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JZ
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Mexican fishermen found after 11 months at sea
http://tinyurl.com/ly5qe
[Edited on 8-16-2006 by JZ]
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frizkie
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Eleven months at sea???!!!!
Now that sounds INTERESTING !! I'd sure like to hear more about that but the link does not supply the story.....Can you tell us more JZ???
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JZ
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Try it now.
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bajabound2005
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Mood: words cannot describe...
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if that link doesn't work, try this one:
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1196612006
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bajarich
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Now thats a real expedition! The didn't use any motors either! (See the thread about the Waverunners)
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frizkie
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Location: Victoria, BC, Canada & El Chorro, Baja Sur
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Thanks
That worked.
Incredible!! There's something to be said for the Power of positive thinking.
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The Sculpin
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Location: Back in the Saddle
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Mood: Riding into the Sunset, looking for a sunrise.
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I hope they don't get screwed on the book royalties or the movie rights!
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Cypress
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11 months? Eleven months? According to my limited math skills, that's close to a year drifting 'round upon the deep blue sea. Jeez! There's something
about this story that doesn't add up.
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MrBillM
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It's been a Long, Long Time !
This one could be the record, but there have been numerous other cases where people survived for six months or more on the ocean, often in Life
Rafts. They, at least, had a seaworthy 30 foot boat (with no propulsion). There are big stretches of the Pacific where you could go for a long time
and never see another vessel.
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Bob H
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Both of the stories are a little different in details. One says 11 months and the other says 9 months. Maybe there is an interpretation problem
here.
The SAME boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. It's about what you are made of NOT the circumstance.
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Mexray
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Sorry...
...It's reported that their relatives in San Blas say they were missing for only three months! I guess the story gets better with every telling!
According to my clock...anytime is \'BAJA TIME\' & as Jimmy Buffett says,
\"It doesn\'t use numbers or moving hands It always just says now...\"
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Sonora Wind
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Fishing???
If I was gone on a three month fishing trip, my wife would surley leave me!! HUMMMM Talk later I've got to pack the boat.
Glad their safe 
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BajaNews
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3 anglers rescued after months afloat, they say
http://sports.espn.go.com/outdoors/fishing/news/story?id=255...
By Mark Stevenson
Associated Press ? Aug. 16, 2006
MEXICO CITY ? Three Mexican fishermen who claim they set out months ago from Mexico's western coast have been rescued near the Marshall Islands ?
5,500 miles to the west ? after surviving on rain water and raw fish.
Eugene Muller, manager of Koo's Fishing Co., said by phone Tuesday that the company's boat picked up the three on Aug. 9. Muller said the men were
recovering and would be brought back to Majuro, the islands' capital, in 10 to 14 days.
"We fished, and we ate the fish raw ? because there was no fire to cook with," survivor Jesus Vidana, 27, told Mexico's Televisa news network in a
telephone hook-up to the ship's communications system.
They once went 15 days without food but had enough drinking water because "it rained every day," he said.
He said the three read the Bible as they drifted across the Pacific.
"We never lost hope because there is a God up there," he said, sounding hoarse and sleepy. "Our feet are swollen, our arms are swollen ? but we're not
in that bad shape."
Vidana said he and the other two men set off on Oct. 28, 2005, from San Blas, a coastal town about 410 miles northwest of Mexico City, to fish for
sharks. But mechanical problems and adverse winds quickly pushed their 27-foot boat out to sea.
"It was nine months and nine days," Vidana recalled. "One of the guys on the boat has a watch that shows the months and the days."
There was no independent confirmation of the date when the men set out from San Blas; phone calls to port officials there went unanswered.
However, the government news agency Notimex interviewed relatives of the men in San Blas, who said they had only been missing for three months.
Muller said the men's boat appeared to have had engine problems.
"Their two motors had been dismantled, and it seemed they were trying to swap parts to get one working," Muller said, noting that the ship's captain
had told him "they were very skinny and they were very hungry. The first thing we did, we gave them something to eat and they chowed down."
Survivor Lucio Rendon, 27, recalled that "we didn't see any ships for months," and Vidana said they were asleep when the Koo's crew called out to
them.
"We're recovering," Rendon said, "sleeping a lot, and eating well."
Salvador Ordonez, the third survivor, said the three carried only flashlights and a compass but no radio.
Still, he said, "I knew I was going to live, that I wasn't going to die."
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BajaNews
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Fishermen survive months at sea eating birds
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=oddlyE...
Aug 16, 2006
By Kieran Murray
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Three Mexican fishermen have been rescued after drifting for months and thousands of miles across 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 village of San Blas on Mexico's Pacific coast in November and were blown 5,000 miles (8,000
km) off course after their 25-foot (8-metre) 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.
NEVER GAVE UP
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.
Details of the extraordinary journey were sketchy. First reports said they were lost for three months but relatives confirmed Vidana's version that
they left nine months ago.
"I lived so sad. ... Now that I know my grandson is alive, I am very happy. I just want him to come home soon," Rendon's grandmother Francisca Perez
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 in San
Blas, which was once a Spanish port and is known for its bird life, tropical jungle and voracious mosquitoes and sand flies.
Mexico is sending an official to meet the survivors in the Marshall Islands and help bring them home when the trawler that picked them up returns to
port in a couple of weeks.
Among other recorded cases of people surviving long periods stranded at sea, in 1942 a Chinese sailor named Poon Lim survived four months alone in the
South Atlantic after a German U-boat torpedoed the British merchant ship he was working on.
In 1789, British Vice Adm. William Bligh was set adrift after the famous mutiny on "The Bounty," a merchant ship he commanded. He and 18 loyal crew
members then made an impressive six-week journey to safety in Timor.
(Additional reporting by Paul Tait in Sydney and Catherine Bremer in Mexico City)
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MrBillM
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More Recent Survivals
I remember years ago (early 90s ?), a middle-aged couple whose sailboat went down and they floated in their liferaft for months. They were able to
survive because they had a PUR Survivor water maker. Their mishap was covered in all of the Sailing magazines and an advertisement for PUR Survivor.
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thebajarunner
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"The Life of Pi"
If you like this story, then read the book.
This book has been around a couple of years, and it is a terrific tale (fiction) but has eerie overtones to the story above.
And, it is one of the best reads you will enjoy this Summer!
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Oso
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another version
Adrift in the Pacific for 9 Months
By H?ctor Tobar, LA 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" Ordo?ez
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, Ordo?ez 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 Vida?a 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."
Ordo?ez, Vida?a 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.
Vida?a 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 Ordo?ez, 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 Ordo?ez 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
Ordo?ez, 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 Ordo?ez has another cousin who has been missing
for more than seven years.
"When you're out there, your engine is your lifeline," Saul Ordo?ez
said. "These days some of us carry cellphones so we can call back if
an engine fails."
The three fishermen remain aboard the Koo's 102, whose crew is
fishing for tuna between the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, Muller
said.
The Koo's 102 is scheduled to arrive in the port of Majuro in the
Marshall Islands in 10 to 14 days, officials said.
The ship's crew members are mostly Chinese-speaking workers, and the
Mexicans have been able to communicate very little with their
rescuers.
They wrote their names on a sheet of paper, which was faxed from the
ship to Majuro, Muller said.
Rendon told Mexican television that the tuna fishermen had spotted
their disabled vessel.
"We were born again," Rendon said of being rescued. "This has been a
miracle from God because we never lost hope."
Mexican diplomats said Tuesday that they would arrange a plane trip
home for the men once they reached port.
Remigio Rendon, 43, said his family never gave up hope that his
nephew Lucio would be found alive.
"My mother refused to pray the novena for him," Rendon said. "She
said Lucio was still alive. And she was right."
All my childhood I wanted to be older. Now I\'m older and this chitn sucks.
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MICK
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WOW THAT'S AMAZING
Getting there is ALL the fun!
Ok being here is fun to
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bajarich
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It something to think about whenever you launch your little fishing boat. I always carry a set of oars that might get me back. I have never seen
spare oars on any fishermans panga in Mexico. If you are left only to drift with the current and don't have a radio, it could be a long day fishing.
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JZ
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That's right. Going out on the water without a VHF radio, GPS, and a good anchor with the proper rode is just nuts. Cell phones are NOT a viable
substitute for a VHF radio.
Get an ACR ditch bag for your radio, GPS, flares, and other essentials. Very compact, water tight, and it floats.
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