Salvador Ordonez apparently practiced what he learned, National Merchant Marine Capt. Francisco Ramirez told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Ramirez said when he heard the rescued fishermen were from the Pacific coast town of San Blas, where he teaches the two-day course "Survival of Human Life at Sea" at least three times a year, he searched his student files and found Ordonez's name.

"It made me so happy because I wanted to believe that I had contributed in a tiny way to this man saving himself," Ramirez said. "It looks like the knowledge we gave him in our institute was useful in some way."

Ordonez was the only one on his boat who has said he drank animals' blood while drifting thousands of miles away from Mexico's Pacific Coast before they were rescued Aug. 9 by a Taiwanese fishing vessel off the Marshall Islands.

The men arrived in Hawaii Wednesday morning and are expected to return Friday to Mexico, where some consider them folk heroes.

"I drank it as if it was a soft drink," Ordonez told the Mexican newspaper El Universal. "At first my stomach hurt, but the next day I felt better and spent the day fishing in the sun."

Ordonez, Jesus Vidana, and Lucio Rendon say they left San Blas with two other fishermen on Oct. 28 on a shark-fishing trip.

The three survivors said heavy winds carried them out to sea, where they apparently survived for nine months by catching and eating raw fish and sea birds and drinking rainwater.

Two others companions died, after refusing to eat raw food, the survivors said.

The government has said it would investigate the deaths and other aspects of the survivors' account.

Mexican news media have cast doubt on the men's account of their odyssey, suggesting they might be drug smugglers who made up the story to avoid prosecution. There are no records of their departure, and some relatives initially said they had been gone for only three months.

Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said today that so far there is no evidence that the fishermen were smuggling drugs, but he said officials would continue to look into the case because their hometown is considered to be in a drug trafficking zone.

"But as long as we have no hard evidence against these people, or some kind of concrete, formal accusation, for us they are simply shipwrecked fishermen who were rescued," Cabeza said.

Ramirez said he plans to invite Ordonez out to eat the next time he is in San Blas so he can hear his story firsthand.