Thursday

Interesting stories about boats abound this week. Three Mexicans, who apparently sailed from San Blas (located about 200 kilometers south of Mazatlán on the Pacific coast), were discovered adrift in their twenty-five foot fiberglass boat earlier in the week. The Mexicans had set sail in the storm-ridden month of November 2005, promptly running out of gas. They were then carried by wind and tide some 8,000 kilometers across the ocean over the following nine months, to be finally rescued by a Taiwanese fishing trawler east of the Marshall Islands. The sailors lived mostly on raw birds who were foolish enough to land on their star-crossed vessel. Vagueness in the reporting is due to the Taiwanese-Spanish language barrier, but apparently the sailors report that they never lost hope because they saw boats passing by them regularly. From Reuters:

"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" It was not clear why none of the boats stopped for the Mexicans earlier on [...]

In other boat news, the remaining co-kingpin of the Arellano Felix family, Javier (who, along with his incarcerated brothers, Benjamin and Ramon, ran the fearsome Tijuana Drug Cartel*) was arrested by the US Coast Guard in international waters fifteen miles off the coast of La Paz in Baja California. Arellano Felix was enjoying an afternoon of deep sea fishing with friends on the unfortunately-named sport fishing cruiser Dock Holiday. The brutal and notorious cartel tsar is now being officially processed in San Diego. All of this just goes to prove the old saw "setting sail from Mexico is no way of guaranteeing where you’ll end up." [Cavin]