Three fishermen lost at sea for nine months relied on a fishing rod constructed out of broken engine parts and rain collected in a bucket to survive.

Sometimes going days without food, the group caught sharks — once with their bare hands — and trapped seagulls. The fishermen hid under blankets to protect themselves from the sun.

“We ate raw fish, ducks, seagulls. 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 an interview with a Telemundo reporter using a satellite phone from the ship that rescued them.

The fishermen took turns reading from one of their last remaining possessions — a battered Bible, which had only a few worn pages left at the end of their journey.

Most of their supplies had been lost to the sea for weeks when a Taiwanese fishing trawler found the group — naked, burned and emaciated — near the Marshall Islands, more than 5,000 miles from their starting point.

The Mexican fishermen rescued from their watery prison said they never thought they would die.

“We never lost hope because there is a God up there,” Vidana told Mexico’s Televisa news network, sounding hoarse and sleepy. “Our feet are swollen, our arms are swollen … but we’re not in that bad shape.”

Source: MSNBC