RIO HATO, Panama (AP) — Three Panamanian men were on their way home
after a night of fishing, happy with their success, when the motor on
their small open boat rattled and quit, leaving them adrift in sight of
land, but too far out for their cell phones to work.
With nothing
left to eat but the fish they caught and a few gallons of water, they
drifted for 16 days, more than 100 miles from home, before they thought
they must be saved.
Adrian Vasquez, 18, saw a huge white ship
coming toward them. He waved a red sweater to get their attention,
reaching high over his head, and dropping it low to his knees. Though he
was near death, the skipper of the little panga, Elvis Oropeza
Betancourt, 31, joined in, waving an orange life jacket.
"Tio,
look what's coming over there," Vasquez recalled saying in an interview
Thursday with The Associated Press. "We felt happy, because we thought
they were coming to rescue us."
The ship didn't stop, and the
fishing boat drifted another two weeks before it was found. By then,
Vasquez's two friends had died.
"I said, 'God will not forgive them,'" Vasquez recalled. "Today, I still feel rage when I remember that."
That
same day, March 10, birdwatchers with powerful spotting scopes on the
promenade deck of the luxury cruise ship Star Princess saw a little boat
adrift miles away. They told ship staff about the man desperately
waving a red cloth.
On Thursday, Princess Cruises, based in Santa
Clarita, Calif., said a preliminary investigation showed that
passengers' reports that they had spotted a boat in distress never made
it to Capt. Edward Perrin or the officer on duty.
If it did, the
company said, the captain and crew would have altered course to rescue
the men, just as the cruise line has done more than 30 times in the last
10 years. The company expressed sympathy for the men and their
families.
The fishermen had set out for a night of fishing Feb. 24
from Rio Hato, a small fishing and farming town on the Pacific coast of
Panama that was once the site of a U.S. Army base guarding the Panama
Canal. There are plans for a new airport to bring in tourists. Vasquez
had lost his job as a gardener at a local hotel, and Oropeza invited him
to come fishing to make a little money. The night before, they had no
luck, so they were very happy to have a load of fish to sell, Vasquez
said.
By the time they started to drift, Adrian had eaten his
lunch of rice and beef. They only had five gallons of water to start
with, and much of that was gone. There was raw fish to eat, but no one
liked it very much, and it soon rotted after the ice melted in the
coolers. Sometimes Vasquez went over the side to probe passing rafts of
debris, and sometimes came up with coconuts for them to eat. At one
point, they caught a turtle, but decided they couldn't eat it and put it
back in the water. As they were, they found a jug of water that they
drank "with tremendous anxiety."
One night they saw a ship far in the distance, and lit a rag on a stick that they waved, but the ship didn't come for them.
On
the Star Princess, birdwatcher Jeff Gilligan from Portland, Ore., was
the first to spot the boat, something white that looked like a house.
When
Judy Meredith of Bend, Ore., looked through the scopes, she could
plainly see it was a small open boat, like the kinds they had seen off
Ecuador. And she could see a man waving what looked like a dark red
T-shirt.
"You don't wave a shirt like that just to be friendly," Meredith said. "He was desperate to get our attention."
Barred
from going to the bridge herself to notify the ship's officers,
Meredith said she told a Princess Cruises sales representative what they
had seen, and he assured her he passed the news on to crew.
The birdwatchers said they even put the representative on one of the spotting scopes so he could see for himself.
Meredith
went to her cabin and noted their coordinates from a TV feed from the
ship, booted up her laptop and emailed the U.S. Coast Guard what she had
seen. She said she hoped someone would get the message and help.
She sent a copy to her son. When she returned to the promenade deck, she could still see the boat.
But nothing happened. The ship kept going. And the little boat with the waving men disappeared.
"We were kind of freaking out, thinking we don't see anything else happening," Meredith said.
Gilligan could no longer bear to watch.
"It
was very disturbing," he said. "We asked other people, 'What do you
think we should do?' Their reaction was: 'Well, you've done what you
could do.' Whether something else could have been done, that's a bit
frustrating to think about."
After Oropeza and Fernando Osario
died, Vasquez was eventually picked up by a fishing boat off Ecuador's
Galapagos Islands, more than 600 miles from where they had set out.
Vasquez
said he slipped their bodies into the sea after they began to rot in
the heat. Before he was rescued, a rainstorm gave him fresh water to
drink, helping him survive. Throughout the ordeal, the thought about his
eight brothers, and never gave up hope.
Safe at home, Vasquez said he recognized their boat, the Fifty Cents, from the photos Gilligan had taken with his 300 mm lens.
"Yes,
that's it. That's it. That is us," he said. "You can see there, the red
sweater I'm waving and, above it is the sheet that we put up to protect
us from the sun."
Vasquez mentioned the ship in his first statement to Panamanian authorities when he returned to his country.
Back
at home in Oregon, Meredith couldn't sleep, wondering what happened to
the men. Reading a news story about a Panamanian rescued off Ecuador
after 28 days in an open boat, she figured that was the boat they had
seen. She pestered Princess Cruises, the Coast Guard, and even the
Panamanian embassy.
"We were all just sick about it, and just wanted to believe the ship notified someone," she said.
__
Barnard contributed to this report from Grants Pass, Ore.
Hans Cett is an established freelance author and consultant
specialising in the mobile communications industry. He also writes for
Countdown2MWC - http://countdown2mwc.wordpress.com/ 
