Questions about the shipwrecked sailor rescued on Vancouver Island last week are no closer to be answered after the man was released from Canadian custody and mysteriously returned to the U.S.

Keith Carver was arrested by RCMP officers at a hospital in Port McNeill, B.C., on Friday, where he was being treated after being stranded on Vancouver Island’s rugged north coast for five days. Police say Carver was detained due to “criminal admissibility to Canada” and was turned over to the Canadian Border Services Agency for further investigation.

Carver was taken into custody and was expected to attend an immigration hearing early this week. Instead, he was released on Sunday night and left for the U.S. that day—leaving many unanswered questions in a story as filled with holes as Carver’s boat apparently was.

Citing Canada’s strict privacy laws, Canadian Border Services Agency spokeswoman Faith St. John would not say why the decision was made to release Carver. She said she did not know where in the U.S. Carver was bound for, or by what means he left Canada.

“The agency didn’t see a need for his continued detention,” she said only. “On Sunday evening, he was released from custody and his departure to the U.S. was confirmed. We have confirmed that he has departed.”

RCMP spokesman Corp. Darren Lagan said a police investigation determined that Carver would likely have been denied entry to Canada even if he had followed procedures for legally entering the country by boat.

“He never did a formal check-in process with authorities here in Canada. Because of that, it raised our concerns and once we looked into his history, we were concerned that he never would have been granted admission to Canada.”

But Lagan said a boater would likely not be taken into custody and detained simply for failing to follow protocols for entering the country by water. A person would more likely be denied entry, he said, for factors such as an outstanding arrest warrant in the U.S., a pattern of criminal behavior or providing false information to authorities.

Lagan refused to say whether Carver fell into any of those categories, but said there is nothing to indicate that he committed any criminal offense in Canada.

But he was suspicious of Carver’s claim that his sailboat sunk off the Northwest coast of Vancouver Island after storms blew the boat north. Carver told police he wasn’t aware that he was in Canadian waters, Lagan said, yet had reportedly dropped his friend off at Tahsis on Vancouver Island after the other man broke his arm while aboard the boat.

“We think he was fully aware that he was in Canadian waters and was aware that he should have checked in with Canadian authorities,” Lagan said.

Carver was rescued last Wednesday by helicopter pilot Wayne Goodridge, who spotted Carver waving for help from an isolated beach near Kyuquot, on the northern west side of Vancouver Island. Carter said he’d survived for five days in the wilderness by eating nothing but lichen and drinking water from a stream. His fantastical tale drew attention across the country, but the questions quickly mounted.

Carver told reporters that he’d bought a 40-foot concrete sailboat in Anacortes and was headed for Mexico with a friend. But he said the pair reportedly encountered repeated and severe storms that pushed them north. After dropping his friend off in Tahsis, Carver apparently headed south alone, but again ran into stormy weather.

He headed for Port Alice, a small community north of Port McNeill, to seek shelter, but his boat began falling apart. On Friday, Feb. 26, Carver abandoned ship, got in a lifeboat and paddled to a beach in the rugged island wilderness.

Boaters have questioned how Carver ended up on Vancouver Island when he’d supposedly headed south from Neah Bay, at the northwest tip of Washington state. Writer and sailor Scott Wilson, on his blog Late Entry, penned a detailed post about the puzzling route Carver took on his ill-fated voyage.

Wilson, who circumnavigated Vancouver Island last summer, raises numerous questions about the route. Tahsis, he points out, is at the head of a long fjord and past several other settlements and Canadian Coast Guard stations along the way. Port Alice is also up a lengthy fjord, Wilson says, past another Coast Guard station and a much closer village at Winter Harbour.

“Carver also managed to get a long way north for someone trying to get to Mexico,” Wilson wrote. “We had to work pretty hard last summer to cover that same territory, going the opposite direction.”

Weather experts have also cast doubts on Carver’s story. The National Post quotes Mark Proulx, a maritime coordinator at the Victoria Rescue Centre in B.C., as saying that between Feb. 18, when Carver dropped his friend off in Tahsis, and Feb. 26, when he said he was shipwrecked, wind conditions were almost too light for sailing—blowing as little as three knots on Feb. 19.

The RCMP have been unable to find any trace of Carver’s boat, Lagan said.