Thursday, August 17, 2006

Raw gulls keep trio alive for nine months

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.

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