Fishermen survive being lost at sea for 8 months

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, August 15, 2006

MEXICO CITY – Lost at sea since November, the three fishermen from a tiny 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” Ordonez 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, Ordonez 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 on Aug. 9 by the crew of the Koo’s 102, a Marshall Island’s 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,” said Eugene Muller, manager of Koo’s Fishing Co. “It’s a long ways from Mexico to here.”

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

Ordonez, Jesus Eduardo Vidana and Lucio Rendon Becerra had left the fishing hamlet of El Limon, about 425 miles northwest of Mexico City, in November, on what was to be two or three weeks of deep-sea fishing, relatives said.

Some family members already had prayed a mourning novena for the men earlier this year – 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 Ordonez, 42, a cousin to two of the fishermen, said in El Limon. “They went fishing and they never came back. We thought they were dead.”

The three fishermen apparently had no radio or cell phone, relatives said. But they did carry several days’ worth of water and food, including a supply of lemons.

The three men are in their mid-twenties, and their youth may have played a factor in their survival, the family speculated.

Aboard the Koo’s 102, the fishermen told their rescuers they survived by capturing sea birds and drinking rain water.