Mr. Ordóñez, who had taken a course on surviving at sea a year ago, earned the nickname “the cat” for his ability to sneak up on seabirds.

“Look, at night, when we were quiet or asleep, the birds would stop on board the launch, and my friend, here, Salvador, who is like a cat, would catch them,” Mr. Vidaña said.

The three survivors learned to eat raw fish and birds, and Mr. Ordóñez drank fish blood. But the two other men could not digest the food, they said, and began vomiting blood.

The owner died one night in January. “Everyone was sleeping, and I was trying to fish for something to eat when he called to me with a little groan,” Mr. Ordóñez said. “I got down near to him, carefully. He was lying on the bow of the ship. And I said, ‘What’s wrong, Juanito, brother?’ And he didn’t respond. I put my ear to his heart, and he was dead. Then, then, I woke everyone.”

The second man died a month later. He cried softly for days before he died, Mr. Ordóñez said. The survivors said they said prayers before heaving the bodies into the deep.

The three surviving men sang ballads, danced, pretended to play guitar and read aloud to each other from the Bible as they drifted for months, they said. Little things took on tremendous importance. They kept track of time with Mr. Rendón’s wristwatch. “This watch was an incredible thing to have,” Mr. Rendón, a 27-year-old man from El Limón, about 10 miles from San Blas, told a reporter earlier this week.

Mr. Vidaña, a 27-year-old fisherman from Culiacán, Sinaloa, said the Bible helped him survive.

“We spent most of the time reading the Bible,” he said Tuesday after arriving in the Marshall Islands, according to Agence France-Presse. “Fishing and praying, mostly. God really helped us because we were at sea so long.”