American sailor rescued after two months on the high seas

An American sailor who spent two months at sea, feeding on raw fish and rainwater, was picked up by a German tanker 200 miles off the coast of North Carolina on Thursday.

Louis Jordan's 35-foot sailboat rolled over, all this time he was on the ship's hull, from where he was taken to a safe place.

Jordan, 37, was reported missing by his family in late January. During the first conversation after finding the sailor, the father told him: “I thought I had lost you.”

In the released audio recording of the phone call, Jordan apologizes for not being able to swim home. Talking to his father on the phone from a German tanker, he says: “I’m fine now.”

A Coast Guard spokesman in Miami told a North Carolina broadcaster at WITN that Jordan had survived in the Atlantic, eating raw fish and rainwater.

A US Coast Guard helicopter took Jordan from a German ship to a hospital in Norfolk, Virginia.

The US Coast Guard called the incident with the American sailor an unheard of endurance feat, while Jordan's father told CNN that he had never stopped hoping that he would find his son alive.

He was last seen on January 23 sailing from Conway to South Carolina for fishing on his yacht Angel.

It is not yet known exactly why the boat overturned, but American media reported that the mast of the yacht was found broken in half.