Position: 100 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 15° 13' 51.26''– W 94° 13' 30.36''
Day 1
Alvarenga sat huddled in the stern, his face covered by the ski mask and sheltered by the hood of his jacket as he gunned the outboard motor. He aimed toward a shore he couldn’t see. Next to him Córdoba—on his knees—bailed nonstop in a losing battle to clear seawater from the deck of the boat. Visibility was sporadic. Alvarenga could use moonlight and see for a few hundred yards, and then clouds of spray and surging waves would make him feel like he was being spun around in a whirlpool with no sight of the horizon and only glimpses of the swirling stars. “We were taking a bath the whole time,” he said. “But I didn’t think we would sink. The waves were not breaking inside the boat, they were lifting and dropping us.”
With the wind now roaring at 50 mph, the sea was white with foam and waves smacked the boat, knocking Alvarenga off course. Like a professional athlete readying for a match, Alvarenga took stock of his opponent. It would be a five-hour competition, and though he had spent years navigating these waters, Alvarenga knew better than to get cocky. Every storm had its quirks and his first task was to understand this storm’s rhythm and flow. Alternately accelerating the engine, then suddenly letting up on the throttle, Alvarenga deftly slid the boat among eight- to ten-foot swells. Amid the chaos of cross currents and gale-force winds, Alvarenga searched for clues as to the order of this madness. He couldn’t stop and let the bow get too low, or he would be flooded. Alvarenga motored cautiously, angling the bow up high, like a surfboard with the weight at the back.
If he went too fast, Alvarenga risked sliding down the face of a wave, planting the bow underwater, where he would then be vulnerable to a second wave that could instantly fill the boat. If more than half the boat flooded, the men were doomed as the sunken boat would ride flush with the ocean and no amount of hand bailing could refloat it. They would die—in which of the many possible ways hardly mattered. It would be either gruesome and quick or a slow torture over the course of days. Sharks were never far. No one would find their bodies; the cause of death would be “lost at sea” and the only clue a patch of scattered gear floating off the coast.
Getting sideswiped by a wave was equally dangerous, as not only would the boat be flooded but the men were likely to be swept overboard. Being washed off the boat even with a life jacket—and only Alvarenga had one—was a harrowing experience that many Mexican fishermen never lived to recount. The boat might be carried west by the wind and the fishermen east by a current. Alvarenga was an exceptionally strong swimmer, but in stormy waters? Could he swim back to the boat? That would be his only option as Córdoba was unlikely to instantly discover his sea legs and take the helm. And if Córdoba were to flip overboard? Alvarenga would try to swing the boat around in a circle and maneuver close enough for Córdoba to grab the rail. But that would take at least two minutes and Córdoba’s body on the surface plus the presence of bloody water would be a shark magnet. Córdoba might be dead by the time Alvarenga returned—or in the process of being shredded. “People think that a shark bite is a clean cut, but that is the Hollywood version,” said Alvarenga. “You have to realize that these sharks have seven rows of teeth, and when they grab, they rip back and what is left looks like long, thin pieces of string cheese.”
Alvarenga ignored the growing pond of seawater sloshing at his feet. An inexperienced navigator might have panicked, started bailing and been distracted from the primary task—aligning the boat with the waves. Alvarenga needed to regain the initiative. The storm had ambushed him. As he threaded a precarious path through the waves, he realized he was advancing too fast. He slowed the engine. Speed was secondary to precision.
To further stabilize his craft, Alvarenga directed Córdoba to deploy a sea anchor. Made from a string of floating buoys attached to the stern, this long tail aligned the bow with the waves, providing drag and more stability. In this case, empty bleach bottles were affixed to a long piece of extra fishing line taken from the wooden crate. “If I hadn’t put those buoys out, we would have sunk after the first few waves. Even with the buoys, every wave was rough as the bow of the boat slammed through it,” said Alvarenga, who had often resorted to this homemade system to navigate fierce storms. Despite the sea anchor and Alvarenga’s navigational skills, the spray and crashing waves dumped hundreds of gallons of seawater into the boat. While Alvarenga steered, Córdoba was now frantically tossing the water back into the ocean, pausing momentarily only to allow his shoulder muscles to recover.
While Alvarenga tensely negotiated their slow advance toward the coast, Córdoba continued to unravel. As the weather worsened, his resolve disintegrated. At times he refused to bail and instead held the rail with both hands, vomiting and crying. Córdoba had signed up to make fifty dollars, an honest two-days’ wage. He could kill, gut and store fish all day if necessary. He was capable of working twelve hours straight without complaining and was athletic and strong. But this crashing, soaking-wet journey to the coast? He was sure their tiny craft would shatter and sharks would devour them. He began to scream his fears aloud, especially the part about being eaten by sharks. Triangular fins had been slicing the water as they killed and hauled in the fish, and both men feared that if the boat flipped they would live only long enough to realize who was eaten alive first.
An occasional burst of lightning provided a glimpse of their predicament. But Alvarenga could harvest little information from this millisecond of light as his eyes were bombarded with pelting salt water but not a drop of rain. He couldn’t reach a supply of fresh water to wash them out. As ever more salt entered his eyes they began to puff up and his vision worsened.
With no running lights and no high-powered spotlight, Alvarenga was navigating not just blind but on pure instinct. The roll of the waves under his seat seemed chaotic but the waves had their own sophisticated sequence. They were slapping out a message, like Morse code, against the hull of his boat. It was Alvarenga’s job to decipher this rapid-fire pattern. Experienced navigators in Polynesia teach similar skills to their adolescent children by laying them on the sea and having them float on their back day after day for months as they learn to distinguish the subtle messages embedded in each wave. Polynesian canoe crews are thus able to read the waves and detect refraction patterns that indicate waves have struck land hundreds of miles away—a lifesaving skill when traversing swaths of the Pacific Ocean where islands are sparsely scattered over a huge expanse, like a few grains of rice in a swimming pool. Alvarenga had never conceptualized his navigation skills as superb or even special—his skills were so embedded they felt like intuition. But over the course of a decade at sea, he had commuted to work and back approximately 360,000 miles, equivalent to a trip from Mexico to the moon then halfway back to earth.
In the early-morning light, as the storm surged, Alvarenga became fixated on his compass and, though bashed by waves, remained confident and convinced that in four, perhaps six, hours they would be safely in port. The waves tossed surprise after surprise in his face, but with flourish and dexterity, he never lost the rhythm. The danger was constant but so too the adrenaline buzz. In many ways, this was the edgy challenge that made life at sea so exhilarating. Alvarenga abhorred walls. An office cubicle would have been prison. Bouncing through ten-foot waves, his eyes stinging and hand numbed from gripping the tiller, he felt free.
This was a dance he had executed dozens of times and he rarely stumbled. When professional athletes reach the highest levels of concentration, they describe being able to see the playing field in slow motion, hence the practically incomprehensible coordination of a soccer player diving and launching a perfect header into the corner of the goal. For Alvarenga, this onslaught of swells, crashing waves and wind was his playing field. In his head the whole glorious show was playing out and he was the star. Back at the palapa in Costa Azul, it would be yet another astonishing tale and a defining moment in his burgeoning career as captain.
Alvarenga’s confidence was not shared by the increasingly terrified Córdoba, who was becoming aggressive and defiant, openly refusing Alvarenga’s entreaties to bail the seawater. “I will see what I can do!” he shouted. Córdoba’s fears were now fueled by a combination of crackling adrenaline and the paralyzing specter of sinking at sea. Alvarenga was enraged at the mutiny and responded angrily to the young mate. “When we get to shore, that’s it. We are never working together again. Never.”
Then Alvarenga took a different approach and tried to instill a bit of calm in the hysterical young man. “You like the money, eh?” Alvarenga taunted Córdoba.
“Yeah, I like the money,” Córdoba admitted.
“Well then, get through this test. This [storm] is not my fault, this is natural and it happens to us all. Now it is our time to suffer but we are not going to die.”
Alvarenga rued not having waited for Ray, his partner for the past year. The men were so close they called one another “mi pareja” (my partner), a phrase commonly used for married couples. It was a recognition of the day-in-day-out routines they shared. “We understood each other and I never had to tell him what to do,” said Alvarenga, who imagined Ray bailing with both arms while providing a running commentary of jokes, stories and upbeat chatter. He could probably light a joint at the same time, thought Alvarenga.
Córdoba slipped further. He was now frozen, practically catatonic. Alvarenga couldn’t release the tiller to bail but neither could he idly watch as the boat filled with water. Nearly a foot of water had collected, reaching up to his calf muscles. The water was unstable ballast that shifted with enough weight to slide the men from one side of the boat to another. The waves were now so large that when they broke into the boat the men were violently thrown about. On one wave, Córdoba was sent smashing down upon the edge of a bench. Alvarenga watched in dismay as his young shipmate was tossed across the boat. He grimly admired the man’s stamina. Córdoba had survived four or five body slams that would have stunned most men. “It is all a matter of posture,” Alvarenga thought. “He doesn’t know how to position his body.”
Alvarenga remained sitting, locked down to the motor, gripping the tiller tightly, determined to navigate a storm now so strong that harbormasters along the coast had barred any boats from heading out to sea. Emergency calls from shore ordered all boats to port—any harbor. Alvarenga never heard his radio; instead he was imagining the cheers he would receive when he docked inside the lagoon. Another grand entrance by Chancha! His fantasy was upset by another round of Córdoba screaming. The young, inexperienced man seemed to be losing his mind. He stood and howled into the wind. “Why is God punishing me?” Córdoba shrieked. “Why?”
For the next three hours, Alvarenga held a steady eastern course. He diagonally sliced through the waves. When he needed to turn farther north, he pulled the tiller toward his body, which would swerve the boat into a sharp curve to the left. Pushing the tiller an arm’s length away from his body allowed him to cut a hard right turn, south.
Alvarenga kept the GPS monitor buried inside the bucket with his clothes—the eighty-dollar device was not waterproof. He checked the GPS infrequently but was rewarded with good news—despite the headwind and the northern currents, they had advanced forty miles toward the coast in the first hours. They were at least halfway to land, but the last miles would be the roughest. The storm, which had arrived with just a whisper of warning, was now taking full breaths—gathering strength on land and launching a wall of wind that literally blew the tops off waves.
The gasoline required to advance in such conditions was far greater than the manufacturer’s estimated mileage per gallon. But Alvarenga had packed two extra fifteen-gallon containers. He had tapped backup gasoline stores on previous trips: to rescue a colleague, to search for a lost net or track a school of fish. “Some of the guys would go out with the minimum amount of gas. Later you would hear them on the radio, ‘Hello, Boss, I ran out of gas.’ They didn’t plan on the return trip. That was their mentality.”
Córdoba migrated from the safety of the stern to a perch on the bow. He was trembling, crying for help and acting so distraught that Alvarenga thought he was contemplating a dive into the sea. “He was out of his mind. Several times he hid inside the icebox,” said Alvarenga, who described peering into the icebox to find Córdoba wide-eyed, half frozen in fear and piled like fresh catch atop a stack of shark carcasses.
As Córdoba wept and sought shelter, Alvarenga maneuvered the boat through ever-higher waves as he aimed for shore. It was hard to bail and steer at the same time, but Córdoba was useless, more deadweight than first mate. As one wave dropped them into a sickening fall, they landed with a hard thud—the impact felt like it had cracked the hull. “We were lucky that the boat had just been repaired,” said Alvarenga. “A storm about a month before had bent and weakened a main strut. We had just recently repaired that with extra bond, so the boat withstood the constant pounding.” While the hull survived, a plastic bucket holding the communications gear cracked along the bottom. Minutes later, when Alvarenga decided to call shore and report the deteriorating conditions and his new position, he found the bucket filled with water. Though wet, the radio functioned but the GPS unit was soaked and nearly floating. The device was ruined. It wasn’t a matter of drying it out. Fortunately, they were approaching the coast, so Alvarenga would soon be able to navigate using landmarks from shore.
Running with the waves was a tricky and exhausting battle with the elements. By seven a.m. both men were running on reserve energy, so Alvarenga ordered a quick breakfast break. The waves had not let up and in retrospect the men were mystified by their own decision. What had possessed them to delay even for a single minute their race to the coast and the safety of land? But hunger does strange things to the human brain and somewhere in his multitasking mind Alvarenga decided the men could spare the luxury of a fifteen-minute breakfast break.
Alvarenga unpacked tortillas, onions and tomatoes. Four pounds of the blood-rich cow livers awaited in a plastic bag. He couldn’t toast the tortillas as he might on a calm outing, but the cold corn tortillas wrapped around the chopped red meat still made a liver and tomato sandwich. Córdoba revived with the food and received a stern warning with his meal—Alvarenga needed his help and he needed him to bail now. The men ate rapidly as Alvarenga kept the motor running, idling the engine, and guiding the boat among the waves as he and Córdoba ate one stuffed tortilla after another.
Alvarenga finished breakfast, revved the motor and resumed a crashing course toward shore. He noticed a change in the visibility. The cloud cover was lifting: he could see miles across the water. No sign of land yet but he was slowly advancing. The mountains would pop up first, as splotches on the horizon, then slowly stretch up to reveal the promise of solid ground. Even if he couldn’t make the safety of the Costa Azul lagoon, he knew at least six other spots where he could find shelter along the coast.
It was around eight a.m. when Alvarenga heard the first cough. It wasn’t an outright burst of protest from the motor, but more like a hiccup or the soft growl of someone clearing their throat. The Yamaha had been running perfectly but it was the same motor that had failed earlier in the week. Within ten minutes, the motor’s cough began to sound chronic.
Fishermen in Costa Azul treated newly refurbished motors with the skepticism given any new arrival to town. Before being taken to sea, these motors are typically mounted to a rack on land, revved up and left to churn. “We have to work them. Sometimes the pieces jam,” said Alvarenga. “We always leave a repaired motor running for at least a few hours. That was something I did not do.”
The motor’s voice continued to change and the two men discussed the possibilities. Had water leaked in? They didn’t think the spark plugs had been compromised—that would have produced a distinct sputtering that either man could fix in minutes by cutting the engine and cleaning the plugs with fresh gasoline, then continuing their journey. This cough was deep in the motor, and it was starting to steal power from the engine.
Around nine a.m. Alvarenga spotted the rise of mountains on the horizon. They were approximately twenty miles from land. Alvarenga pulled his head out of his jacket and looked for familiar landmarks. It wasn’t necessary to use electronics now; he’d run this stretch hundreds of times. There was, he thought, just one last real danger: the vicious shoreline surf where breaking waves would be huge. Landing ashore during a storm was so dangerous that fishermen would perch on the rail of the boat ready to dive into the ocean, preferring to be flung ashore by the surf than be crushed to death by a flipping boat.
Alvarenga had barely savored the joy of sighting land when the motor’s cough turned into a persistent hacking. Was the gas line pinched? Had something rattled loose? “I couldn’t believe it. I could see the coast. We were fifteen miles off the coast and the motor started to die.”
Alvarenga decided to cut the engine, perform a modest tune-up then continue toward shore. The risks of not checking the motor were clear. Three years earlier Alvarenga had suffered severe engine breakdown, the motor disintegrating until the propeller spun so slowly that he advanced at one mile an hour. It had been a numbing three-day crawl back to the coast. But after his ten-minute overhaul (including pulling and cleaning the spark plugs) the motor now refused to turn over at all.
It sounded like there was neither spark nor gas, nor any connection between the two. Increasingly agitated, Alvarenga yanked again and again at the outboard motor cord. Blisters formed on his index and middle finger. Like a guitar player switching out callused fingers, Alvarenga began using his ring finger. He ripped the cord until even his pinkie was torn and numb with pain. Finally the cord snapped. With no cord to start the motor, Alvarenga felt naked against the force of the storm. He pulled apart the motor and tried without luck to fashion a new ripcord. Then he erupted in anger. “I swore at the motor, I cursed it.” He also immediately pulled out his radio and called his boss. “Willy! Willy! Willy! The motor is ruined,” Alvarenga yelled into the radio.
“Chancha, Chancha! Calm down, man, give me your coordinates,” responded Willy from the beachside docks in Costa Azul.
“We have no GPS, it’s not functioning,” said an increasingly frustrated Alvarenga. Realizing they were within sight of the coast, Willy came up with a simple solution.
“Lay an anchor,” he ordered. Willy figured that Alvarenga could anchor down and ride out the storm. Being so close to shore meant a quick rescue mission could be sent to grab the men at the first break in the weather. In the worst-case scenario, they could save the crew and return later for the anchored boat.
“We have no anchor,” Alvarenga said, speaking into the radio.
“Okay, Chancha. We are coming to get you. We are sending out Trumpillo,” responded Willy.
“If you are coming to get me, come now, these waves are huge. We are taking on lots of water,” said Alvarenga. “Come now, I am really getting fucked out here,” shouted Alvarenga. They were his final words to shore.
Alvarenga redirected his attention to the storm and ordered Córdoba to adjust the sea anchor—the dynamics were vastly different on a boat with no motor, no thrust. Córdoba and Alvarenga were now alone in their battle against the storm. In this weather, it would be very risky to launch a rescue attempt—both men were in agreement on that point. Alvarenga gave Córdoba a crash course on survival. “I told him to scout the waves, to pay attention. To hold on to the boat. I tried to explain what was about to happen and what he should do.”
As the waves thumped the boat, Alvarenga and Córdoba now began working as a team. A mutual survival instinct overcame fatigue. With the morning sun, they could see the waves approaching, rising high above them and then splitting open. Each man would brace and lean against a side of the open-hulled boat. Depending from which direction a big wave appeared, the men would jump to the opposite rail in an attempt to counteract the roll. But the waves were mad, slapping each other in midair, joining forces to create swells that raised the men to a brief peak where they could get a third-story view, then with the sensation of a falling elevator, instantly drop them. The men wore beach sandals that provided no traction. As the waves increased, Córdoba was tossed around like a crash test dummy. “He had a big bump on his head. It didn’t bleed, but he really smashed his head,” said Alvarenga. “He nearly cracked his ribs on another fall. I told him to hold on, that we had no doctor here, no medicine, no pills.”
Alvarenga realized their catch—nearly a thousand pounds of fresh fish—was making the boat top heavy and unstable. With no time to ask or consult his boss, Alvarenga went with his gut: they would dump all the fish into the ocean. One by one they hauled the slippery fish out of the cooler. Most were less than fifty pounds and the men could each grab and toss a single fish overboard. But for the larger catch, including a pair of tuna and several sharks, the individual fish were seventy-five pounds apiece, meaning the men would grab head and tail simultaneously and swing the bloody carcass into the ocean. Falling overboard was now more dangerous than ever. The bloody fish were sure to attract sharks—it was as if they were chumming the seas to deliberately provoke a frenzy.
For nearly an hour the men strained against the wind and the shifting boat as they unloaded the catch from atop piles of ice. They often waited ten minutes for a break in the wave sets, then let go of the rail, rushed to the icebox and ditched a single fish. “We needed to get the boat higher in the water. That would give us more strength to fight the storm,” said Alvarenga. They also tossed the ice and the extra gasoline. To further increase the stability, Alvarenga strung another fifty buoys. “It was the buoys that allowed us to survive that whole morning,” said Alvarenga.
Around ten a.m. the radio died. The batteries ran out of power. Now they were unable to help organize a rescue. It was before noon on day two of a storm that Alvarenga knew was likely to have a five-day life cycle. Losing the GPS had been a minor inconvenience. The failed motor had been a disaster. Without radio contact Alvarenga was on his own.
The seesaw motion of being adrift made the men feel like they were going up and down more than in any distinct direction. Only much later would they realize how fast they were being blown northwest and pushed out to sea. They occasionally went into a spiral motion where the boat would spin several complete circles, then, pushed by the wind or aligned with ocean currents, would straighten up. Water was flooding over the rail and was two feet deep at their feet. The men bailed as fast as they could while keeping an eye out for changes in the wave patterns. Alvarenga’s eyes were burning from the salty spray. Córdoba half crouched near the deck, held to the boat with one hand while trying to shovel water overboard with the other. When Córdoba stood, the water now reached nearly to his knees.
Around noon, a violent wave smashed the boat on the left side. The force of the wave reached under the boat, which lifted and tipped as if it would flip over, like a car going over a guardrail. Alvarenga, who had just begun to move from the stern to midboat, was tripped up and landed hard on the floor. Córdoba was swallowed in the deluge. He disappeared inside a surge of water.
“Everything washed out,” said Alvarenga. Along with the lines, their water supply and the food, Córdoba was swept overboard. He managed to grab the rail with one hand, and with his body submerged to the chest, clung precariously to the outer rail of the boat. “He screamed and I didn’t think he could hang on for long. I grabbed him by the hair and pulled him aboard. It was like landing a big fish.”
Córdoba, soaked and terrified, was trembling on the floor of the boat as he silently thanked his captain. “He had water coming out his mouth, his nose,” said Alvarenga. Nearly half the boat was filled with water.
Alvarenga stared in disbelief that he was now in a sinking boat. Córdoba remained motionless, paralyzed by the shock of nearly drowning. But Alvarenga quickly regained his survival instinct.
“Help me! Help bail,” he shouted to Córdoba.
“It’s better that we just go down,” moaned Córdoba.
“Have faith,” Alvarenga pleaded. “This is going to pass. It will pass!”
The storm roiled the men all afternoon as they fought to bail enough water out of the boat to keep it from sinking. The same muscles, the same repetitive motion hour after hour had allowed the two men to dump perhaps half the water. They were both ready to faint with exhaustion but Alvarenga was also furious. He picked up the heavy club normally used to kill fish and began to smash the broken engine in a fit of fury. Then he grabbed the radio and GPS unit and angrily threw the machines into the water.
The sun sank and Córdoba and Alvarenga succumbed to the cold. They turned the refrigerator-sized icebox upside down and huddled inside. When the wind whistled in at the bottom, they used the fiberglass outboard motor cover as a barricade against the most direct blasts. There was no spray from the sea. The men, soaking wet and barely able to clench their cold hands into fists, hugged and wrapped their legs around each other. But as the boat sank ever lower to the waterline the men took turns leaving the icebox to bail for frantic ten- or fifteen-minute stints. Each few gallons returned to the ocean was accompanied by heavy exhaustion and constant pain. Progress was slow but the pond at their feet gradually grew smaller.
Córdoba began to sob. “Don’t be crying,” Alvarenga yelled. “We need to bail, get the water out of the boat!”
As darkness shrank their world, the wind ripped straight offshore and drove the men farther out to sea. Were they now back to where they had been fishing a day earlier—a hundred miles offshore? With no GPS and only the stars as guides, they lost any means of calculating distance.
Alvarenga began to think of colleagues who had died at sea. El Indio. Vicho. La Celia. Pihasso and Richard. Many of them had left families behind and Alvarenga felt particular sadness for those who died young—if he died now, at least it would be with the knowledge that he’d fully enjoyed his life. For the first time he felt guilty that he had brought along young Córdoba. Just twenty-two years old, he’d barely graduated from adolescence. But Alvarenga assumed that a rescue party would be launched at dawn. He had participated in a similar mission years earlier. “There were some friends, their motor had died so they called on the radio,” said Alvarenga. “I was onshore. I knew where they fished. I said, ‘Let’s go.’ I stripped down my boat, just to basics, to keep it light and with lots of fuel. I organized the rescue and found them. We connected a cable and we dragged one of the boats back from the sea. Wow, they were excited—they screamed at me, ‘Chancha, you did it!’ God, were they happy.”
Nighttime, however, brought a new set of dangers. With no light to highlight the incoming waves, the men were susceptible to being flooded or flipped. The wind blew cold across the water and survival seemed remote. Crouched on the floor of the boat inside the icebox, each man would unleash a frenzy of energy to bail the boat one last time. As they could no longer see the waves, they could not prepare for the hits. Like a cork bouncing around inside a washing machine they were catapulted first in one direction, then another. “People often forget that in the ocean everything is three-dimensional,” says Luca Centurioni, an expert in ocean currents at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. “It is not a linear experience, it is often more like a pinball game.”
Córdoba began to collapse. “Why do we have to move so much?”
“Follow my orders. Obey me, I am in charge,” Alvarenga said angrily. “If you were in charge it would be different—we would be dead by now.”
“Boss, don’t get mad at me,” Córdoba pleaded.
“Then obey and we’ll get through this,” Alvarenga said encouragingly. But privately he felt a rising sense of panic. “When will this end?” he asked himself. “And how?”