MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Happy final for Mexican fishermen

Three Mexican fishermen who claim they spent nine months adrift in the Pacific Ocean finally reached dry land when the fishing boat that rescued them arrived at a remote island chain thousands of miles from their homeland.

The trio landed Monday in the Marshall Islands aboard the Asian fishing ship that pulled them from the ocean on Aug. 9. They are expected to return to Mexico by plane after a medical checkup later this week, Mexico's Foreign Relations Department said.

Television footage showed the fishermen looking thin but clean-shaven, occasionally smiling and appearing surprising healthy.

"I'm well, very well," survivor Salvador Ordonez said. When asked if he would go back to the sea, he answered: "Of course. I've always worked on the sea."

After the men were rescued earlier this month, they told authorities they had set out 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.

They said they survived on rain water and raw fish before being rescued near the Marshall Islands, about 5,500 miles to the west.

On Monday, Ordonez told the Televisa news network that two other men on the boat had died during the ordeal. One of the men, whom they knew only as "Juan," didn't want to eat raw food.

"He vomited ... and after a while he vomited blood, over and over again." Eventually he and the other man died, and the three survivors threw their bodies overboard, he said.

Survivor Jesus Vidana, 27, said the two dead men had hired the other three to make the fishing trip, and denied speculation they may have set out to pick up drugs at sea, a common activity on Mexico's Pacific coast, which often serves as a transfer point to the United States.

There was no independent confirmation of the date when the men set out from San Blas. However, the government news agency Notimex interviewed relatives of the men earlier this month, who said they had only been missing for three months.

The fishermen have become instant folk heroes in Mexico and the Mexican Council of Bishops has called them an example of faith.