Man survived after 13 months lost at sea

MAJURO (AFP) –

A castaway who says he survived 13 months adrift in the Pacific said Tuesday he thought about suicide but was sustained by dreams of eating his favourite food — tortillas — and reuniting with his family.

Fisherman Jose Salvador Alvarenga also described being forced to dump the body of his teenage companion overboard when he starved to death, but said his own strong religious faith helped as he drifted some 12,500 kilometres (8,000 miles) from Mexico to the Marshall Islands.

Alvarenga said he set out on a one-day fishing expedition in late December 2012 with a teenager named Xiguel, when they became lost in their 24-foot (seven-metre) fibreglass boat.

“We had just finished a day of shark fishing when the motor died,” he said. “I wasn’t worried at first but I couldn’t get a radio signal, and meanwhile there was a wind that pushed us further out.”

The 37-year-old’s mood darkened as he described how the boy, who he says was aged 15-18, died four months into their voyage, unable to survive on a diet of raw bird flesh, turtle blood and his own urine.

“He couldn’t keep the raw food down and he kept vomiting,” Alvarenga said. “I tried to get him to hold his nose and eat but he kept vomiting.” He said the teenager died of starvation and he pushed his body into the ocean. “What else could I do?”

“I didn’t want to die of starvation,” he told AFP through a Spanish interpreter at Majuro Hospital, where he is recuperating after being found disoriented last Thursday at a remote coral atoll.

“There were times I would think about killing myself. But I was scared to do it,” he added, raising his arm, pointing to heaven and declaring: “God! Faith!”

The stockily built Alvarenga looked in remarkably good physical shape when he arrived in the Marshalls capital Majuro five days after landing on the remote Ebon Atoll.

Sporting a bushy beard and with his hair bleached a ginger colour by the sun, he was helped down the gangplank by a male nurse but he did not appear to have chapped lips, blistered skin or other signs of severe exposure.