By EFE Agency
The company that makes the popular Heinz ketchup has asked people to help find a man originally from Dominica, a Caribbean island, who claims to have been adrift on a sailboat for 24 days and to have stayed alive thanks to a boat of that sauce. , garlic powder and bouillon cubes.
The objective of this search operation, which began on February 14, is to give Elvis Francois, 47, a boat, despite the fact that when he was rescued by the Colombian Navy last January, he said he had no knowledge of navigation.
Perhaps for this reason and the bad memory of his involuntary adventure does not appear anywhere, even when the company has contacted the authorities of Dominica and Colombia.
"We are looking for credible leads to contact Elvis to offer him a new boat equipped with navigation technology and thus avoid another disaster in the future
," the company wrote in its message to the public on Instagram.
In mid-January, the Colombian Navy reported that it had found Francois aboard a small sailboat 120 nautical miles (about 222 kilometers) northwest of Puerto Bolívar, in the department of La Guajira (northeast), thanks to the fact that he had written in the helmet the word "Help", help in English.
According to what Francois told the Colombian sailors, on December 25 he was on the island of Saint Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles on the seashore carrying out maintenance tasks on a sailboat when the wind carried it out into the open
sea
.
Francois had no experience in navigation, so he was lost and disoriented at sea and his attempts to maneuver the boat and connect by radio were unsuccessful.
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When he was rescued, he said
he had been adrift for 24 days
and that he survived on a bottle of ketchup, garlic powder and bouillon cubes.
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He had no water, so he had to hydrate himself with what little he could collect from the condensation that formed on the boat's sail and in a sack, according to Commander Carlos Urbano Montes.
The Colombian Navy offered him medical attention and he was sent to Colombian Migration to start the corresponding procedures for his return to his country of origin.