## Arrival at Ebon Atoll: January 30, 2014
Alvarenga had counted fifteen lunar cycles. He was somewhere in the Pacific. And then, at some point in the night of January 29 or the morning of January 30, 2014, he saw something that might be land.
He had seen things on the horizon during the drift that turned out to be nothing — cloud formations, the curve of the ocean in certain light conditions. He told Jonathan Franklin that when he saw the atoll, his first reaction was to wonder whether it was another hallucination. He had experienced hallucinations during the drift, and he knew his perception was not always reliable after this long at sea.
The island didn’t disappear.
Ebon Atoll is the southernmost atoll in the Marshall Islands chain, a remote collection of islets and reef surrounding a central lagoon. It is inhabited — Ebon’s main island has a population measured in the hundreds — but the outer islets are sparsely populated. The islet now called Eneaitok, where Alvarenga came ashore, was home to only Amy Libokmeto and Russell Laijedrik.
Alvarenga swam his boat to shore during the night, pulled it onto the beach, and fell asleep. He was woken in the morning by roosters — the first land animals he had heard in more than a year.
What he had when he arrived: a 24-foot boat with a dead motor. Inside the boat were the remains of his survival operation: a live bird he had tethered (probably keeping it as a food reserve), bird remains, a small turtle shell. He had a knife. He had the shredded underwear he was wearing. He had not bathed in more than a year.