Ana Martinez
Extraordinary details are emerging of how a 37-year-old man survived at sea for 66 days by eating raw fish and drinking rain water after a fishing trip went wrong. A Coast Guard crew airlifted seaman Louis Jordan from a container ship that had rescued him on Thursday approximately 200 miles off the North Carolina coast.
Jordan was widely assumed to be dead after he and his sailing vessel, the Angel, were reported missing by his family on Jan. 29. However, the Coast Guard received a notice from a 1,085-foot German-flagged vessel, the Houston Express, at 1:30 p.m Thursday, saying it had spotted a man sitting atop his overturned boat 200 miles east of Cape Hatteras, and brought him on board. The Coast Guard transported the man to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where he walked in for treatment unaided, looking remarkable healthy considering the ordeal he has apparently undergone.
In an audio clip of a phone call he made from the container ship to his father, Jordan apologizes for not being able to sail home and tells his father: “I’m doing fine now.”
In an interview with the Today show, Jordan described himself as an “inexperienced sailor” and says that his ship capsized on his way to the Gulf Stream, where he was hoping to catch some “big ones.”