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Cold, frightened and desperate after 13 hours in the choppy Gulf of Mexico, Melinda Lopez refused to give up.
After falling overboard Tuesday from the shrimp boat on which she worked, Lopez swam and floated until she reached safety at an oil platform, spray-painted a distress signal and activated an alarm system to summon help.
“I just had to stay strong. I didn’t want to go like that,” the 32-year-old Lopez said in a story Friday in The Victoria Advocate. “I didn’t want to be eaten by fishes. I was really scared.”
Lopez, who was without a life jacket, fell off the boat 70 miles off Galveston in the Gulf of Mexico.
Neither the boat’s three-man crew nor those of other boats that floated past heard her cries.
