The Telegraph UK reports:

Salvador Alvarenga, 36, is the only man known to have survived for over a year at sea.

And when he set sail from the coast of Mexico in November 2012, he thought he was setting out on a two-day fishing trip, having paid 22-year-old Ezequiel Cordoba $50 to accompany him.

But a vicious storm with 10ft waves knocked out the 25ft boat’s communication systems, and washed their supplies overboard.

He suffered hallucinations and tried to throw himself overboard, where sharks were circling. The pair survived for several months by catching fish and birds, and drinking turtle blood and rainwater. But one bird they ate made Cordoba severely sick, and they found a yellow poisonous sea snake inside its stomach.

Cordoba proved to be less resilient than the older man, refusing to eat some of the stomach-churning raw meat that kept Mr Alvarenga alive. He eventually died, extracting promises from Mr Alvarenga not to eat his corpse, and to find Cordoba’s mother and tell her what happened.

Mr Alvarenga befriended the corpse, keeping it on the boat for six days and chatting to it, until he realised his own insanity and threw it overboard.

“I could see my death was going to be very, very slow,” he said.

But against all odds, he survived. Mr Alvarenga washed up in the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in January 2014. Dazed and emaciated, he was found by a couple living on the island who took him in.