Do You Believe Louis Jordan?
Louis Jordan, 37, is the novice sailor who claims he spent 66 days at sea aboard his dismasted Alberg 35 before being spotted and rescued. The Coast Guard team that rescued him did something pretty unusual by calling the whole incident into question.
"We don’t have any reason to believe anything he told the media is false," said Coast Guard spokesman Nate Littlejohn. "However, we don’t know for a fact he was out at sea for 66 days. All we know is his family reported him missing on 29 January. We’ve not heard the whole story yet."
There are three things that initially made us skeptical. First, the repeated reports from numerous sources, including the normally reputable BBC, that said, “A German tanker spotted him [Jordan] sitting atop his 35-ft boat’s overturned hull 200 kilometers off the North Carolina coast.” There is no way that a full-keel Alberg 35 is going to continue floating some 60 days after she turned over. She’s going to the bottom, and in a lot less than 60 minutes. The explanation for this is that there was a miscommunication between whoever was on the German ship and news sources, and the news sources didn’t know enough about boats to follow up on the impossibility of an Alberg being upside down for so long.
The second thing that makes us skeptical is that Jordan was found in the Gulf Stream not that far from where he took off. The Gulf Stream moves at 3-5 knots, and after 60 days would have put him off Ireland. On the other hand, he could have just been at the edge of the Gulf Stream, which has lots of back eddies.
The third thing that made us dubious is that the weather from January 6 to when he was rescued 66 days later, was anything but pleasant in the area where he was ultimately found. The Coasties who rescued him repeatedly said how surprised they were at how good a condition he was in.
On the other hand, Jordan apparently made no monetary or credit card transactions during the period he was supposedly lost at sea. Nobody reported having seen him during that time. He also lost 50 pounds. And if the story is false, what did he do, hide out for a couple of months, then deliberately go out and dismast his boat?
There is also the fact that others have survived long periods at sea. Take the case of Mexican fisherman Jose Salvador Alvarenga, who claimed to have ended up 6,000 miles to the west of Mexico, in the Marshall Islands, after drifting in a panga for 440 days. His story got more credence in 2006 when Mexican shark fisherman Jesus Vidana and his crew spent 270 days drifting from Mexico to those same Marshall Islands before being rescued by a Taiwanese tuna fishing vessel. The one case nobody doubts is that of U.S. sailor Steven Callahan who, in 1982, drifted across the Atlantic after a whale had sunk his sloop Napoleon Solo.