NEW BEDFORD, Mass. -- Four fishermen rescued from their rubber raft adrift at sea said Monday that 'plenty of praying' and five bags of chocolate chip cookies kept them alive during their 42-hour ordeal.
'Everyone did plenty of praying and eating Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies,' said fisherman Joao Medeiros, 36, captain of a fishing trawler whose crew was saved this weekend on the high seas off Nantucket Island.
'Without God, and the supply of cookies, I don't think we would have made it,' Medeiros said. 'The cookies saved us. They're good and we had to watch out that we didn't eat them all because we didn't know how long it would be before somebody spotted us.'
Medeiros and his crew abandoned their 67-foot fishing trawler, the Christina J., about 20 miles off Nantucket at about 10 p.m. Thursday when huge waves flooded the vessel's engine room and knocked out its power.
They were rescued at about 5 p.m. Saturday when a passing tugboat, the Taurus, spotted the raft and picked the men up, about 7 miles off Nantucket.
Medeiros said when the crew abandoned ship they only had time to grab five bags of the cookies and a 12-ounce container of water in a tin survival canister.
'Water started leaking in right away and we had to get off the ship and into the raft before the boat sank,' he said.
Medeiros said that 15 minutes after the crewmen abandoned the trawler it sank in 'rough and freezing seas.' He also said none of the crew members slept through the 42-hour ordeal at sea, during which conditions were both rainy and foggy.
'I prayed the whole time,' he said. 'I thought I'd never see my wife or daughter again.'
The other three members of the crew were Manny DaSilva, 25, Glorialdo Farizo, 42, and Manny Matso, 23, all of New Bedford.
