The will to survive.(The Goodness Of America)

At around 4 p.m. on October 7, Texan Melinda Lopez took a break from her duties aboard the shrimp boat Ike and Zack in the Gulf of Mexico, some 70 miles off Galveston. She climbed into some soft netting stored on a shelf-like structure at the stern to relax and read a book. Since she was not working, she was not wearing her life jacket.

Suddenly, she lost a shoe, causing her to trip and tumble into the rough sea. She called for help, but the three other crew members had not seen her fall and could not hear her shouts. The boat soon vanished from sight, initiating a harrowing 27-hour ordeal that severely tested Lopez's swimming proficiency, survival skills, and determination to beat the odds and live.

Clad only in shorts and a light shirt, she swam and floated for some 13 hours, at one point fighting off a large fish that bumped her hard over and over again for about 15 minutes. Occasionally, she would notice boats in the distance, but in the dark, with waves sweeping over her head, they could neither see nor hear her. "I just had to stay strong," she told the October 10 Victoria Gazette following her rescue. "I didn't want to go like that. I didn't want to be eaten by fishes. I was really scared."

Near daybreak on October 8, she heard a foghorn in the distance and began swimming toward it. Nearly exhausted, she reached the source, an offshore oil platform, and climbed aboard. To her dismay, she discovered that nobody was there.

Rummaging around, she found some food, a little water, some black and white paint, a few trash bags and lifevests, and some yellow caution tape.

After scrawling "SOS" on the platform's helicopter pad ...