f13.net

MEXICO CITY — Lost at sea since November, the three fishermen from a hamlet outside San Blas had been 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" Ordóñez resigned themselves to the fact 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 eight months adrift, Ordóñez and his companions had been found alive north of Baker Island in the central Pacific, the same 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 Taiwanese crew of the Koo's 102, a Marshall Islands fishing boat. 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, said in a telephone interview from the Marshall Islands. "It's a long ways from Mexico to here."

The Mexicans' boat had two disabled outboard motors but was still seaworthy, Muller said.

Interviewed via shipboard radio by Mexican television Tuesday evening, 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.

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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."

Ordonez, 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.

On Tuesday, news of the rescue was greeted in El Limón 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," said Saul Ordóñez, 42, a cousin to two of the fishermen. "They went fishing and they never came back. We thought they were dead."

He and other fishermen from the communities around San Blas had sailed and traveled up and down the Pacific coast looking for traces of the missing boat.

"No one gave us any information; no one gave us any news," Hortensia Ordóñez, Salvador's aunt, told a Mexico City radio station.

"So we gave them up for lost."

Unbeknownst to their relatives back in San Blas and El Limón, the three men were being pushed steadily westward by the same currents and winds that first 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 Ordóñez has another cousin who has been missing for more than seven years.

"When you're out there, your engine is your lifeline," said Saul Ordóñez.

The three remain aboard the Koo's 102, whose crew is fishing for tuna, Muller said.

The ship is scheduled to arrive in the port of Majuro in the Marshall Islands in 10 to 14 days, officials said.

The crew of the Koo's 102 is made up primarily of Chinese-speaking crew members, and the Mexicans have been able to communicate only fleetingly with their rescuers.

They wrote their names on a sheet of paper, which was faxed from the ship to Majuro, Muller said.

Mexican diplomats said Tuesday they will arrange a plane trip home for the trio.

I believe Schild marinates himself on a regular basis.  Or perhaps pickles.