Seabirds, Rain Kept Men Alive for 9 Months
By Héctor Tobar, Times Staff Writer
August 16, 2006
MEXICO CITY — Lost at sea since October, the three fishermen from a hamlet outside San Blas were given up for dead long ago.
After weeks of looking for their son at fishing ports up and down the Pacific Coast of Mexico, the parents of Salvador "Chava" Ordoñez resigned themselves to the belief that he, his two companions and their 30-foot fishing boat had been swallowed up by the sea, family members said. On Tuesday, news of a miracle came from 5,000 miles away. After more than nine months adrift, Ordoñez and his companions had been found alive north of Baker Island in the central Pacific, the lonely stretch of ocean where aviator Amelia Earhart disappeared almost 70 years ago. Sunburned and skinny, but otherwise healthy, they were rescued Aug. 9 by the crew of the Koo's 102, a Marshall Islands fishing boat run by a Taiwanese crew. Trade winds and ocean currents had carried the three men from the waters off their home state of Nayarit more than halfway to Australia. "They were quite hungry," Eugene Muller, manager of Koo's Fishing Co., said in a telephone interview from the Marshall Islands. "It's a long ways from Mexico to here."The Mexicans' fishing boat had two disabled outboard motors but was still seaworthy, Muller said.
Interviewed Tuesday evening via shipboard radio by Mexican television, the men said they survived by eating raw fish and capturing seabirds."Sometimes our stomachs would hurt, because we would go up to 15 days without eating," Jesus Eduardo Vidaña told the Televisa network. "There were times when we had only one bird to share among the three of us."The three fishermen apparently had no radio or cellphone, relatives said. But they carried several days' worth of water and food, including a supply of lemons. The three men are in their mid-20s and their youth may have played a factor in their survival, their relatives speculated. Aboard the Koo's 102, the fishermen told their rescuers that they had fought off dehydration by collecting rainwater to drink. "They were quite skinny" Muller said. "As soon as we got them on board, the crew fed them some rice."
Ordoñez, Vidaña and Lucio Rendon Becerra left the fishing hamlet of El Limon, about 425 miles northwest of Mexico City, on Oct. 28, for what was to have been two or three weeks of deep-sea fishing, relatives said. Vidaña told Televisa that strong winds pushed them out of their fishing area and they became lost.Some family members already had said a mourning novena, ritual prayers that are meant to guide the departed on their journey from purgatory to heaven. On Tuesday, news of the rescue was greeted in El Limon and San Blas as nothing less than an act of God. "I'm trembling all over and I think I'm going to have a heart attack," Saul Ordoñez, 42, a cousin of two of the fishermen, said by telephone from El Limon. "They went fishing and they never came back. We thought they were dead."
Saul Ordoñez and other fishermen from the hamlets around San Blas had sailed and traveled up and down the Pacific Coast looking for traces of the missing boat. They even searched the coast of the Islas Marias, more than 50 miles off Nayarit. "We were looking for some trace of them, anything, but we found nothing," Ordonez said. Other family members visited Acapulco and Mazatlan, and called authorities as far away as Colombia. "No one gave us any information, no one gave us any news," Hortensia Ordoñez, Salvador's aunt, told a Mexico City radio station. "So we gave them up for lost." Unbeknown to their relatives in San Blas and El Limon, their fishing boat was being pushed westward by the same currents and winds that had carried Portuguese and Spanish explorers across the Pacific centuries ago. Those currents often play havoc with the fishermen of San Blas, many of whom go 50 miles or more out to sea in search of shark and other deep-sea fish. Saul Ordoñez has another cousin who has been missing for more than seven years. "When you're out there, your engine is your lifeline," Saul Ordoñez said. "These days some of us carry cellphones so we can call back if an engine fails."
More:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-rescue16aug16,0,4072812,full.story
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