Most of us have forgotten a packed lunch or missed dinner, and we think we know hunger. But Elvis François, a 47-year-old man from Dominica, faced a very different kind of hunger — the kind that creeps in slowly, day after day, while you’re bobbing alone in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, your only companions the sun, the salt, and the silence.

What got him through? Not protein bars. Not a magic fishing rod. Just a bottle of ketchup, a pinch of garlic powder, and a few stock cubes. It might not sound like a meal, but for Elvis, it was nothing short of life-saving.

Ketchup and grit: his only menu

Elvis had been doing a bit of DIY on a sailboat near Saint Martin when everything went south. A sudden shift in the weather dragged his boat out to sea, and before he knew it, the coastline had vanished. With no navigational training, he was left drifting, his tools useless against the relentless current.

With no rescue in sight and no way to communicate, he turned to the only things he had on board that resembled food: one lonely bottle of ketchup, a container of garlic powder, and a few Maggi seasoning cubes. He mixed them with water and rationed the concoction for nearly a month.

In a video later released by the Colombian Navy, Elvis explained, “I had nothing to eat, just a bottle of ketchup… I mixed everything with water to survive for about 24 days.” His voice was calm, but the weight of what he’d endured was unmistakable.

Drifting, hoping, surviving

For three and a half weeks, Elvis floated across open water, his boat slowly becoming both prison and lifeline. He made attempts to send distress signals, but without luck. The worst part? The crushing isolation.

“There was nothing else to do but sit and wait,” he said. “Some days I lost hope. I thought of my family. I didn’t know where I was.”

That level of solitude, the total absence of human contact, is something few of us can truly understand. It’s not just about food or comfort — it’s the psychological battle of staying sane when you have no sense of time, no landmarks, and no voice other than your own.

A mirror, a miracle

Then came a sliver of hope. On the 15th of January, nearly a month after he was swept out to sea, Elvis saw a plane overhead. With instinct and quick thinking, he grabbed a mirror and began signalling furiously, bouncing beams of sunlight into the sky like a modern-day Morse code.

This time, it worked.

The plane responded, and not long after, a search party located his boat — over 120 nautical miles from Colombia’s Puerto Bolívar. The Colombian Navy, with help from a merchant vessel, brought him to safety.

Back on dry land, with an extraordinary tale to tell

Elvis was later handed over to immigration officials for repatriation. But long after the paperwork is finished, his story will live on — a quiet, powerful testament to human resilience, quick thinking, and the weirdly heroic role of humble condiments.

So the next time you complain about dinner being late, spare a thought for the man who survived nearly a month at sea on ketchup and determination alone.