Garita Palerma – A castaway who spent 13 months adrift in the Pacific is being sued for $1 million by his lawyer and is living on handouts a year after his ordeal.

And while he is still struggling to get by, Jose Alvarenga is starting to think about going fishing again.

And there could be a multi-million dollar book and movie deal in the pipeline.

Alvarenga, 38, reached the Marshall Islands on January 30 last year, 13 months after he was caught up in a storm as he hunted for sharks.

He survived on fish, birds and rainwater while his younger crew member, Ezequiel Cordoba, 24, died four months into the journey.

Now the Salvadoran fisherman, who miraculously survived 13 months at sea before he was found last January, is being sued by his former lawyer for $1 million, his family has revealed.

A year after he came ashore on the Marshall Islands, Alvarenga, 38, is also at odds with relatives of the man who died at sea with him who do not believe his story, NBC News reported.

“Jose has no money,” his brother-in-law, Jorge Bonilla, told NBC. “As a family, we try to help him by sending money for food and medicine.”

But it’s not all bad news for Alvarenga whose family say that he is back to good health at home in El Salvador after more than a year aboard a 7.3-metre open boat drifting across the vast north Pacific Ocean.

He is even talking about going fishing again, Bonilla said.

He is also collaborating on a book – and perhaps a documentary – but his former attorney and family friend, Benedicto Perlera, is not happy at being left out of the deal, NBC reported.

The duo had a falling out and the attorney now represents the family of Cordoba. Perlera said the Cordobas believe they are entitled to profits from Alvarenga’s story – even though they are still skeptical about his tale.

Alvarenga told authorities that the fish and turtles they caught to eat did not agree with Cordoba’s stomach and he died. He denied eating his friend and says he put the man’s body overboard.

“They don’t think their son died the way Jose says he did,” Perlera told NBC.

Perlera has also filed a $1 million breach of contract suit against Alvarenga after he says the former fisherman dropped him for a US-based law firm.

“We would have been very successful together,” he said. “Jose’s story is worth a lot of money.”

His new lawyer, Jeffrey Masonek, said a publisher has bought Alvarenga’s story.

It will be written by Guardian journalist Jonathan Franklin, who wrote ‘33 Men’ – about the Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days in 2010, NBC reported.

Alvarenga and Cordoba vanished in November 2012 after they headed out to hunt sharks off the coast of Mexico. They were hit by a storm and swept out to sea.

Five days after Cordoba failed to return, his family in Chiapas reported him missing and began searching for him, his aunt Lucia Cordoba Cruz said.

“Our family looked for him in the sea, in other villages, always hoping to find him,” she said –but the search was ended about three weeks later in December 2012.

Thirteen months later, on January 30, 2014, a bearded and bedraggled Alvarenga came ashore on Ebon Atoll in the Marshalls and told an astonishing tale of his survival.

“I always had faith that I was going to survive, asking God every day and every night,’ he told the media after he landed back home. “I never lost faith that one day I would be found.”

There was skepticism about his story after doctors deemed Alvarenga to be in strikingly good health, although he was mentally frail, dehydrated and limping.

But he stood by his story and survival experts and oceanographers said it was possible. Months after setting foot on land again, he passed a lie detector test.

The doctors who first treated him said Alvarenga had developed a phobia of the very ocean that had turned him into a global celebrity.

A year later, that fear seems to have worn off.

“I know he has mentioned a desire to get back to the fishing life,” lawyer Masonek said.

“I think he is doing fine,” he added. “He’s very, very grateful to be alive.