José Salvador Alvarenga was fisherman from the village of Costa Azul, a small settlement off the coast of Chiapas in Mexico. He was a regular guy with little sailing experience and as normal went to work on a 30 hour shift of deep sea fishing, hoping to catch marlins and sailfish.
Normally he would head out with one of his good friends who knew how to sail well, but today his usual partner wasn’t available, so he was teamed up with a man named Ezequiel Córdoba, a local from the village with whom he had never spoken to.
The pair headed out into the ocean on 17th November 2012 aboard a 24 foot topless fibreglass skiff equipped with a single outboard motor and a large refrigerator box and made their way several miles from the coast where they began to fish.
Everything was going well at first and José recalls how they caught around 500 kilo’s of fish when the hit. They were blown several miles off course and were unable to manoeuvre the boat in such weather, so they dumped all the fish over board to make it lighter.
The storm lasted for 5 days straight and by the time it was over they were hopelessly lost, being many miles of course and with most of their electronics being damaged they were left with little food and gear but luckily the pair managed to hold on to a working 2 way radio that José used to call his boss and report the situation before the battery died.
His boss sent out a search party but gave up after 2 days due to no trace being found in the poor visibility they had to work with, and so the 2 of them were now stranded at sea with no one looking for them, presumed dead.
The pair drifted hopelessly across the ocean with no way of propelling their ship and not knowing which direction led to land. The survived from drinking rainwater they caught using plastic sheets and the few container they had, but more often would end up having to drink their own urine or the blood of turtles they caught.
As for food they managed to catch the occasional bird but most often ended up eating raw whatever fish they could catch, or turtle meat.
4 months into the voyage and Ezequiel became sick from eating nothing but raw fish and turtle for several months and started to refuse food. He ended up starving to death with José recalling this happened around 4 months after they left land.
Over the coming months José would be taunted by rescue numerous times, recalling how he saw various shipping containers in the distance, but with no way of being able to signal them they off into the horizon.
He drifted across the ocean for a total of 438 days until he saw a small slither of land, which turned out to be one of the Marshall island and so he jumped overboard and swam for shore, making his way to a small beach side house. The couple in the house immediately called the emergency services and José Salvador Alvarenga was finally safe, and is now the only person in history to survive stranded at sea for more than 1 year.