“Every day I was like, ‘Please God, send me some rain, send me some water,’ ” Louis Jordan, 37, told WAVY-TV.

Louis Jordan, with beard, walks from the Coast Guard helicopter to the Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Norfolk, Va., after being found off the North Carolina coast Thursday. His family says he sailed out of a marina in Conway, S.C., on Jan. 23, and hadn’t been heard from since. The Associated Press

The crew of a German-flagged container ship found Louis Jordan floating on his vessel, the 35-foot Angel, on Thursday afternoon.

Jordan said he initially did not believe the container ship was real when he saw it. He said the ship’s crew did not see him until he began waving his arms.

“I waved my hands real slowly, and that’s the signal ‘I’m in distress help me,’ ” he told WAVY. “I blew my whistles. I had three whistles. They never heard them. I turned my American flag upside down and put that up. That says, ‘rescue me.’ ”

A Coast Guard helicopter crew from North Carolina airlifted Jordan from the ship to a hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday night. He had a shoulder injury and was dehydrated, the Coast Guard and his family said.

But Jordan was in good condition and refused treatment at the facility, according to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital spokesman Dale Gauding. Jordan left the hospital with his parents around 2 a.m. Friday.

Jordan had been living on his sailboat at a marina in Conway, South Carolina, near Myrtle Beach, until January, when he told his family he was “going into the open water to sail and do some fishing,” said his mother, Norma Davis. He sailed out of the marina Jan. 23, Coast Guard officials said, and hadn’t been heard from him since.

The details of Jordan’s whereabouts and how he might have survived for at sea were still unclear, said Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Ryan Doss.

“We don’t know where he capsized,” Doss said. “We really won’t know what happened to him out there until we talk to him” at length, he added, but said Jordan did manage to eat fish he caught while at sea.

Records show Jordan sailed out of the Conway marina Jan. 23, aboard Angel, said Marilyn Fajardo, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard’s 7th District. Fajardo said the Coast Guard in Miami was notified by his father, Frank Jordan, on Jan. 29 that he hadn’t seen or heard from his son in a week. One week later, Davis said their son was still missing.

Jordan told WAVY that he was traveling north when his boat hit bad weather. He said he saw a wave crash into his window, and the boat eventually filled with water. He said at one point he was flying through the air and he thinks he broke his shoulder.

He said he rationed his water to about a pint a day, but “for such a long a time I was so thirsty.”

Alerts were issued from New Jersey to Miami to be on the lookout for Jordan and his sailboat, according to the Coast Guard. Officials also searched financial data to determine whether Jordan actually had come ashore without being noticed but found no such indication, she said.

A search began Feb. 8, but Fajardo said the Coast Guard abandoned its efforts after 10 days. Some sailors reporting seeing Jordan’s sailboat, but none of the sightings were confirmed. The case was suspended.

The Coast Guard said Jordan didn’t file a “float plan,” the nautical equivalent of a flight plan, to determine his route or destination, and Fajardo said there wasn’t enough information to narrow down his whereabouts.

“We’re elated that he survived. We were never able to determine where he was headed,” Doss said. “Without that as part of the equation, it was difficult to come up with a search area.”

In a Coast Guard audio recording of the first post-rescue contact with his father, Louis Jordan says, “I haven’t heard you in so long.”

Frank Jordan tells him: “I’m so glad that you’re still alive. We prayed and prayed and we hoped that you were still alive, so that’s all that matters.”