A fisherman who claims to have been lost after a storm at sea for more than a year has been giving more details about his experience.<br /><br />Jose Salvador Alvarenga, who’s 37 and thought to be from El Salvador, washed ashore last week on the remote Marshall Islands in the Pacific.<br /><br />Having set off from Mexico in December 2012, he says he survived for 14 months by drinking turtle blood and catching fish and birds with his bare hands.<br /><br />He was found some 10,000 kilometres away in a disorientated state in his 7.3-metre fibreglass boat. <br /><br />While some doubt his account of what happened, his family are hailing his return as a miracle.<br /><br />His sister Yanira Bonilla said: “My mother would always say ‘daughter, he is not dead’ and then I would say to her ‘mami, don’t get your hopes up’. And then she told me ‘no, but I feel that he is alive’. Now I can see and prove that a mother is never wrong.”<br /><br />José‘s brother, Carlos Albarenga said: “It had a big impact. I was left speechless. I am very happy and very grateful to God and to the people who rescued my brother. I don’t have enough words or gestures to thank them enough for everything they are doing for him.”<br /><br />According to authorities, Alvarenga set sail with a younger fisherman but the teenager died a month into their ordeal.<br /><br />“It was supposed to be a one-day shark expedition, but they were blown off course by the northern winds,” Thomas Armbruster, the US Ambassador to the Marshall Islands, told the media.
