El Limon is a hot, dusty, hard-scrabble village on the Pacific coast of Mexico. There, in her rough breeze-block home, Francisca Perez Ponce prayed each day before an altar she had built in memory of Lucio Rendon, her 26-year-old grandson. In late October 2005, Lucio and some other fishermen had disappeared while out on a three-day shark-fishing trip. “Everybody here thought they were dead,” said Silverio Aspericueta, the city manager of the nearby port of San Blas.

So, on August 15, 2006, nine months after the fishermen disappeared, Francisca Perez Ponce and the other residents of El Limon were stunned when a call came through from the foreign ministry in Mexico City. The official said Lucio Rendon and two other fishermen had been found – alive and in good health. They had been rescued on August 9 by a Taiwanese tuna trawler near the Marshall Islands, about 2,000 miles northeast of Australia, apparently carried by currents and trade winds more than 5,500 miles across almost the entire Pacific Ocean. They had been lost at sea for nine months and nine days, one of the longest maritime disappearances on record. As the trawler took Lucio Rendon, then 27, Jesus Vidana, 27, and Salvador Ordonez, 37, the 200 miles back to the Marshall Islands, the story of their extraordinary journey made headlines all over the world. In Catholic Mexico, though, their survival was hailed as no less than a miracle. “We were born again,” Lucio Rendon said of their rescue. “This has been a miracle from God.”

Their incredible journey was celebrated in corridos, or popular folk songs, in which much was made of the fact that the names of the three saved fishermen were Jesus, Salvador, which means “saviour”, and Lucio, meaning “light”.

When the trawler reached Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, on August 22, 13 days after their rescue, the three fishermen were in surprisingly good physical shape. Once the Mexican government had supplied them with passports, they were flown to Mexico City on August 27. But in the time between the news of their rescue and their arrival there, the aggressive Mexican media had been looking more deeply into their story. So when Salvador, Lucio and Jesus came through immigration at Mexico City airport and faced hundreds of reporters at a chaotic press conference, they were stunned by some of the questions thrown at them. “Are you cannibals?” reporters cried. “Are you narcos?” – meaning drug-runners. Why had the fishermen not mentioned in the first interviews they gave by satellite phone from the trawler that two other men – known as Juan David and El Farsero – had been with them on the boat when they set out? Or that they’d died? Was their story a fabrication? Had they been on a drug-running trip and killed the two after a fight? Who were Juan David and El Farsero? There seemed to be no record of them.

There were also questions about where the three fishermen were found. However, Peter Niiler, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, says: “It is plausible that they drifted so far.” He explains that through the combined force of the ocean currents and leeway – the amount the trade winds would blow such a boat – “you could drift up to 50 kilometres a day. We know from our measurements it is very likely they drifted that far in nine months”.

In the days after the rescue, reporters had discovered that over 50 fishermen had been arrested in recent years for drug-running along that coastline. They found out that Jesus Vidana had financial problems, and Lucio Rendon was on bail for stealing shrimp from a fishing company. And Salvador Ordonez was not from San Blas, as he had claimed, but from Oaxaca, where he had abandoned his wife and two children 12 years earlier. There was speculation about the journey itself: some suspected a hoax. But where was the motive? And how could the fishermen have carried it off?

In early December I phoned a man called Joe Kissack (pronounced Kiss-ick) to see if he could arrange interviews with the fishermen. I wanted to find out the truth about their extraordinary journey and apparently miraculous survival. In October, Kissack, working with a Colombian perfume wholesaler from Mexico City called Eli Beda, had formed a company, Ezekiel 22, to acquire the rights to the fishermen’s story. The Mexican press announced Kissack’s deal would be worth as much as $3.8m to the fishermen.

Considering the worldwide interest in the fishermen’s story, it seemed surprising to me that Kissack, who lives in Atlanta and works for a small book-publishing company, had been able to buy the rights to their story. Now, he said, he believed God had called on him to bring the fishermen’s story to the world. He saw their story as one of faith and redemption that could inspire millions to come to God. I was astonished when he insisted he wanted his own spiritual journey to be as important a part of the movie he planned as the fishermen’s epic nine-month voyage.

In mid-December I flew with Kissack to Mazatlan on the Mexican coast, where he introduced me to Jesus Vidana. I then travelled alone to San Blas and El Limon, where I tracked down Salvador Ordonez and Lucio Rendon. Although Kissack was happy for me to talk to Jesus, he and his business partner, Beda, were clearly not keen I should interview Salvador and Lucio, for reasons that only became clear later.

When the fishermen cast off from El Limon around dawn on October 28, 2005, Jesus, Lucio and Salvador quickly realised that while Juan David had some knowledge of fishing, his friend El Farsero was there just for the ride. Juan David was a tall, fat, expansive man in his late thirties.

El Farsero was younger, thinner and aloof. “He had airs,” said Jesus. “The three of us, we are real fishermen. We were born fishermen. We are used to bad weather, the sun, working hard.”

In San Blas, Juan David had bought petrol for the two 200-horsepower outboard motors, some food, water for drinking and ice to keep the fish they caught fresh, two knives for cutting sharks, a spark-plug extractor, a screwdriver and 10 large plastic containers. They had a compass, but no radio or satellite navigation system.

“I was worried, and told him it was too little food, too little water, too little petrol,” said Salvador. “I thought about not going, but my need was great. I needed a few extra dollars.”

By early afternoon they had arrived south of the Maria Islands, 60 miles offshore. They threw out their long fishing line to catch bait for sharks. But that night a cold front blew in with heavy swells and, as they slept, the cimbra (the centring) on the fishing line – the main line to which buoys on the surface and hooks underneath are attached – broke and went missing. Although Salvador became increasingly concerned they would run out of petrol, Juan David insisted they look for the line, which was worth $1,000. They kept searching and later that night, as Salvador had feared, they ran out of petrol. Even so, they were not immediately worried because they could still see the lights from other boats, and Salvador and Lucio had both been lost before, once for more than a week. But the cold front continued to blow and they were carried further out to sea.

Over the next two weeks the men grew increasingly desperate, running out of water and unable to fish, as they had no lines or hooks. “I am going to die unless I do something,” Salvador, who had taken a short survival course in 2004, said he told himself. “So I peed into a cup and drank it. The others said they would never do that, but the next morning they told me they had drunk their own urine too in the night.”

After about two weeks without food, Salvador saw a sea turtle swimming nearby and, with a line round his waist, he jumped into the sea and caught it. Lucio and Jesus helped to haul it in. They carved it up, and Salvador and Lucio ate some of its raw flesh. More importantly, they drank its blood, which saved them from dying of thirst. “Blood is a safe liquid, filled with nutrients,” says Tomas Francisco Ramirez, a merchant-marine captain who conducted the two-day training course that Salvador had taken in 2004. “It’s a well-known method of survival.” But the three fishermen say they had trouble convincing Juan David and El Farsero to eat the turtle. “Juan David would say, ‘I don’t eat crap like that – I’m used to eating good food,’” Jesus recalled. “We would tell him, ‘You may have that at home, but you don’t have it here.’

“We would eat everything of the birds we caught, even the bones,” Jesus told me.

They were mainly lucky with the weather, but twice, in December and January, probably somewhere near Hawaii, the storms were so fierce they thought the boat would capsize. “That was the worst time for us,” said Lucio. “We really thought we were going to die.” Salvador was the one who kept their spirits up, telling them they were sure to be saved. He was very inventive, using the containers they had as flotation devices along the sides of the boat so that it would be less likely to capsize in storms. He fashioned a makeshift sail so they could better steer through heavy seas. And every day he would read from his tattered Bible. Once, when a huge storm ripped out the Apocalypse section from Salvador’s Bible, they took it as another sign they would be saved. He would often call the others to read passages with him, especially the story of Jonah and the whale. “I said I would love the same thing to happen to me,” Jesus recalled, “that a whale would eat me and take me back to the coast.”

The men would argue, usually over stupid things, but it never became physical. Often they saw planes overhead and boats passing not far away. Once some men on a boat waved to them. “They thought we were working,” said Jesus. “I cried because it came so close.”

As Salvador, Lucio and Jesus kept up their strength and spirits, Juan David and El Farsero were getting weaker, and the latter was obviously suffering a complete psychological breakdown. “He would just sit in a corner crying,” said Jesus. “Juan David would talk about his family, his two daughters. But El Farsero didn’t talk about anything.” In mid-January, Juan David started vomiting blood and defecating on himself. For eight days Lucio, Salvador and Jesus took it in turns to clean him. He began calling for his mother. “I am sorry, Mama,” Lucio recalled him saying. At around 2pm on January 20, he died.

“Everyone was sleeping and I was trying to fish when he called to me with a little groan,” said Salvador. “I got down near him; he was lying in the bow of the panga [an open-topped boat]. I said, ‘What’s wrong, Juanito, brother?’ He didn’t respond. I put my ear to his heart, and he was dead.”

They kept the body on the boat for three days. On the third day, after saying seven Hail Marys and seven Our Fathers, the three fishermen threw Juan David’s body into the ocean. “I grabbed him under the shoulders,” said Jesus. “Lucio grabbed him by the legs and Salvador took his hips. A piece of skin from Juan David’s foot came off on Lucio’s hand.”

I asked the fishermen if Juan David’s death discouraged them. “No. That’s when we started making more effort,” said Lucio. “I decided what happened to Juan would not happen to me. I decided, I will not be thrown into the sea.”

About three weeks later, El Farsero, who had been curled up at the end of the boat, also died. “The truth is we didn’t realise he had died,” Jesus admitted. “We went over to him, moved him, and that’s when we saw he was already dead. We kept him on the boat for two days because we didn’t know how long he had been dead.”

Surprisingly, there has been no formal investigation into the deaths of Juan David and El Farsero, and none of the three surviving fishermen has been questioned by any Mexican law-enforcement authorities about the deaths.

The fishermen insist they would never have considered eating their two companions, alive or dead. From their separate accounts, and the state of their health when they were rescued, it’s clear for most of the trip that they had plenty of food, and so had no need to consider cannibalism.

But food did become a problem after about 7½ months, as they floated further west, and there were no more sea turtles. “That’s when we started losing weight,” said Jesus. “Sometimes we would eat ducks; other times we wouldn’t eat for three or four days. But I remember Salvador saying the end will be like the beginning. In the beginning we were suffering and hungry; at the end it was the same.”

The rescue came when they were sleeping.

“Salvador woke up and said, ‘I’m hearing something, a boat or a ship,’” Jesus recalled. “And we said, ‘You are loco. Go back to sleep. It’s just the wind.’ And he said, ‘No, I am going to have a look.’ So he went out and started screaming, ‘It’s a ship! A ship! And it’s huge!’ And we got up and looked – and it was so close to us.”

In the six months since their tumultuous return to Mexico, the fishermen have coped in different ways with the memories of the voyage, the deaths of their two companions, the incredible attention and troubling scrutiny they have received. Jesus has come through it the best of the three, materially and psychologically. In addition to the $10,000 advance he and the other fishermen each got from Joe Kissack for the film rights, Jesus has been given a new house by the governor of Sinaloa, and a boat with a net. He has put his fame to good use and helped other local people in need. But Lucio and Salvador have had enormous problems adapting. Since their return their heavy drinking has become notorious in El Limon and San Blas. “Those guys like to drink too much,” says the San Blas city manager, Silverio Aspericueta. When I asked a fisherman on the dock in San Blas where I might find Salvador, he makes a chopping gesture with his hand. “Borracho, borracho,” he says. Drunk, drunk.

I am only able to find him after I scour the brothels and the bars in San Blas. Finally, in a dive called El Mescalito, one of the working girls, Alma, says she knows Salvador and agrees to take me to his room, near the dock. When we get there, Alma is surprised to find he has a girlfriend, Maricella. Maricella tells me Salvador is out fishing but will return the next day, which is when I talk to him. After he has talked about the voyage, I ask him about his drinking. He shrugs and says he has always drunk a lot.

Most troubling, though, is what has happened to Lucio. The taxi driver who takes me to his house in El Limon knows where he lives – he recently drove him there from San Blas at 4am, blind drunk. I ask Francisca Perez Ponce, Lucio’s grandmother, how the ordeal changed him. “I don’t like it. He is drinking so much now,” she says. “When he is not drinking he is a really good person, but when he drinks he loses control. He says he drinks so much because he suffered a lot and he can’t forget what happened.”

It is painfully obvious to me that Lucio, quickly downing beers as he talks, is suffering from post-traumatic stress. But nobody in a position to help him seems willing to do so. And the $10,000 that he has received from Kissack has, if anything, worsened his problems by fuelling his drinking binges.

Francisca Perez Ponce tells me of another deep anxiety – that the Mexican media’s announcement that Kissack would pay the three fishermen $3.8m for their film rights has put their lives, and those of their families, in danger, as kidnapping is such a big industry in Mexico.

It’s ironic that even some of those involved in the negotiations with Kissack doubt the fishermen will ever see anything like the sums they have been promised by him. As Kissack talks to Hollywood studios about a possible film, he may not be willing to face the truth about his sainted fishermen: that their ordeal has turned Lucio and Salvador into psychologically damaged alcoholics. That is not, of course, the spiritually uplifting message he needs his putative film on los tres pescadores to convey.

“It is a story about faith and hope and survival,” Kissack continues to insist, “a story that can inspire millions, and bring them to God.”

The tragedy of the three Mexican fishermen is not what happened on their terrible voyage. It is that those who have been most involved with them since their return – such as the voracious Mexican media – have ignored the men’s suffering for their own ends.

THE SEA DID NOT TAKE THEM

1983: On a mission to recover the dead from an oil-rig crew boat that had sunk off the Gulf of Mexico, the dive team discovered the ship’s cook trapped in an air pocket. He had survived underwater for more than 40 hours.

1997: the British yachtsman Tony Bullimore (right) was stranded in the Southern Ocean when his boat capsized in high winds during a round-the-world yacht race. The veteran sailor managed to survive by perching on boxes in an air pocket in the boat’s overturned hull. He was rescued five days later by an Australian naval crew.

2001: Four Samoan fishermen were forced to ditch their outboard motors as their heavy load of fish began dragging them under. After living on a diet of rainwater, fish and seabirds, two of them died. The other two were brought ashore four months after their ordeal began, when their boat reached the coast of Papua New Guinea.

2003: Fourteen Bangladeshi fisherman were discovered by a Sri Lankan trawler drifting 1,500 miles from home, unconscious and strapped to barrels. The crew had secured themselves to the containers in order to stay afloat after their boat had capsized in a cyclone.

2006: Living on just three fingernail-sized pieces of biscuit and a sip of water a day, 15 passengers of an Indonesian ferry that sank in the Java Sea survived aboard a raft for nine days before being rescued.