"For 438 days, he lived on the edge of sanity."

November 7, 2015 2:21 PM

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months by Jonathan Franklin. Salvador Alvarenga is a fisherman who fishes off the Pacific coast of Mexico. In November 2012 his boat was carried out into the Pacific by a storm. He survived until he drifted ashore in the Marshall Islands, over ten thousand kilometers from where he'd left shore.
posted by Kattullus (14 comments total)

So, this was real, then? Holy fuck. I remember there were questions about the story at the time. Wow.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:25 PM on November 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Amazing. I love to read survival stories, but for my part, I have already decided that I will not be accomplishing any great feats of it. I'm afraid of what that kind of survival might make me.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:01 PM on November 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Extraordinary.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 3:06 PM on November 7, 2015

I was visiting family in Newport News, Virginia last year, and my nine-year-old nephew and I ended up going to the Mariners Museum and seeing an exhibit about people who survived shipwrecks. They had a bit about this guy. Afterwards, we met up with my mom's cousin, and it turns out that his father was on a merchant marine vessel that got torpedoed during World War II, and he and the other survivors spent 30 days drifting on a lifeboat before they were rescued by some heiress out on her yacht. So anyways, the upshot is that I don't think that my nephew is ever going to set foot on a boat, because he's convinced that floating at sea for months is a thing that happens all the time.

Alvarenga really must have had amazing emotional strength to survive alone for so long.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:18 PM on November 7, 2015 [8 favorites]

Sounds like a pitch for a bad copycat movie.

"It's like The Martian, but on a boat!"
posted by Hatashran at 5:07 PM on November 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Cool Papa Bell: “So, this was real, then?”

I guess I missed the skepticism online and elsewhere about this story when it first appeared. I almost wish I hadn't gone looking for it. I suppose I shouldn't be but I'm astonished at the level of contempt in some quarters.
posted by ob1quixote at 5:33 PM on November 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

That's really quite remarkable. It sounds like they didn't have any kind of distiller/desalinator on board, which makes his survival even more remarkable. (The guy who drifted across the Atlantic in a life raft years ago at least had that for much of his voyage although it failed partway through.)

That's some incredible emotional and spiritual resilience, there.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:41 PM on November 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

What humanness. Without that, he would not have survived. He is so lucky the currents carried him to the Marshall Islands instead of elsewhere in the pacific.

Sharing an anecdote, I knew someone who got lost in a forest for 3 days - by day three, she said she was hallucinating so much she couldn't tell her rescuers from her imagination. I imagine he felt much the same when he washed ashore, over one year after he left.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 7:49 PM on November 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

It was like an extreme form of poverty. I liked the trick of walking back and forth in the boat for exercise, and the deliberate fantasizing to keep sane, in the face of grueling uncertainty and isolation. (A gifting of positive endorphins.)
posted by Oyéah at 8:56 PM on November 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

Man, he should go back to the beard and bun.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:15 PM on November 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Wow.

Just...

Wow...
posted by Samizdata at 8:08 AM on November 8, 2015

What an amazing feat. I'm so glad he managed to live through all that.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:39 AM on November 8, 2015

Finally reading this; what a story.
posted by LobsterMitten at 7:05 PM on November 8, 2015

Amazing.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:18 AM on November 9, 2015