Haunting reason man stranded at sea for 438 days was never rescued

José Salvador Alvarenga was stranded in the Pacific Ocean for 438 days before he was able to make it back to dry land, and he wasn't even rescued.

He set out from Mexico in November 2012 with the intention of making a 30 hour round trip including some deep sea fishing.

Accompanying him was Ezequiel Córdoba, a 23-year-old he didn't know very well, and things went wrong a short way into their voyage.

Their boat was blown off course by a storm and became damaged, with the fishermen forced to dump around 500kg of fresh fish they'd caught.

Alvarenga was able to call for help on his boat's radio before it stopped working, and with no way to move the boat the broken vessel began to drift in the Pacific Ocean.

José Salvador Alvarenga was stuck adrift on the Pacific Ocean for 438 days and no rescuer came to his aid. (GIFF JOHNSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Much of the fishing gear had become damaged by the storm as well, meaning that food supplies for the two men were low.

Search efforts responding to Alvarenga's call for help only lasted two days before they were called off, and the fisherman said that Córdoba eventually refused to eat after becoming sick from eating raw food and starved to death.

Before he died, Córdoba asked that Alvarenga not eat his body - instead it was tipped overboard after six days as Alvarenga had started talking to it and was worried that he was going insane.

It would be 438 days before the surviving fisherman made it back to dry land, eventually washing up on the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific thousands of miles from where he had first started.

Alvarenga said that at times he could see other ships, but couldn't be rescued by them since he had no equipment that could signal his distress to them.

This was the boat Alvarenga survived in for 438 days. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

With no flare gun, he couldn't fire up a signal for help, and the part of the Pacific he was in was one of the quieter parts of the world's largest ocean so his chances of being spotted by anyone else would have been few and far between.

He tried flagging down cargo ships that he could see in the distance but none of them picked him up, meaning there would be no rescue.

Instead he was forced to survive, eating the birds and fish he could catch, and drinking the blood of turtles to try and survive.

Finally on 30 January, 2014 he was able to drift close to Ebon Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands, abandoning his boat and swimming to the shore.

He was then rushed to hospital for treatment and later published a book about his 438 days lost at sea, However, Córdoba's family tried to sue him as they claimed Alvarenga had cannibalised the body - something the fisherman denied.