Marine Survival Trainer: Story of Man Lost at Sea for a Year 'Is Possible' VOA News
go to original February 4, 2014

Listen to Kerry Sanders' interview with Thomas Hart Armbruster, U.S. Ambassador to the Marshall Islands, in which they discuss the incredible tale of castaway Jose Salvador Alvarenga (L). (NBC News)

A 37-year-old fisherman from El Salvador has washed ashore in the Marshall Islands, telling authorities he survived a 13-month journey across the Pacific Ocean by drinking his own urine and eating raw turtles, fish and birds.

Jose Salvador Alvarenga says he set sail from southern Mexico in December 2012 for what was supposed to be a one-day shark-fishing expedition. When his seven-meter fiberglass boat lost power, he claims he began drifting, and kept drifting, until he landed nearly 11,000 kilometers away. He says he was forced to throw his teenage companion overboard after the young man died because he could not handle the diet they were forced to eat.

Authorities have not confirmed the story, and some have raised doubts about its plausibility.

But marine survival trainer and former U.S. Navy diver Terry Crownover said Alvarenga's ordeal is entirely believable. "In the world today, anything is possible. You'll have people that will give up within the first hour, and you've got some people that are just not going to give up. And it's just staying focused. And his big advantage was being out of the water and having some means of protection from the sun and loss of fluids, but I believe it is possible because you look back at case studies of people who have gone almost that duration in open life rafts."

And Crownover [Director of Training at the Marine Survival Training Institute at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette] is not alone.

Read the rest at VOA News

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