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Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months

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entremet

entremet

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Holy crap!

This is better than any movie. Must read when you have time. The will to live is amazing stuff. I'll post some choice excerpts:

Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, had left the coast of Mexico in a small boat with a young crewmate 14 months earlier. Now he was being taken to Ebon Atoll, the southernmost tip of the Marshall Islands, and the closest town to where he had washed ashore. He was 6,700 miles from the place he had set out from. He had drifted for 438 days.

Floating across the Pacific Ocean, watching the moon’s light ebb and flow for over a year, Alvarenga had battled loneliness, depression and bouts of suicidal thinking. But surviving in a vibrant world of wild animals, vivid hallucinations and extreme solitude did little to prepare him for the fact that he was about to become an international celebrity and an object of curiosity.
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Within days, Alvarenga began to drink his urine and encouraged Córdoba to follow suit. It was salty but not revolting as he drank, urinated, drank again, peed again, in a cycle that felt as if it was providing at least minimal hydration; in fact, it was exacerbating their dehydration. Alvarenga had long ago learned the dangers of drinking seawater. Despite their longing for liquid, they resisted swallowing even a cupful of the endless saltwater that surrounded them.

“I was so hungry that I was eating my own fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces,” Alvarenga later told me. He began to grab jellyfish from the water, scooping them up in his hands and swallowing them whole. “It burned the top part of my throat, but wasn’t so bad.”
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More at the link, including maps and media.

link
 
Read about him at the time but there were so few details. I can't imagine the hell this man went through and I'm not sure I could've lived through it myself.
 
Read this the other day. Incredible story indeed.

Still don't understand how he was able to catch fish with his bare hands though. Jelly fish? yeah. Regular fish? Amazing.
 
What a read. To go through what he and his friend went through, I would have killed myself. It takes determination to not do so in a situation like that.

The part with him grabbing the sand made me smile.
 
At the time I remember people being skeptical that his story was legit. In the sense that there was no confirmation from friends or family.

That's a horrible story.
 
This sounded familiar. It happened back in 2012. I remember the internet having crazy theories about him eating his comrade.

Edit: I still find the story fascinating.
 
8906_6.jpg


WILSON!!!!
 
Floating across the Pacific Ocean, watching the moon’s light ebb and flow for over a year, Alvarenga had battled loneliness, depression and bouts of suicidal thinking. But surviving in a vibrant world of wild animals, vivid hallucinations and extreme solitude did little to prepare him for the fact that he was about to become an international celebrity and an object of curiosity.
Click to expand...

So a real life Pi without the tiger?
 
Damn what a story. Poor Cordoba. It reminds me of how unforgiving the sea, as well as life, can be. I don't think I could have made it.
 
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