SAN BLAS, Mexico - Three Mexican fishermen have been rescued after drifting for about nine months across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean in a small boat, an ordeal they survived by eating raw birds and fish and drinking rain water.
The shark fishermen said on Wednesday they left their home town of San Blas on Mexico's Pacific coast in November and were blown 5,000 miles off course after their 25-foot (8-meter) fiberglass boat ran out of gas and they were left to the mercy of the winds and the tides.
Their families had given them up for dead, but they found a way to survive in what appeared to be one of the most impressive feats of endurance on the high seas.
"We ate raw fish, ducks, sea gulls. We took down any bird that landed on our boat and we ate it like that, raw," Jesus Vidana, one of the three survivors, said in a Mexican radio interview from the ship that rescued them.
The news stunned friends and relatives. "It's truly a miracle. Everyone is very happy," said Jose Guadalupe Guerra, a town hall official in San Blas.
"Everyone found out from the television. A cousin of one of them fainted from the shock. His grandfather also got very emotional -- they'd written them off as dead," he said.
The odyssey finally ended when Vidana and the other two men, identified as Salvador Ordonez and Lucio Rendon, were rescued a week ago by a Taiwanese tuna fishing trawler in waters between the Marshall Islands and Kiribati.
"They were very skinny and very hungry," Eugene Muller, manager of the fishing firm that found them, said on Wednesday.
The three men were sunburned but otherwise in good health. Vidana said they always believed they would be found.
"We never lost hope because we were always seeing boats. They passed us by, but we kept on seeing them. Every week or so, sometimes we'd go a month without seeing one, but we always saw them so we never lost hope," he said.
They were lucky to be picked up in the end because they were fast asleep and only noticed the rescue boat was coming for them when they heard its engine.
4 comments:
david letterman last night said in his monolog that the first thing they said when they were rescued was "mel gibson said WHAT?....
damn..i just realized it was 9 months...judas priest..i never paid much attention to the story and thought it was like 6 weeks or something...damn..9 months..that's amazing..
Surely the family thought tney just sailed to the USA :)
I read another version apparently there were originally 5 of them , 2 died and were thrown overboard ( eaten more like !)
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