Man survives 16 months at sea


robdoar

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Something is fishy... not just the Turtle Blood.

A fisherman from El Salvador who washed ashore on the Marshall Islands has claimed he survived more than a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean, drinking turtle blood and catching fish and birds with his bare hands.

On Thursday an emaciated Jose Salvador Alvarenga, 37, dressed in ragged clothes and in disoriented state was found on the Ebon Atoll, where he had washed up in his 24ft fibreglass boat.

Though various details remain sketchy, Mr Alvarenga claims he spent over a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean, exposed to the elements in his tiny boat surviving on turtle blood and dead birds.

He speaks no English and no one among the 700 islanders on Ebon Atoll spoke Spanish but using drawings and gestures he managed to explain to officials he set sail on a shark fishing trip late in December 2012 from Mexico, 6,200 miles away, but was blown out to sea.

Alvarenga, who told authorities has been a fisherman for 15 years, set sail with another fisherman, aged 15 to 18, but the teenager died a month into their ordeal.

He used pictures to indicate that he survived by eating turtles, birds and fish that he caught with his hands, and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain.

Authorities said they were still gathering information and planned to contact his family in El Salvador and the US.

[bBvideo 560,340:tunvagel]

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Too funny this story. They even put up a picture of Tom Hanks, and they look like twins with the facial hair and long hair.

Im a skeptic on these sort of things, because he looks like he ate a horse each day, the size of him, and the meat on his body. Doesn't look like he starved at all . . .

@Raph_Hinterland i don't think he would of eaten him, but because he was fishing for sharks, I'm sure he used him as bait lol

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  • 8 months later...

Could be true, could be a hoax.

It's not impossible though, once somebody knows how to get fish and water from the ocean, he could survive a long time because there would be plenty of it. That he is a fisherman gives some credibility to his tale.

And it makes you wonder if not some people really got to America during the last thousands of years. It's always been suspected and they could just have been carried like him over vast oceans, thousands and thousands of miles.

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Im a skeptic on these sort of things, because he looks like he ate a horse each day, the size of him, and the meat on his body. Doesn't look like he starved at all . . .

Maybe he was even larger when he left and he's mostly been living off body fat; technically it is possible to survive like that, but you wouldn't be very healthy. (It could also be a glandular or hormonal issue -- people can be overweight for lots of reasons other than eating too much.) The University of Dundee monitored a man who didn't eat for over a year except for some basic mineral supplements, but I can't find a link to a report right now.

For a while I was curious as to how it took him 16 months before encountering land again. Then I remembered that there are some serious current loops in the Pacific Ocean, which is why we have the floating gargabe patches. Debris from the tsunami in Japan took nearly two years to make it to North America, so I guess he was lucky to get out in "only" 16 months.

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Debris from the tsunami in Japan took nearly two years to make it to North America, so I guess he was lucky to get out in "only" 16 months.

The problem lies not with the time he spent on the ocean. The problem lies with his skin, he does not look like he was exposed to the elements for over a year. He also looks well-fed, which seems strange to me, since I'd expect him to be worn-out and thin. Maybe that's just what I expect to see, but I'd have imagined him to be starving or dead, since he only had his bare hands to capture food.

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Debris from the tsunami in Japan took nearly two years to make it to North America, so I guess he was lucky to get out in "only" 16 months.

The problem lies not with the time he spent on the ocean. The problem lies with his skin, he does not look like he was exposed to the elements for over a year. He also looks well-fed, which seems strange to me, since I'd expect him to be worn-out and thin. Maybe that's just what I expect to see, but I'd have imagined him to be starving or dead, since he only had his bare hands to capture food.

Good point; I'm not sure what 16 months of exposure to the elements would do to one's skin, so I can't judge that aspect. As for weight, if he was really overweight before he left he may have lost a bunch of weight, but still not enough to be thin. I haven't seen any "before" photos so I don't know about that, either.

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