Stranded Fishermen Survive Nine Months At Sea

[mrmoshe]

Three Mexican shark fishermen survived nine months at sea in a small boat by eating raw birds and fish and drinking rain water as they drifted thousands of kilometres across the Pacific Ocean.

The fishermen said they left their home town of San Blas on Mexico's Pacific coast last November and were blown 8,000km off course after their 8-metre fibreglass 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.

"We ate raw fish, ducks, sea gulls. We took down any bird that landed on our boat and we ate it like that, raw," said Jesus Vidana, one of the three survivors, in an interview with a Mexican radio station from the ship that rescued them.

The odyssey finally ended when Vidana and the other two men, identified as Salvador Ordonez and Lucio Rendon, were rescued last week by a Taiwanese tuna fishing trawler in waters between the Marshall Islands and Kiribati.

"They were very skinny and very hungry," Eugene Muller, the manager of the fishing company that found them, said.

The three men were sunburned but were otherwise in good shape. Vidana said he and his crew mates 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."

It was not clear why none of the boats stopped for the Mexicans earlier on, and 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.

Details of the extraordinary journey were sketchy, in part because of language difficulties between the Mexican fishermen and the Taiwanese trawler crew.

The first reports were that they had been lost for three months, and Muller said he thought they were drifting for 11 months.

Vidana and relatives in San Blas said they set out on their dramatic fishing trip last November.

Muller said he understood that there were five men aboard the boat when it set out from San Blas, and that two of them jumped overboard a few days into their ordeal. But Vidana made no mention of any missing fishermen.

In San Blas, relatives and friends of the fishermen had given up hope and were astonished to hear of their survival.

"I lived so sad ... Now that I know my grandson is alive, I just want him to come home," Francisca Perez, the grandmother of Lucio Rendon, told the Televisa news station."

"There are no words to express it. The emotion here is very strong because we thought they were dead," said Efrain Partida, a fellow fisherman from the small village.

Mexico's government is sending an official to meet the survivors in the Marshall Islands when the trawler that picked them up returns to port in a couple of weeks. The government will then help them return home.

Edited August 16, 2006 by MallacootaPete

[Laredo]

amazing that in that nine months they were never swamped ?

"always seeing boats", that must have been painful

[Sharky]

Thats crazy man 9 months. I cant wait to read the full story or the book when it comes out.

One of my favourite books is called surviving the savage sea.the books about a family of 5, plus a crew member servive 44 days out of a small tinny. Good read to

[netic]

Amazing story, in nine months they must have encountered some rough seas.

[Flattieman]

Wow! Amazing - can't wait to read more.

Flattieman.

[caine]

If only they were members of SEA TOW

Let this be a leason to you all

[mrmoshe]

Wow! Amazing - can't wait to read more.

Flattieman.

More on those Mexican survivors:

Fishermen's friends thrown overboard

THREE Mexicans who survived for nine months as their small fishing boat drifted across the Pacific Ocean tossed two other men overboard after they died of starvation during the journey, officials have said.

The three were rescued last week by a trawler more than 8000km from Mexico's Pacific coast fishing village of San Blas, where they left for what was supposed to be a routine shark fishing trip last November.

Stranded on the high seas for nine months, they stayed alive by eating raw birds and fish and drinking rain water, but the Government said that two other men perished during the ordeal and were thrown overboard.

"At the start of this fishing trip, there were five people on board the boat. Two of them would have died shortly afterward," Miguel Gutierrez, a senior official at Mexico's foreign ministry, said.

"They refused to eat, and that's why they died," he said, and rejected suggestions that the survivors may have eaten the bodies of their dead companions.

The story has captivated Mexico but the survivors did not mention their dead companions when they were interviewed on Wednesday by radio and television stations from the boat that rescued them near the Marshall Islands.

Mr Gutierrez said a survivor told a Government official that one man died in January and the other in early February.

"It is natural that people who have spent nine months on the high seas, in the conditions they survived, would not have their complete story straight away," said Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez.

A local Government official in San Blas said on Thursday that no one there knew two other men were on board the very basic 8m fiberglass boat.

The survivors' families had given them up for dead, and were astonished to learn from news reports that they survived.

"Now you see that miracles exist," said Marina Estrada, the aunt of one of the fishermen.

The three men were skinny and sunburned after their ordeal but are otherwise in good health.

The Taiwanese fishing trawler that found them is expected to return to port in the Marshall Islands next Monday.

The survivors will then be given medical checks and flown home.

[Flattieman]

Thanks mate. It certainly is an interesting case.

Flattieman.

[inked]

good find mallacoota pete

[mrmoshe]

Wow! Amazing - can't wait to read more.

Flattieman.

Well, this saga just gets wierder by the minute.

Here's the latest on those hapless Mexican fishos:

Pete.

_________________________________________________

Story of three rescued fisherman is shrouded in mystery

Mexico City - As if lifted from a detective novel, replete with rumours of drug trafficking and illegal fishing, the miraculous rescue of three fisherman who survived nine months at sea has taken yet another unexpected turn.

Until now the unlikely story of three 'heroes' rescued by a Taiwanese tuna trawler about 8,000 kilometres from their home had been met with wonder around the world. But a new series of surprising and contradictory versions of events have added an element of mystery to the tale.

It began with the revelation by one of the survivors on Thursday, a day after the initial news broke, that there were actually five men on board the fishing vessel that left the city of San Blas, on Mexico's Pacific coast, at the end of last October.

The shocking detail was disclosed to Mexican authorities by Jesus Vidana, 61, one of the fishermen, only after multiple television and radio interviews with all three survivors from onboard the Taiwanese vessel, in which no mention of the companions had been made.

A foreign ministry official, Miguel Gutierrez Tinoco, on Thursday rejected a possibility raised in a radio interview that the surviving fishermen may have eaten the bodies of the other two.

'No, not at all,' he said. 'The survivors have said that they managed to survive first thanks to rainwater, and on solid food such as they managed to fish out of the sea with hooks tied to the wires of the motor.'

Vidana said their two companions starved to death around the beginning of the year and were thrown into the sea.

But in San Blas, those who saw the fisherman leave last October insist there were three, not five.

'I saw them the day they left. My nephew Lucio waved and said goodbye. There were three boys, not five. I don't know where they got that there were five,' fisherman Nicolas Rendon, the uncle of one of the survivors, told local newspapers.

Psychologist Jorge Alvarez, who specialises in victims of natural disasters, says it is entirely natural that the survivors might omit the detail in their first accounts. It is common for those living through such a tragedy to experience temporary amnesia, he told the media Friday.

But in an added twist, residents of San Blas, a dedicated fishing community, say that nobody would take five people on a motorboat only nine metres long to hunt for sharks. The only thing five men could be doing at the high seas in a boat of that size, they insist, is trafficking drugs.

None of the residents have heard of the two deceased fisherman, identified only as Juan David and 'El Farcero.' There was no clear translation for the latter name.

San Blas' port authority, which takes a register of all ships that leave the port, has no record of the boat leaving, nor was its disappearance reported by any of the survivors' relatives.

However a foreign ministry official on Thursday said the boat had registered with civil authorities that five people were on board.

According to the newspaper Excelsior, residents of San Blas have long known that their fisherman dabble in illegal activities, heading out under the cloak of the night to the Maria Islands to hunt protected shark species and selling the fins to the Japanese.

'Nobody likes to go to the Maria Islands, but that's where the fish are. It is infested with sharks,' says Nicolas Rendon, the uncle of survivor Lucio.

That is only the relatively more innocent side of the activity. At least 50 fisherman from the area have been jailed for trafficking cocaine to Sonora and California in the north. Only a little further south is where the Mexican drug kingpin Franciso Javier Arellano Felix was arrested by US authorities earlier this week.

Mexican authorities have so far refused to offer their own speculation until the Taiwanese vessel carrying the three survivors docks in the Marshall Islands next Monday, at which time they hope to shed more light on the growing mystery.

© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

_______________________________________________

And this too:

_______________________________________________

`Koo 102' captain tells of rescuing fishermen twice

By Huang Hsu-lei

STAFF REPORTER

Saturday, Aug 19, 2006,Page 3

Yen Ching-shui (顏清水), the captain of the Koo 102 fishing boat that rescued three Mexican fishermen near the Marshall Islands earlier this month, said in an interview via satellite with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister paper) on Thursday that this was the second time this year that he had saved fishermen in distress.

Yen has been captain of the boat, a 1,200-tonne purse seine fishing boat specializing in yellowfin tuna, for more than five years.

Speaking about the first rescue, Yen said his crew saved two fishermen in Kiribati who had been lost for 60 days in March.

According to Yen, they sighted a small boat with two men about 500m to 1km away when they were looking for fish near the waters of Papua New Guinea on March 5.

Both men and boat were lifted onboard the Koo 102 and the men were fed their first hot meal in two months. Despite the ordeal, both men were still in good health and could both walk and communicate without any problems, Yen said.

The two men, who were stranded because of an engine problem, survived the ordeal by catching fish and gathering rainwater.

After their rescue, they remained on the Koo 102 for almost three weeks, helping out by killing fish, cleaning and doing other light work, Yen said.

The two were then received by officials when the boat moored in Nauru to unload fish.

Then on Aug. 9, when fishing in the waters southwest of Hawaii, Yen's radar detected a 10m long boat about 500m to 600m up ahead of his vessel, Yen said.

On the boat were three men waving their hands in the air.

Yen said that when they picked up the men, the three were only skin and bones and would have died had they not been rescued.

Yen added that when he saw two pieces of luggage on the small boat, he thought they might be hiding weapons and that the three were pirates.

But after six of his crew mem-bers from the Marshall Islands talked to the men in Spanish, they understood that the three were in trouble.

The three men survived by catching sea birds and drinking rainwater.

After a couple of days on the Koo 102, the three had began to put on some weight, Yen said.

Edited August 19, 2006 by MallacootaPete

[mrmoshe]

Three Mexican shark fishermen survived nine months at sea in a small boat by eating raw birds and fish and drinking rain water as they drifted thousands of kilometres across the Pacific Ocean.

The fishermen said they left their home town of San Blas on Mexico's Pacific coast last November and were blown 8,000km off course after their 8-metre fibreglass 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.

"We ate raw fish, ducks, sea gulls. We took down any bird that landed on our boat and we ate it like that, raw," said Jesus Vidana, one of the three survivors, in an interview with a Mexican radio station from the ship that rescued them.

The odyssey finally ended when Vidana and the other two men, identified as Salvador Ordonez and Lucio Rendon, were rescued last week by a Taiwanese tuna fishing trawler in waters between the Marshall Islands and Kiribati.

"They were very skinny and very hungry," Eugene Muller, the manager of the fishing company that found them, said.

The three men were sunburned but were otherwise in good shape. Vidana said he and his crew mates 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."

It was not clear why none of the boats stopped for the Mexicans earlier on, and 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.

Details of the extraordinary journey were sketchy, in part because of language difficulties between the Mexican fishermen and the Taiwanese trawler crew.

The first reports were that they had been lost for three months, and Muller said he thought they were drifting for 11 months.

Vidana and relatives in San Blas said they set out on their dramatic fishing trip last November.

Muller said he understood that there were five men aboard the boat when it set out from San Blas, and that two of them jumped overboard a few days into their ordeal. But Vidana made no mention of any missing fishermen.

In San Blas, relatives and friends of the fishermen had given up hope and were astonished to hear of their survival.

"I lived so sad ... Now that I know my grandson is alive, I just want him to come home," Francisca Perez, the grandmother of Lucio Rendon, told the Televisa news station."

"There are no words to express it. The emotion here is very strong because we thought they were dead," said Efrain Partida, a fellow fisherman from the small village.

Mexico's government is sending an official to meet the survivors in the Marshall Islands when the trawler that picked them up returns to port in a couple of weeks. The government will then help them return home.

A follow up on those hapless Mexican fishermen lost at sea back in August for 9 months.

It looks like they have done very well from their ordeal.

Pete.

______________________________________

Fishermen's ordeal set to make them rich amigos

MEXICO CITY: Three Mexicans who spent nine months drifting across the Pacific Ocean in a flimsy fishing boat eating raw fish and seabirds are to be paid at least $US3.8 million ($5 million) to turn their story into a movie.

The three - all fishermen who said they were too poor to afford a better boat or modern fishing equipment - have signed a contract to sell their story to an Atlanta-based company, said a Mexican Government official in San Blas, the fishing town where they began their odyssey.

The company negotiated eight-year exclusive rights to market the story to film companies, book publishers and merchandisers, said Silverio Aspericueta, part of a team of federal, state and municipal officials that led the negotiations on the men's behalf.

The final amount could be higher, Mr Aspericueta said. "The $3.8 million, they said it could be double that. That is a base."

The men were feared lost when their eight-metre fibreglass boat ran into trouble off Mexico's Pacific coast last November.

As their families gave them up for dead, they drifted more than 8000 kilometres before being picked up in August by a Taiwanese tuna trawler near the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific.

The three had survived by catching birds and fish to eat and drinking rainwater - and occasionally their own urine.

The men initially faced investigations because some doubted their claim that they meant to fish for shark when they set off from a coast known as a major drug trafficking highway. However, the Government has found no evidence they were smugglers.

Mr Aspericueta said the company is negotiating with several movie companies, including Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures. "We became famous overnight," he said from San Blas.

Edited October 15, 2006 by MallacootaPete

[robthefisherman]

amazing story

[Gibbofisho]

as is they didn't eat their mates. Or they jumped ship cause they tried to eat them.

[mrmoshe]

Here is a great read on those Mexican Fishermen lost at sea for 9 months last year.

It's from today's U.K. Independent and casts doubt on the fisho's story of surviving that long at sea.

A rather long read but interesting.

Cheers,

Pete

_________________________________________________________

Shipwreck Survivors: Three men in a boat

They claim to have survived for 289 days at sea, but, four months on, the awe-inspiring tale of the Mexican fishermen looks less like a miracle and more like an elaborate hoax.

Published: 07 January 2007

It's still night-time, but dawn will be coming soon. One of the most famous men in Mexico is lying awake in his boarding-house bed, listening to thunder pound the church on the town square. He hasn't slept in days. "When I close my eyes," he confesses, "I see nothing but the sun."

Last October, Salvador "Chava" Ordoñez and four other fishermen embarked from San Blas, a village on the west coast of Mexico, for what was supposed to be a three-day shark-fishing expedition. On the first night they ran out of petrol (or the engine broke down, or both, depending on which version you read) and their small boat was swept away by the same strong winds and currents that carried Portuguese spice traders to Micronesia in the 17th century.

Nine and a half months later, the 27-ft craft was spotted by the crew of a tuna-fishing boat in the waters off Baker Island, a tiny atoll some 5,500 miles west of San Blas. Two of the men had died of starvation, but 37-year-old Chava Ordoñez survived, along with Jesus Vidaña and Lucio Rendon, both 27. In English, their names translate to the Saviour, Jesus, and the Light.

Los Perdidos, as they're known in Mexico, claimed they survived by drinking rainwater from the filthy bilge and eating seagulls, raw fish, and sea turtles. They read aloud from Chava's tattered Bible, while Lucio, a musician, played air-guitar concertos to stave off boredom, as toxic on a small boat as the seawater around it.

The three pescadores (fishermen) had apparently endured the most remarkable odyssey of survival ever recorded: 289 days at sea, utterly exposed to the blazing sun, with nothing but two useless outboard engines and their own inner toughness. It was the kind of accidental epic journey that brought the Vikings to North America, the Maoris to New Zealand, Noah to Mount Ararat.

As news of their rescue flashed around the world, the fishermen's journey took on near-biblical significance. The Catholic Church's League of Bishops declared their survival a profound miracle, an "example of the power of faith". Before long, a mysterious Christian film producer from the US had signed Chava and his two fellow survivors to a reported $4m (£2m) movie deal. But when photographs surfaced showing Chava and his companions looking rested and well-fed after their ordeal, the media turned sceptical. Had they eaten their companions? Were they drug-runners gone astray? The accusations came to a head at an unruly news conference in Mexico City.

But the bishops had a point: the tale of Los Perdidos is sufficiently fantastic that it requires a certain degree of faith to believe it at all.

San Blas is a small, mud-spattered fishing village on Mexico's Pacific coast, about 60 miles north of Puerto Vallarta. Many of the 9,000 residents are shrimp, shark and dorado fishermen, while others operate eco-tours for bird-watchers. San Blas is best known for its jejenes, ravenous gnats that rise from the sand at dusk to feast on human flesh.

Three blocks down Calle Batallon from the town square, Chava is drinking Pacifico beer in the courtyard of Hotel Ranchero, the shabby, musty boarding house where he lives. People stop by the Ranchero every day in search of Chava, or "El Perdido" - city functionaries, union (omega) representatives, old friends, old "friends", book publishers, parishioners, journalists, incredulous fishermen, and eager women. Jesus and Lucio have already left town; he hasn't heard much from them.

Chava is a favourite in the local bars. Soon after he arrived in San Blas for the shrimp season 15 years ago, he earned the nickname "Ballena", after his preferred beer. On this rainy night, Chava's friend May, who owns the Ranchero, and his old buddy Carlos, from the off-licence, have stopped in (with a bottle) to hear Chava talk about his ordeal. "Ballena used to fall down a lot," Carlos says, smiling. "It seemed like every night, eh, Chavita?"

Short and stocky, with dark skin and a kindly face, Chava smiles and nods. A football match plays silently on the TV; Chava's eyes fix on it as he recounts his long voyage. "We left from Boca de Camichin at dawn with hooks ready to catch the tuna," he begins. Boca de Camichin is San Blas's sister village, about 12 miles away. "Then we used the tuna and skipjack to fish for shark, because the dark meat gives off a lot of blood."

Commercial shark fishing is a brutal, controversial industry. Fishermen slice the fins from the sharks and toss the bodies, sometimes still alive, overboard. Asian buyers pay around £25 a pound for the fins, which are used to make shark-fin soup, which costs upward of £50 a bowl.

Chava and his companions were not rich men. Lucio Rendon lived with his grandmother, aunt, and uncle in a nearby pueblo called La Limon; Jesus "Juanchito" Vidaña grew up in a fishing village in Sinaloa, to the north. Both men are tall and slightly paunchy, with thin moustaches and long, curly, mullet haircuts. The owner of the boat, known around the docks as Señor Juan, lived in Mazatlan, six hours north. The fifth man was older and didn't talk much. His boatmates called him "El Farsero".

Before heading out, they stopped in San Blas harbour to pick up supplies. "We started down where the shrimp boats are," Chava says. "We had sandwiches wrapped in paper for later, and there were also plantanos [bananas]. And of course there were jugs of water, but they were empty very soon."

No one took note of Señor Juan's launch leaving San Blas on 28 October, 2005. Thus the fishermen were never officially declared missing, and the government never searched for them.

Señor Juan's boat was a 27-ft fibre-glass sled with an open cockpit and plenty of workspace, but no VHF radio, radar, fish-finder, GPS, or any other electronics. None of the fishermen had a mobile phone. Nor was there a canopy to provide shelter from the sun, and Chava regretted that he hadn't brought a baseball cap. This type of boat, called a bugy or lancha by the locals, is common on the coast, and dozens are tied along the docks and rock-lined shore of San Blas's small harbour. Although most lancha engines are held together with duct tape and baling wire, Señor Juan's boat sported two 250-horsepower outboard motors, each of which cost upward of £8,000 new.

Señor Juan steered for the Islas Marias, a small archipelago 60 miles off the coast that is home to a massive prison complex, the Alcatraz of Mexico. "It was very sunny," Chava says. "There were waves, but they weren't very big. It is four hours to the islands. We set our lines in the water for the tuna and ate sandwiches for lunch. There were also beans on the boat."

According to Chava, Señor Juan pulled into the harbour of the largest island and topped off the fuel tanks. Then they headed back out to sea. They set their longline tackle on the first morning. In longline fishing, 80 to 100 baited hooks are spaced three- to six-feet apart on a long rope that spans two buoys. The gear is left to drift for as long as a day before it is hauled in, one hook at a time.

After they set the equipment, the sky darkened and a storm rolled in. The wind picked up strength and the waves began to gather and crest. Night fell, and the fishermen lost sight of their equipment. Señor Juan panicked. That equipment is expensive. So he started a frantic search for the gear, his twin outboards burning precious fuel.

It was a long and frightening night, and Chava, the most experienced of the five, tried to convince Señor Juan to give up the search and head back to the Islas Marias to refuel. But Juan's concern for his lost gear clouded his judgement. He zigzagged around in the dark for hours before the engines sputtered and ran out of gas. In the ensuing silence the five of them realised they had much bigger problems than missing fishing gear. "At that point we got really serious," Chava says quietly. "We started drifting out to sea."

After the storm passed, the sun returned, and thirst overwhelmed them almost immediately. They were at the mercy of the wind and the currents, well out of sight of land, without a cloud in the sky.

"After four days I got a plastic container and then I relieved myself," Chava says. It was an empty fuel tank that he washed out with seawater. "I said I was going to drink my own urine, but the rest of them refused. I said I wanted to live."

More than nine months later, on 9 August, 2006, the Koo's 102, a 240ft purse-seine fishing boat, was plying the waters off Baker and Howland Islands, in the same lonely, atoll-specked region where the American aviator Amelia Earhart is said to have disappeared in the 1930s. At around three in the afternoon a mate on the bridge noticed the drifting lancha, which hadn't appeared on the radar.

"I was awake when the boat rescued us," Chava says. The three usually tried to sleep during the sun-scorched days and fished for food at night. There was a small enclosure in the bow, and they took turns sleeping in its meagre shade. Jesus had a compass, and he had been assuring the others that they would soon land in China; Lucio wore a watch, but hid it, he says, "because each little while they asked me what time it was".

"I was usually awake," Chava says, "because it was very hard to sleep on the boat with the sun. We saw many boats pass by us. When that happened, it was devastating, and we didn't talk for many hours. But I never imagined we would die. I knew that God was protecting us. When Lucio said, 'This boat sees us, he is coming over to us,' I was very happy. Very happy."

The Taiwanese crew gave them water and basic first aid for their sunburns. Then the cook emerged from the galley with the pescadores' first real meal in more than nine months: a large platter of sushi. "Are you going to fry that fish?" Jesus asked incredulously. The cook didn't understand him.

As the vessel steamed toward the Marshall Islands, 1,200 miles northwest, the rescued men rested and ate rice and noodles, and the captain faxed their identities to port authorities in Majuro, the capital, who forwarded the information to the Mexican consul. The lancha was hoisted up and stowed on the deck of the big boat, its twin engines long since dismantled to make fishing tackle and snares.

When the Koo's 102 arrived on the Marshall Islands, Eugene Muller, the manager of Koo's Fishing Company, greeted the castaways. "They were a little skinny and exhausted," he says. "And understandably so. By the time I saw them on the docks they were in pretty good condition, but that was two weeks later."

Meanwhile, news of the remarkable rescue reached Mexico. Families in fishing communities often lose men to the sea; the pescadores' loved ones had held memorial services for them, and moved on with their lives. Vidaña's wife had given birth to a baby, and his house was on the verge of foreclosure. The media reported that Rendon was on probation for stealing shrimp from a San Blas fishing company. Chava's live-in girlfriend was with another man.

The three men, who had never been on an aeroplane before, flew to Hawaii on 21 August, where photographs were taken of them wearing leis, looking as though they'd just vacationed on the North Shore. The press had also learned of the two other fishermen who had died. When the three survivors landed in Mexico City on 25 August, they found more than 100 reporters waiting at the airport, shoving and shouting hostile questions.

"Can you explain why you are alive?"

"Why aren't your fingernails longer?"

"Why do you look so healthy?"

"Did you eat your companions?"

"Are you cocaine traffickers?

"Well, none of that is true," Rendon said at the press conference. "We were out shark fishing."

"This is a miracle from God," Chava added meekly.

"Those who don't believe us," said Vidaña, "I hope they never have to go through what we went through."

In San Blas many locals have opinions about Los Perdidos, but few have as much authority as Antonio Aguayo. He was a mate on a San Blas shark boat as a teen and has been a captain, guide, and outboard mechanic for 35 years. These days he mostly runs sport-fishing day trips for dorado and marlin aboard his lancha, which has an immaculate late-model 75-horsepower Mercury outboard. Everyone knows Tony, and Tony knows everyone. He even rescued Chava once in 2005.

"I got a radio call from a boat that was out for two days and a belt broke on the engine," Aguayo says. "They were 60 miles out. The owner and six other guys in a boat. Chava was one of them. They had a big boat with a wide canopy, and when I came up to the boat there was Chava, standing on the front. He saw me and he called out, 'Maestro!' From then on, every time he sees me he calls me Maestro."

When he's not out fishing, Aguayo sits in his Ford pickup in the shade of a large tree, in case a potential client happens past. His tidy boat is moored nearby. "Chava is not a close friend of mine, but I know that he is a sensitive young man, a nice boy," Aguayo says. "But this story is very difficult to believe. I think maybe they were on land for much of the time, in Costa Rica or Colombia, or even Panama."

He thinks it likely that the three were involved in some sort of smuggling operation. The west coast of Mexico is a favourite destination for shipments of cocaine from Central and South America, according to DEA agent Sarah Pullen. From there the contraband is taken overland to the US.

"There is a system that [the smugglers] have," Aguayo says. "They travel 100 or 120 miles offshore to meet up with other boats that are bigger and give them gasoline, so that they go (omega) farther." With a full load of fuel and no navigational equipment, the men could have zoomed hundreds of miles off course. "Then the current takes them," Aguayo theorises.

Aguayo has seen tough times at sea. He has seen boats filled with fishermen swallowed whole in storms, en route from Islas Marias. He has seen men return from disastrous voyages deprived of water and food under the harsh Pacific sun. "I think these Perdidos spent some time out there, a month maybe," he says, pointing down the river toward the sea. "But the most I've seen anyone survive is three or four days. After that you have a desperation. Your body gets disorders - your eyes, your skin. Here, if you go out for three days without having food and water, you would probably die."

Late one afternoon Aguayo and I board his lancha and steam a mile downriver, toward a fenced-in naval station that guards the mouth of the estuary. We slow to an idle by the base, and Aguayo points out four lanchas, beached side by side and partially covered by blue tarpaulins. The police confiscated them in the estuary as they were making drug pick ups. Each has two giant outboard motors, like the ones on Señor Juan's boat.

"Only those three men have the truth," Aguayo says, echoing the words of several fishermen I spoke with. "I don't know what they were doing on that boat. But I think I know that they were not fishing for shark."

In the rich recorded history of sailors lost at sea, none has lasted a fraction of the time or fared nearly as well as the three Perdidos. In 1982, American sailor Steven Callahan drifted for 76 days in a covered life raft, staying alive by eating barnacles and fish and distilling seawater with a basic desalinator; he was emaciated and near death when he made land in the Caribbean, having travelled 2,000 miles. "It took me six weeks to recover to the point of being physically functional," he wrote in his book Adrift. "It took another six weeks for... my weight to return to normal."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first book, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (which began as a series of newspaper articles in 1955) tells the story of a Colombian navy seaman who fell overboard and drifted for 10 days on a life raft. He killed a seagull, tried to eat it, but couldn't. "It's easy to say after five days of hunger you can eat anything... But you still feel nauseated by a mess of warm, bloody feathers with a strong odour of raw fish and of mange."

Medically speaking, a human body living in a boat on the open sea would be vulnerable to a long list of potential maladies, almost all of which would be visibly evident. "This is not going to be subtle stuff," says Dr Jay Lemery, who is an expert on wilderness medicine. "You're going to see muscle breakdown at the highest levels, retinal burns, cataracts, poor dental hygiene to say the least, and severe, if not fatal, scurvy."

Scurvy, which results from vitamin C deficiency, sets in after one to three months; its symptoms include spongy gums, liver spots, and bleeding from the mucous membranes, among other things. "After 289 days of the occasional raw bird, the toll on the human body would be extraordinary," Lemery continues. "You are going to see Skeletor."

When I first met Chava, a little more than a month after his rescue, he was quite robust; his hair was a rich black, his skin was clear, his eyes bright, and his teeth, when he smiled, were a flashy white. Under his crisp new football shirt I detected a slight, beery paunch.

"I had no trouble eating the birds," Chava tells me. On the boat, Lucio and Jesus called him "El Gato", because he would lie still for hours and wait for the seabirds to walk near his hand. "When I caught them, I split them down the middle like this" - he motions as if breaking a loaf of peasant bread in half - "and then we take turns eating it."

"Sometimes our stomachs hurt, because we would go 15 days without eating," Vidaña told Mexican television. "There were times when we had only one bird to share among the three of us."

For water, the men collected rain in the fish-well of the lancha and in empty fuel cans, which they washed out with seawater. Barnacles eventually formed on the bottom of the boat, attracting a steady supply of sea life. Chava says that they drank the blood of the fish and birds they caught, a practice he learned in a survival course offered by the local government just weeks before the fateful voyage. "We also ate the intestines of the turtles," Jesus said in a videotaped interview. They discovered that the turtles' heads were filled with blood, so they cut them off and drank from them like upturned goblets.

Señor Juan, the boat owner, and the other man, El Farsero, tried to eat the raw meat, but they couldn't keep it down. Chava says the two of them vomited blood. Señor Juan was the first to die, in January, after three months at sea. "The other men on the boat were sleeping and I was awake with the fishing equipment, trying to catch a fish," Chava says. "Don Juan was in the bow of the boat, and he called to me. I went there and he wasn't moving. I said to him, 'What's wrong, hermano?' He didn't respond."

Jesus awoke and asked, "Is he alive?"

"No, Juanchito," Chava replied. "He is already dead." He put a crucifix around the dead man's neck and pushed his body over the side. El Farsero died 15 days later. "He cried and cried for many days," Chava says. "He was very ill, and he cried. Then he just stopped."

The three survivors read prayers from Chava's Bible before they heaved El Farsero's body, too, into the sea. They would not have been the first shipwrecked crew to resort to eating human flesh under dire circumstances. But Chava insists that they never even considered it. "Never," he says, his face impassive. "We never talked about it."

Back in the United States, Joe Kissack's wheels began turning as soon as he heard about the Perdidos. Tall and friendly, with long, swept-back hair, the 49-year-old Kissack was once an executive vice president at Columbia TriStar Television, where he negotiated the syndication sale of Seinfeld and Walker: Texas Ranger. Two and a half years ago he checked into a psychiatric hospital while battling severe depression. "I was just at the end of my rope," he says. "I don't really remember much, but my chart says I was suicidal."

Kissack says he recovered with the help of prayer. He formed Ezekiel 22 Productions in July, while Chava, Lucio, and Jesus were still lost in the South Pacific. At a dinner party in August, he heard the story and was on a plane to Mexico the next day. He views his journey to find the Perdidos as one of faith; in much the same way he views their journey across the Pacific. (omega)

"Every time I had doubt, God gave me a sign," he says. In Mexico City, TV news reports about the rumours of cannibalism and drug trafficking almost scared him off. Then, as he was about to abandon his journey to San Blas and go back to Atlanta, God spoke to him again, this time through a pop star. "I opened the cab door and I heard George Michael singing 'Ya gotta have faith,'" he exclaims. "Then I said, 'God, you gotta be kidding me!' A sign? Maybe? Ya think?"

It was not difficult to find the three fishermen and in a meeting at a hotel restaurant in Mazatlan, Kissack delivered a PowerPoint presentation that predicted that they would earn millions of dollars from a film based on their ordeal. "Of course this is going to make a lot of money," he says. "There are 350 million Spanish speakers in the world. And what are they talking about right now? The election? The revolution in Oaxaca? Uh-uh. They're talking about los pescadores. This is the biggest story in Latin America, like, ever."

While news reports have valued the deal at $3.85m, Kissack says that figure isn't accurate, and that the officials who floated it weren't even part of the negotiation. "It's more like a book publishing deal," says the man who sold Seinfeld. "The survivors get to benefit from anything my company benefits from. They are getting a salary and percentages, guaranteed through 2014." For now, he says, he's paying them out of his own pocket.

Kissack thinks of himself as a "fourth pescador" and says repeatedly that he wants to protect them. "Chavita is carrying some pain with him," Kissack muses. "I don't know what it is, and it may not be from the voyage. After all, these are very tough men who have led hard lives. But he's got something in there, a darkness, some sort of dark secret.

"These guys are tough," he continues. "They are survivors. And really, if they were making this up, these simple fishermen from this tiny place in Mexico, do you think the three of them could keep their stories straight under all this scrutiny? I mean, I couldn't even do that."

Like Kissack, we want to believe the tale of Los Perdidos. We want to believe that human grit can conquer 5,500 miles of pitiless ocean and scorching sun. We want to believe that three simple men passed through the centre of hell for nine months and came out smiling, even a little pudgy. We are drawn to their story, as we are to all survival stories, because we need to know that no matter how bad it gets, how seemingly hopeless, salvation waits on the other side.

Start asking hard questions, though, and it becomes extremely difficult to accept that three men in a 27ft lancha could have drifted 5,500 miles across the Pacific in nine months and lived. For one thing, the prevailing wind and current patterns make their journey highly unlikely, according Joseph L Reid, professor emeritus of physical oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and an expert in Pacific currents. There are actually two westward-flowing currents: a relatively weak one at about the latitude of San Blas (22 degrees north), and a much stronger one, just below the equator. In between, however, runs an easterly countercurrent that the fishermen would have had to cross en route to their rescue spot.

"The fact that they crossed the countercurrent makes it very strange," Reid says. Then there are the doldrums, which are a little north of the equator. There would have been days on end when there was no wind at all."

Reid estimates that if they had really started near San Blas, the pescadores would have averaged between 12 and 15 miles a day (instead of 20 miles per day), which means that their journey should have taken closer to a year. Far to the south of San Blas, however, the winds and currents are more consistent. If the fishermen had started drifting at the latitude of, say, Panama or Colombia, they would have zipped along at close to 28 miles a day, says Reid. Their journey would have taken more like 200 days instead of 289.

But that's still a very long time for three men to survive in an open boat near the equator. "It takes just 60 days for the human body to die from protein deficiency," Dr Jay Lemery points out. "These fishermen's bodies would exhibit a severe catabolic state, which means they would be very emaciated." Yet in photos taken on the fishing boat, just days after their rescue, the fishermen display chubby cheeks and brilliant, toothy smiles.

In short, common sense and human physiology dictate that their amazing journey could never have happened the way they say it did. The truth is, if they were really shark fishing, they were likely the only shark boat in Mexico capable of keeping up with the narco-traffickers on open water. They probably at least tried to eat their dead comrades. And they could never have survived for nine months.

Yet there they were, drifting in their lancha at 175 degrees west and two degrees north, thousands of miles from home, smiling and waving as the Koo's 102 drew near.

When Chava, Lucio and Jesus returned to San Blas, Padre Pedro Franquez, the town priest, hosted a fiesta on the square. When the crowd applauded the speeches extolling his heroism, Chava smiled politely, but the public had already split between believers and doubters, so the whole thing seemed oddly forced. "It was very strange," says the bartender at a local bar and restaurant called McDonalds. "We were all celebrating their miraculous return. There were speeches, a roast of meats, music. The mayor and the priest were there. But if what they are saying is the truth, then miracles exist. And I've never been in a church."

One afternoon I stop by Padre Pedro's office in a shaded courtyard adjacent to the towering nave of his parish church, La Virgen de Fatima. A stout man with thick forearms, the padre takes time to meet me in the midst of a busy procession of engaged couples, concerned citizens, and municipal officials.

"I hope you are enjoying your time here in San Blas," Padre Pedro says with a kindly smile. A fan whirs in the corner and paperwork rustles on his desk. "Are the jejenes too much for you?"

After we exchange pleasantries I blurt out that I've just seen the confiscated drug boats at the navy base, and wonder if the padre knows anything about smuggling in the region.

"I would like to invite you not to attend my services tonight," he says sternly, and waves toward the door. A secretary approaches and guides me outside.

"Have a good day," she says, and closes the door to keep out the jejenes

Lost at sea Legendary tales of survival, shipwrecks and cannibalism

Rose Noelle, survival time: 119 days

Capsizing on their way from New Zealand to Tonga in 1989, a four-man crew managed to survive on their up-turned trimaran for 119 days. By the end of their four-month ordeal the general public were so amazed by how healthy they looked after the rescue that their amazing survival story was initially greeted with disbelief.

Anglo-Saxon, survival time: 70 days

After being attacked by a German raiding ship in 1940, seven crew members of the doomed British merchant ship, the Anglo-Saxon, got away in one of the vessel's small utility boats. Two died within the first two weeks from gangrene and a further three a few days after the water rations ran out. Fortunately, one of the remaining duo noticed mats of floating seaweed, crawling with tiny crabs and winkles. It kept them alive until, on the 70th day, they landed on a small island in the Bahamas, 2,500 miles from where they started.

Violet Jessop, survival time: N/A

To be involved in one maritime disaster is unfortunate, but serial-survivor Violet Jessop was caught up in three. The White Star Line employee was on board the Olympic in 1911 when it collided with another vessel. Unperturbed, she went on to join the Titanic for its maiden voyage. Jessop made it to a lifeboat before the ship broke apart. Then in 1916, when she was serving onboard the Britannic, it hit a mine and sank. After jumping out of a lifeboat just before it was sucked in to the propellers, she was finally rescued.

Mignonette, survival time: 22 days

While en route to Australia in 1884, the small yacht Mignonette was caught in a violent storm. The boat sank and the crew escaped on the yacht's dinghy. Nineteen traumatic days later, three of the desperate, dehydrated crew killed and ate one of their own; a delirious cabin boy. Three days later they were rescued and were promptly tried for murder.

Ziggy the cat, survival time: 17 days

In November a tomcat called Ziggy found his way into a large container in northern Israel, bound for Liverpool. A little worse for wear, he survived the 2,000 mile, 17-day journey without food or water.

Edited January 7, 2007 by MallacootaPete