An Australian sailor who spent three months at sea alone with his dog Bella before being rescued by a Mexican tuna boat said he is ‘grateful’ to be alive and has been on solid land for the first time since his journey began.
After getting off from the fishing boat that had saved him, the Maria Delia, on Tuesday in the Mexican city of Manzanillo, Timothy Lyndsay Shaddock, 54, admitted that he had survived by eating “a lot of sushi.”
“I’m feeling alright.” I’m feeling a lot better than I was, I tell you,” Shaddock said to reporters on the dock in the port city some 210 miles west of Mexico City, smiling.
“I’m just grateful to the captain and the fishing company that saved my life. ‘I’m alive and I didn’t really think I’d make it,’ Shaddock said, adding that he and his ‘amazing’ dog Bella are both doing well.
In April, a catamaran owned by a Sydney man set sail from the Mexican city of La Paz for subtropical French Polynesia, but a few weeks into the 3,700-mile voyage, bad weather rendered the vessel unusable.
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He claimed that in early May, while he was sailing out of the Sea of Cortez and into the Pacific, was the last time he had seen land. It was a full moon, he said. Shaddock described himself as a reserved individual who cherished being alone on the sea. Shaddock struggled to respond when asked why he had left Mexico’s Baja Peninsula to cross the Pacific Ocean.
‘I’m not sure I have the answer to that, but I very much enjoy sailing and I love the people of the sea. It’s the people of the sea that make us all come together. The ocean is in us. We are the ocean,’ he said
