its cutters earlier. A buoy near the search area registered 23-foot-high waves and wind gusts of 55 m.p.h.

A Coast Guard spokeswoman said that there were no plans to resume the search this morning, when weather conditions were expected to be worse.

The storm also was blamed for shutting down the Townsend's Inlet Bridge, which connects Sea Isle City and Avalon. The bridge sustained damage when a barge crane broke loose from its moorings and rammed it on Wednesday night.

The nasty conditions prevented engineers from assessing the damage and kept crews from making repairs, a spokesman for the Cape May County Bridge Commission said. The bridge was expected to remain closed at least through the weekend.

The storm was born of the remains of Ida. Typically, tropical storms fall apart after they make landfall and get ripped apart by land forms. Ida, however, was not typical.

It held together and made it to the Carolina coast, where it regrouped and became a powerful low-pressure system, said Alex Sosnowski, a meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc. in State College, Pa.

It has conspired with an area of high pressure, or heavier air, over southeastern Canada to place the region in an air sandwich. Air moves toward lighter air, similar to the way it escapes from a punctured tire. The high-pressure area also is blocking the storm from moving.

Since air moves clockwise around highs and counterclockwise around lows, the Shore is in an ideal position for a long period of onshore winds.

Farrell said this season so far has been reminiscent of others characterized by El Niño, an unusual warming of surface waters over thousands of square miles of the tropical Pacific. It occurs periodically and affects weather in North America in complex ways. The current El Niño has intensified significantly in the last few weeks.

Farrell recalled that the winter of 1997-98, when a sequence of coastal storms took out sand along the Jersey Shore, coincided with a strong El Niño. Since then, however, the storm climate at the Shore has been relatively benign. Residents and property owners should be grateful, he said.

"They've had a decade of extremely beneficent weather," he said. But he added that the fall storms could signal a change.

"If we replay this about five more times before Christmas," he said, "there'll be some crying."

Contact staff writer Anthony R. Wood at 610-313-8210 or twood@phillynews.com.