14 Mexicans and one Salvadoran told rescuers they had been afloat without food or water

migrants board rickety boats in the dark, taking orders from inexperienced seamen. From sandy Mexican shores popular with weekend tourists, they can see downtown San Diego's lights when the sky is clear.Smugglers who charge them about $4,000 each for the illegal crossing often use two boats with different crews for the short trip, forcing them to change at sea, authorities say. That way, the hired hands will have less to tell if they are captured.U.S. officials and academics suspect heightened enforcement on land is pushing migrants to gamble their lives on the kind of dangerous voyages — on flimsy watercraft and with little regard for winter — more commonly associated with Cubans and Haitians braving the Florida Straits."Anytime you put pressure on a point along the border, the traffic moves somewhere else," said Juan Munoz Torres, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. "The only thing left is the ocean."A spate of recent captures and discoveries of abandoned boats off California's coast climaxed shortly after sunrise Wednesday with a dramatic example of the increased risks that migrants are taking.
The crew of a pleasure cruise saw people waving from a 24-foot skipjack adrift about 12 miles off the San Diego coast and 20 miles north of the Mexican border. The cruise ship called a private towing firm, which alerted authorities to the 11 men and four women aboard a boat meant to carry far fewer.
The 14 Mexicans and one Salvadoran told rescuers they had been afloat without food or water. Some were dehydrated and sunburned, but no one was seriously hurt or killed. Authorities say the boat was leaking water and hardly anyone on board knew how to swim. Officials say they initially believed the boat was stranded for three days, but later determined it was less than two."They repeatedly expressed how they feared for their lives and thought nobody was going to rescue them," said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.