So, this couple, they live in the jungle right near the beach, and one day they see a strange man crawling through the sand. He's naked, and he can barely stand; he's clutching a knife and shouting something incoherently in a language they don't understand. The guy's name is Salvador, and he works as a deep-sea fisherman, catching tuna and sharks and stuff off the coast of Mexico.
It's a dangerous job, but he's into it. One day, he decides to go on a two-day fishing trip, and his normal fishing partner can't make it, so he needs someone to go with him. A young, inexperienced guy volunteers—this guy, Pata.
Salvador and Pata get in the boat and head out to the Pacific. For about two days, they fish and catch about 1,100 pounds of fish—enough to sell back home for about a week's worth of money. Everything is going great until they're finally done fishing and turn their boat around to go back home.
Then, out of nowhere, kabam! A massive storm hits, and the boat starts to fill up with water. Pata panics, using a bucket to get the water out of the boat while Salvador tries to steer through the massive waves.
Finally, luckily, after a while, the storm starts to die down, and Salvador can see land—they're about two hours away from the shore. That is when, boom! The boat's engine starts sputtering and dies.
Salvador pulls out his two-way radio and calls his boss, saying, "Help! My engine is dead. " The boss asks for his location, but their GPS has stopped working.
To make it worse, the storm starts building up again, getting stronger and stronger, tossing the boat around. Sometimes the waves raise them up three stories high before the boat drops. Salvador realizes that the 1,100 pounds of fish they caught is making the boat unstable, so they dump it all out and keep throwing anything not useful overboard to lighten the load—like extra ice and extra fuel.
Then the two-way radio dies. By this point, Salvador and Pata have been bailing out the boat for hours, and the engine still won't start. Salvador gets frustrated; he's pissed off, and he just loses it.
He picks up the fish-killing club and smashes the boat's engine, grabs the dead GPS and the dead two-way radio, and chucks them into the water. As night comes and the temperature drops, the two men have to huddle under an upside-down cooler for warmth and shelter. Meanwhile, back on land, a search party is formed to look for the two, but unfortunately, the storm is still very active, and visibility is very low.
After about two days of no results, the search is called off. Five more days go by before the storm finally stops, and when it does, Salvador and Pata finally get their bearings. They look around and realize they have no idea where they are, and to make it worse, they're starving.
There's nothing to eat on board and nothing to drink. With Salvador's equipment gone, he's got to get creative. He spends a bit of time figuring out how to catch things in the ocean using only his bare hands—fish, turtles, and jellyfish—and they start eating that raw because that's all they have.
They drink turtle blood and their own urine because, again, that's all they have. One day, they get lucky; a seabird lands on the boat. Salvador quickly grabs it, and they survive eating that for a few weeks.
Then it finally rains, so they collect rainwater and start drinking that. For two months, they live like this, eating raw animals and catching rainwater when they can. But as time stretches on, something comes over Pata.
He's not acting the same anymore; he starts to get depressed. As he's losing all hope, he slowly begins to refuse any food—he simply can't bring himself to eat any more raw animals. Eventually, he stops eating entirely and grows really sick.
Salvador and Pata feel like he isn't going to make it, so they make a pact: if Salvador makes it out alive, he'll contact Pata's mother and deliver her a message, a message that's only meant for her. I don't know exactly what that message is because, again, it's only meant for her. Salvador agrees to this, and then one rainy morning, after they've been lost at sea for over four months, Pata finally passes away from starvation.
Salvador is devastated; that was the only person around. I mean, they had grown really close during this whole traumatic experience. So, he's immediately very lonely, continuing to hold conversations with Pata's body even after he's dead.
After six days of this, he realizes it's not mentally healthy to keep talking to a corpse, pretending it's alive. So, he pushes Pata's body back into the ocean and goes on living his life on that boat, lost at sea. Ten more months go by, and Salvador is still out there, living day to day, catching fish with his bare hands and drinking rainwater and having conversations with birds.
But then one day, Salvador starts to see a different kind of bird—not the seabirds he's used to seeing. No, these are land birds, and in the distance. .
. He can suddenly see, kind of, a mountaintop, and that mountaintop ends up being attached to an island. Maybe there is hope; maybe he can deliver that message to Piñata's mother like he asked him to.
Now, this island is about an hour away, and Salvador directs his boat toward it. When he's close enough, he dives into the ocean and swims for the shore. Then he gets there, and he's too weak to walk; and he's naked.
He had brought a knife with him just in case, and he slowly crawls up the beach into the jungle. That's where he spots a house, and the owners of that house—a couple—see him crawling around naked with a knife, shouting in Spanish. They're like, "Who the heck is this guy?
" But that couple does end up helping him get to the hospital. So, what is this island Salvador finally landed on? Well, after being lost at sea for 438 days, Salvador had drifted over 6,000 miles, all the way from Costa Aul, Mexico, to Ibon in the Marshall Islands.
About a month later, after he's rescued, he finally gets a chance to travel to L14 in Mexico. There, he visits Piñata's mother, and he's able to deliver Piñata's final message to her. Then, he gets a big deal because his story is just incredible.
Afterwards, Piñata's family sues him for a million dollars, wanting half the proceeds from any of his book sales. So, that's fun. I don't know if the lawsuit actually went through, but that's the last reporting anyone did on any of them.
So, good luck with all that.
