For several days now, the manufacturer of the popular tomato sauce (ketchup) Heinz has asked its 176,000 Instagram followers for help to find a man from the island of Dominica who claims to have been shipwrecked on a sailboat for 24 days and to have kept alive by a jar of that sauce, garlic powder, and chicken bouillon cubes.
The search, which began on February 14 with several publications on the social network, aims to find the man identified as Elvis Francois, 47, to give him a boat.
Francois was rescued by the Colombian Navy last January and said he had no knowledge of navigation.
“We are looking for credible leads to contact Elvis to offer him a new boat equipped with navigation technology and thus avoid another disaster in the future,” the company posted in a message on Instagram.
“Elvis Francois could be anywhere in Dominica. So we turn to you, the internet, to help us track him down so we can celebrate his safe return and help him shop for a new boat,” Heinz said in a second post on February 16 alongside the hashtag #FindTheKetchupBoatGuy. .
At the end of January, the Colombian authorities reported the discovery of a man named Francois aboard a small sailboat 120 nautical miles (about 222 kilometers) northwest of Puerto Bolívar, in the department of La Guajira (northeast), thanks to because he had written the word “Help” on the helmet.
According to what Francois told the Colombian sailors, on December 25 he was on the island of Saint Maarten in the Netherlands Antilles on the seashore performing maintenance on a sailboat when the wind blew it into the open sea.
At the time of being rescued, he said that he had been adrift for 24 days and that he survived with a bottle of ketchup, garlic powder and bouillon pills.
He had no water, so he had to hydrate himself with what little he could collect from the condensation that formed on the boat’s sail and in a sack, according to Commander Carlos Urbano Montes.
In his last publication 9 days ago, the Heinz company once again asked his followers for help to try to find the man, however, he has not succeeded and seems to be giving up on finding him.
“We’ve hit a dead end in our search for Elvis Francois, but we know he’s still out there. Now we need his help to track him down so we can buy him a new boat,” the post reads.
With information from EFE.