Sustained by prayer, rainwater, fish
U.S. sailor found on overturned sailboat after going missing for 66 days in Atlantic
It’s been very difficult not knowing anything and I just feel like all of our prayers have come true.
NORMA DAVIS
MOTHER OF LOUIS JORDAN
Louis Jordan’s Facebook page foreshadowed his fate. A year ago, the 37-year-old South Carolina man began posting photos of himself on his beloved 10.6metre sailboat, Angel, which he had painstakingly restored. Over the coming months, he uploaded pictures of food he had jarred and fish he had caught for dinner. Jordan, it seemed, was preparing for a journey.
On Dec. 28, 2014, he posted a video to Facebook. It was grainy footage of a woman recounting a near-death experience.
Less than a month later, Jordan would be the one facing death at sea.
On Thursday, a bearded, sunburned and dehydrated Jordan was rescued from atop his ruined boat. He had been missing for 66 days, during which his family had feared him drowned. Jordan told the U.S. Coast Guard that he had survived on rainwater and raw fish he caught with a net and by rationing food he had packed.
The only other nourishment he had was spiritual. In a phone call to his father after his dramatic rescue, Jordan said he had prayed for himself and his family. His father answered that he, too, “prayed and prayed” for his son’s safe return.
In an interview Friday on the Today Show, Louis Jordan said: “I was planning on catching some big ones” by sailing out into the Gulf Stream. “On the way there, my boat capsized. I was actually sleeping, that’s when it happened. The whole boat had turned around and I was flying through the air somersaulting and the ceiling was the floor and the floor was the ceiling and this side was the other side and everything was upside down and backwards.”
He added: “I was just rolling around with all the things, all the objects, all my possessions and electronics and GPS and even my stove had come off of the wall and was flying in the air with me. We’re all just turning around together and I land against the wall and I break my shoulder.”
Jordan’s mother, Norma Davis, told The Associated Press: “It’s been very difficult not knowing anything and I just feel like all of our prayers have come true. They’ve been answered.”
The real life version of Cast Away is all the more remarkable given the time and distance Jordan apparently drifted alone at sea. By the day of his rescue, he had travelled roughly 800 kilometres from home.
Marilyn Fajardo, a spokeswoman for the coast guard’s 7th District, told NBC News that officials also searched financial data to determine whether Jordan had come ashore without being noticed, but found no indication that he had.
The saga began on Jan. 23, when Jordan set sail from the marina in Conway, S. C., on a short fishing trip. He never returned.
At 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds, Jordan was known as a “gentle giant.” Facebook posts paint Jordan as a free-spirited young man who shared his father’s Baha’i faith, which holds that Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and other religious figures were all messengers of the same God. “You’ll probably never meet a nicer guy,” marina manager Jeff Weeks said.
Jordan had spent months fixing up his boat and taking it on short, inland fishing trips. But his Jan. 23 expedition was something altogether different: a solo trip on the open sea.
“He might sail up and down the Intracoastal Waterway, but he didn’t have the experience he needed to go out into the ocean,” Weeks said.
Jordan’s father, Frank, is a retired teacher and avid sailor so he didn’t worry when his son didn’t contact him for a few days. Three days after his son’s illfated fishing trip, Frank posted his own video of him sailing on the same waters. By Jan. 29, however, Frank was concerned enough to contact the U.S. Coast Guard.
Alerts went up and down the Atlantic, and an official search was launched on Feb. 8. A week later, however, the coast guard abandoned its search. Several sailors had claimed to have spotted Jordan’s sailboat, but there wasn’t enough concrete information to narrow down his whereabouts, the coast guard said.
On Feb. 16, Frank posted a haunting poem to Facebook dedicated “for my boy Louis.”
But as the weeks dragged on, Frank’s faith began to waver. “I also pray that my son Louis Gregory Jordan will be found alive and if not, that he will continue his spiritual journey with joy and radiance,” he posted on March 2.
As his family began to mourn his death, Jordan was drifting about 300 kilometres off the coast of North Carolina. Somehow, his antique sailboat had lost its mast and capsized, injuring Jordan’s shoulder in the process. He had grown thin but managed to survive after the shipwreck on just rainwater and raw fish netted from the ocean.
On Thursday afternoon, a German tanker spotted him sitting atop Angel’s upturned hull. As a coast guard helicopter raced to the rescue, Jordan climbed aboard the tanker and spoke to his father over a satellite phone.
“Hi dad,” he said. “I haven’t heard you in so long.”
“Oh man, it’s nice to hear your voice,” Frank Jordan answered. “People have been praying for you.”
“I’m sure they have,” Louis said. “I’ve been praying, too, every day.”