Shipwreck Survivors Recall Ordeal in Shark-Filled Waters

Sapped of his strength and running low on hope, with sharks circling like a hangman’s noose in the great Pacific, Jorge Bello made a resolution: He would not be eaten alive.

If he felt a shark’s teeth ripping into his flesh, he decided, he would slit his own throat with a knife and be done with the torment--and, just possibly, save the lives of his two companions.

“I have seen what a shark can do, and I didn’t want that to happen to me while I was living,” Bello recalled Saturday. “Besides, I thought if the sharks were busy with me it would give the others a chance to survive.”

Instead, Bello and his two colleagues lived to tell the tale Saturday of the shipwreck of their 25-foot wooden fishing boat in stormy seas last Sunday 40 miles west of Acapulco. After 55 hours adrift on floating debris, the trio was literally saved by Magic--a fortuitously named Dutch freighter ferrying bananas from Panama to Long Beach that spotted the Mexican fishermen and plucked them from the sea.

The three recounted their saga at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, where officials provided aid after the survivors arrived in Long Beach aboard the freighter. U.S. immigration authorities obliged with three-day visas. All three men have scratches, burns and bumps, but no serious injuries.

The fishermen, who were the only ones aboard the sinking vessel, are due to return Monday to their home in Acapulco, where grieving relatives had initially assumed they were dead, the latest area fishermen to perish in a high-risk occupation. Search parties had concluded they were lost after finding sandals and other personal effects at sea.

So stunned was Pedro Fontan’s mother that her son was actually alive that she insisted he prove that it was indeed her son speaking on the telephone from Los Angeles. She demanded he state his date of birth--Nov. 2, 1961.

“She just couldn’t believe I survived,” said Fontan, a slender father of three whose sun-bleached hair stands as testimony to his time under the sun at sea. “People had already lit the candles for us.”

Indeed, the three were not far from the end when the crew of the Magic spotted them waving frantically about 8 a.m. Tuesday. They had had no fresh water or food for more than two days, suffered from a scorching sun and chilly nights, and hung desperately to a floating gasoline tank and, later, a filled plastic garbage bag that miraculously appeared and provided a kind of life raft.

And then there were the ominous sharks, whose dorsal fins proved an unnerving sight as the three clung to life amid an unexpected, pounding storm that lashed them with 12-foot waves. Ironically, the three are shark fisherman--and, indeed, were heading back to Acapulco with more than 600 pounds of cooling shark when the storm swamped their modest fishing vessel.

It was the foul smell of the gasoline from the floating tank that kept the sharks at bay, the three suspect. Aghast at Bello’s offer to sacrifice himself, Fontan said he held onto the trio’s knife to ensure that his lifelong friend would not make good on his proposal.

“It’s a miracle they’re here,” said Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, Mexican consul general in Los Angeles. “They have been reborn.”

The fishermen credited their survival to Nico H. Zegers, captain of the Magic, the Dutch freighter that pulled them from the water Tuesday morning, by which time the storm had abated. The veteran seaman hadn’t seen anything like the bedraggled threesome since his days in the 1970s rescuing Vietnamese refugees from the South China Sea.

“You don’t expect to see people floating in the middle of the ocean,” noted the blond Zegers, who was awarded with a plaque of appreciation by the Mexican government.

The Magic had initially passed by the trio, but then a crew member heard screams for help and informed the captain. The big boat turned around and picked up the battered survivors.

Not long before that, the three had begun to show signs of delirium. Fontan said he hallucinated the image of a man with a bottle of cool Coca-Cola, prompting him to ask, “Can I have a sip?”

The third crewman, Jose Luis Diego, tried to coax him back to reality. “I told Pedro to calm down,” said Diego, a 33-year-old father of three who is a cousin of Bello. To the shock of the others, Diego managed to sleep somewhat as he floated--he was even heard snoring.

Now, all are understandably eager to return home and see their families. “The first thing I’ll do is go to church and thank God,” said Bello, the eldest of the three at 38, and the father of two teenagers. He added: “One can put no price on life.”

But the fishermen must face the financial quandary of how to come up with the $5,000 or so to reimburse the vessel’s owner for his lost boat. As is commonly done in Mexico, the three were permitted to use the launch in exchange for a portion of their daily fishing take. A group of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles has begun a fund-raising campaign for them. The three wonder if the owner will even believe their story.

“He might think we took the boat to Los Angeles and sold it,” said Fontan.

Despite their ordeal, the three say they will go back to the sea. They have lived off its bounty all their lives, making an implicit pact with its inherent risks. Six fellow fishermen died last year, they said, presumably shipwrecked and finished off by sharks. No trace of them was ever found.

“We have mouths to feed, children to send to school,” said Fontan with a smile. “The sea is our way of life. What else can we do?”