Wilsoooooooonnnnnnn!
A man who claims to have been adrift on the seven seas (or at least the Pacific) for the last 16 months washed up on Thursday on a remote atoll around 8,000 miles from his original starting point in Mexico.
His name is Jose Ivan, and his small boat washed up on Ebon Atoll, a chain of islands in the Pacific that forms part of the Marshall Islands. Dressed only in a pair of ragged underwear, he is apparently quite emaciated (what with the lack of food and water and that type of thing) but is doing well after being found by two locals when his boat eventually found land yesterday.
A Norwegian researcher, Ola Fjelstad, who is stationed on the Ebon Atoll at the moment, spoke to AFP, telling them that he has long hair and a considerable beard, and that it seems he stayed alive on the boat by catching fish, birds and turtles with his bare hands. He is also claiming that he drank turtle blood when there was no rain water available, which is how he stayed hydrated.
Reliable details about what happened are still a little thin on the ground, but it seems that he set off from Mexico in September of 2012 destined for El Salvador with another companion, who did not survive the journey. Fjelstad stated that Ivan is “staying at the local council house and a family is feeding him,” and that the government is trying to organise a plane that can land on the atoll to collect him and bring him to the capital Majuro for a full medical check up, but that may not happen until Tuesday.
Hat-tip to Yahoo News and What Culture for the pic
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