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Three Mexican fishermen have been rescued after drifting for about nine months across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean in a small boat, a hard experience they survived by eating raw birds and fish and drinking rain water．
The shark fishermen said on Wednesday they left their home town of San Blas on Mexico's Pacific coast in November and were blown 5,000 miles off course after their 25-foot 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．
“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．
The odyssey finally ended when Vidana and the other two men, Salvador Ordonez and Lucio Rendon, were rescued a week ago by a Taiwanese fishing boat in waters between the Marshall Islands and Kiribati．
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．
“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 mosquitoes and sand flies．
San Blas is home to thousands of fishermen and many have old boats without radios or life-saving device．
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