One reported detail from some accounts — that he said he once swam toward a ship that was passing and couldn’t reach it — is in the category of claims that cannot be independently confirmed from this account alone. What can be said is that, whatever the precise number, the drift route from the Mexican Pacific coast to the Marshall Islands did pass through areas traveled by commercial shipping, and that a small open boat without power or functioning lights was not guaranteed to be visible to passing vessels.
## Ocean Science: Why the Drift Went Where It Did
When oceanographers at the University of Hawaii heard about Alvarenga’s account in early February 2014, they did what oceanographers do: they ran the numbers.
Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) ran a computer model that released sixteen virtual tracers in the ocean model at a location approximately 200 nautical miles southwest of Chiapas, Mexico. They seeded the model starting in late December 2012 — somewhat after the actual departure date but within the range of the drift’s early period. The model was driven by satellite-sourced daily wind and current data. The same model had been used after the 2011 Japan tsunami to track debris across the Pacific, with wind-force inputs added to account for the way floating objects respond to wind as well as to current.
The result: the virtual tracers followed a path westward and eventually toward the Marshall Islands. By January 31, 2014 — the day after Alvarenga reached Ebon — the tracers were clustered within approximately 120 miles (about two degrees of latitude) of Ebon Atoll. The model showed that Alvarenga’s account of a 13-month drift from Mexico “falls well within the model’s limits.”