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(Amends name to Alvarenga to match El Salvador Foreign Ministry spelling)
SYDNEY, Feb 3 (Reuters) - A fisherman from El Salvador who washed ashore on the Marshall Islands said he survived more than a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean, drinking turtle blood and catching fish and birds with his bare hands.
Jose Salvador Alvarenga, 37, told officials he set sail on a shark fishing trip late in December 2012 from Mexico, 10,000 km (6,200 miles) away, but was blown out to sea.
He was found in a disoriented state on a remote coral atoll where he had been washed up over the weekend in his 7.3-metre (22-foot) fibreglass boat. A police patrol boat took him to Majuro, the capital.
"He got off the boat with a very bushy beard," Jack Niedenthal, a film-maker based on Majuro, told Reuters by telephone.
"He's having trouble walking, his legs are very skinny. I'm not ready to call this a hoax, I think this guy has done some serious time at sea," Niedenthal said after speaking briefly to Alvarenga through an interpreter.
A male nurse helped him down the gangplank before he was whisked away to hospital for medical checks.
"It was supposed to be a one-day fishing expedition but they were blown off course by the northern winds," the U.S. ambassador to the Marshall Islands, Tom Armbruster, told media.
Alvarenga, who has been a fisherman for 15 years, according to the authorities, set sail with another fisherman, aged 15 to 18, but the teenager died a month into their ordeal.
Authorities said they were still gathering information and planned to contact his family in El Salvador and the United States.
The Marshall Islands has a population of 68,000 people spread over 24 coral atolls.
In 2006, three Mexican fishermen picked up by a Taiwanese tuna trawler near the islands said they had spent nearly 9 months at sea after drifting across the Pacific in a flimsy fishing boat.
(Reporting by Thuy Ong; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
((thuy.ong@thomsonreuters.com)(+61 2 9373 1236)(Reuters Messaging: thuy.ong.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))
Keywords: PACIFIC/CASTAWAY