Position: 280 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 12° 47' 51.93'' – W 97° 25' 39.14''
Day 6
After five days of careening waves and screaming wind the winds finally eased. Alvarenga and Córdoba were now approximately 280 miles offshore and well beyond the limited search-and-rescue capabilities of the Mexican Coast Guard. “They would have needed long-range aircraft,” explains Art Allen, a search-and-rescue planner for the US Coast Guard. “As a radar object, these boats are pretty invisible, just fiberglass with an outboard motor. And only two people? That’s not a big radar target. It’s not surprising they weren’t found. And there’s also a thought process of ‘How long do we search? What are their chances for survival? Are they even upright?’ Twenty-meters-a-second wind is a pretty nasty wind. The Mexican Coast Guard may have presumed that the fishermen didn’t last the [first] night.”
Miraculously, the two men had not flipped. The sea anchor off the stern had aligned the bow to the oncoming waves and allowed the men to survive day after day bashing and crashing through incoming waves. Now the two men awoke to a freakish calm. As Alvarenga and Córdoba scanned the horizon, the lack of waves distorted their depth perception. The ocean’s flat surface was stretched so smooth it made the sun seem closer and allowed the imagination to build the illusion of an edge to the ocean where an unlucky fisherman might just slip off.
In the open ocean, depth perception was tricky. A Styrofoam block just a half mile away could be distorted into looking like an aircraft carrier on the horizon. Objects a hundred feet deep were magnified and distorted by the water. With few points of reference every floating object was susceptible to the whims of imagination and the deceptions of wishful thinking. Like a traveler lost in a desert, Alvarenga and Córdoba had no certainty that what they saw or heard actually existed.
Puddles of seawater sloshed at their ankles, a reminder that despite nonstop bailing, Alvarenga and Córdoba had never fully emptied out the boat. The Yamaha motor lacked cover and cord—it looked naked. Nearly all the fishing gear was floating in the sea miles away and their fouled communications gear now lay at the bottom of the ocean. Taking stock of their tools and supplies was disturbingly quick: a long wooden plank, one gray bucket with some clothes, a battered fishing knife with a cracked handle, a trusty machete, a wooden club, the empty icebox (with lid), a pile of bleach bottles, a small pile of nylon rope, the useless motor and one red onion found wedged under a seat after the five-day tumult. Or had it been a four-day storm? Time was increasingly elastic in this world without clocks or calendars. A more primeval rhythm took hold: the warmth of dawn, the blistering daytime heat, the relief of sunset and the mystery of darkness.
Córdoba and Alvarenga had lost much of their body heat during the storm. The wind cut through their wet clothes. They had shivered and spent the four evenings clenched and entwined in what a US Navy SEAL trainer described as “a puppy pile.”
Now on a cloudless morning, as the sun rose over the sea, Alvarenga rechristened his boat. The original name had been fairly generic—Shrimper from the Coast #3. After surviving a fearsome Norteño without a motor, nearly flipping twice and losing all his communications gear, Alvarenga decided his boat needed a more grandiose title. He began referring to it as The Titanic. His humble boat had survived one hit after another and Alvarenga was paternalistically proud. “My boat was more of a triumph than the other Titanic,” he said. “That other one? It sank!”
As the morning sunlight comforted and warmed the men they hoisted a six-foot-long wooden plank from the floor, laid it across two benches that crossed the boat like central ribs and prepared a bed. The men stripped off their wet clothes and, clad only in underwear, stretched out to sop up the first glints of sunlight. Córdoba’s shoulders and arms were so tired he could barely pull himself up. Bailing seawater had left his upper body collapsed. He had multiple bruises—many of them deep—after being flung from one side of the boat to the other. Córdoba felt a new loyalty to his captain. When he was swept overboard, it had been Alvarenga’s quick reflexes that saved him from drowning.
That afternoon a plane buzzed overhead. “We could read the letters on the side, T-A-C-A,” said Alvarenga. “I thought, ‘That one is going to Tapachula or Mexico City.’ We tried to signal but they didn’t see us.” Córdoba felt like they were destined to a slow, painful death. “We are going to die, we are going to die,” he moaned.
“What are you talking about? We are not going to die. Stop it!” Alvarenga scolded his companion. “Don’t think that way. We are not going to die at sea. A rescue mission will find us, and we are going to be saved. We are going to get out of this.”
“Ah, I am not so sure,” Córdoba responded and began to cry in long sobs.
Fatigue, however, soon overcame them and both men collapsed into a deep sleep. Córdoba dozed with his head next to Alvarenga’s feet. It was a balancing act for them to both fit on the same plank. When Alvarenga moved, Córdoba awoke. They slept intermittently throughout the morning, splashing water on their arms or legs to stay cool but never daring to dive into the water. The sun was burning hot and they loved it.
The men awoke with a painful thirst, but they had no freshwater stocks. Coconuts were everywhere and the floating fruit tortured Alvarenga. He could see them swirl by, could almost taste the chilled coconut water. He spotted a solitary bobbing sphere. Then an entire clutch of coconuts, like huge grapes, drifted near and lured him; dared him to swim out. Alvarenga was not tempted. He was a confident and strong swimmer who often took an hour-long morning swim as he explored the lagoon near his palm-roofed hut. But here in the open ocean, Alvarenga knew the risks, even if he didn’t actually see the fins of patrolling sharks. When a coconut was close, the swim from the boat to the coconut and back would take less than a minute. Maybe just thirty seconds. But Alvarenga feared it would take far less for a shark pack to hone in on his telltale thrashing.
Alvarenga had never seen a man eaten alive by sharks. But like the other fishermen from Costa Azul, he had heard the grisly details of the death of his former boss. Captain Gio had been a grouchy old-timer with a raspy, choking voice caused by the scarring from a bullet to the throat. Years earlier, Gio was churning home at a rapid clip in his launch when he smashed into a half-sunken log. The force of the collision launched Gio overboard. In the ensuing confusion, the boat veered off course and by the time the mate took over and circled back, a pool of blood and mass of fins confirmed that Gio would get no further burial. There were signs of a gruesome death but not a piece of Gio to be seen. Apparently sharks had been gathered under the log or nearby. The story of Gio plus Alvarenga’s shark-fishing experience were savage reminders of the limited life expectancy of anyone swimming in these waters. No matter how much he longed for fresh coconut water and a bite of coconut meat, Alvarenga’s sea smarts prevailed. He would wait until the coconuts were within reach.
On that first night of calm, their sixth day at sea, Alvarenga and Córdoba felt a bizarre combination of being trapped and also a sense of freedom. They were farther out to sea than either man had ever traveled, but without the barrage of crashing waves, with stars lighting the smooth ocean and no wind, it felt like they had arrived at a calm harbor. “We looked up and saw airplanes, saw those blinking lights,” said Alvarenga. “We thought, ‘How cool, those people are eating. They have lights and heat. They are relaxed and we are down here suffering.’ ”
Stretched out on the plank, in long bouts of silence, talking only briefly, neither of them stated the obvious: they were alone and adrift. They had heard enough tales of lost fishermen to understand that islands were few and far between. If they had stocked either a sail or a pair of oars, the men could have set a course, but lacking the tools, they drifted at the whim of the wind and ocean currents, swerving, looping and zigzagging across the wide-open Pacific. “A drifting boat gets these bursts of high speed due to a tidal current coming through and then you slow down,” says Luca Centurioni, of Scripps. “You’re always randomly pushed around . . . The ocean is not a river, so you’re not going ‘downstream’ with the currents. This is stop and go, stop and go.”
As they drifted west at approximately 75 miles a day, the nearest landmass in their path was a single, tiny blip on the map: Clipperton Island—a remnant of Napoleonic conquest, still under French rule but a lonely outpost 1,000 miles west. To the south, the closest islands were the Galapagos, 1,100 miles distant on the other side of the equator. NASA astronauts who flew over the Pacific Ocean in the Space Shuttle found it to be endless, even when traveling 17,500 miles an hour. “I never really believed that seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface is covered with salt water until I flew over the Pacific,” says Jerome “Jay” Apt, who flew on three Space Shuttle flights between 1991 and 1996. “Sometimes it took thirty-five minutes of our ninety-minute orbit to cross the Pacific.”
As he watched the sunset, Alvarenga sensed they were in a different world. “I couldn’t tell how far we were from shore. But the current really ripped us out,” he said. “My ears started to ring after we passed two hundred miles from shore.”
On the final day of the first week—November 23—Alvarenga awoke early. By five a.m. he’d surveyed the boat, taken stock (again) of the meager supplies and framed the outline of a plan. He had sufficient experience to realize that the only likely rescue was being spotted by another boat. But even that was difficult, as his twenty-five-foot craft sat low in the water. There was nothing like a mast that might provide a profile. The boat didn’t have any glass that might flash reflections. From more than a half mile away, they were virtually invisible. The boat’s white hull blended in so well with the sea it looked like a deliberate attempt at camouflage.
When Córdoba awoke he immediately began to pitch in. Despite his wailing and blubbering during the storm, Córdoba wasn’t a man to complain about physical pain. Alvarenga explained the plan and, working together, the two men tied Alvarenga’s T-shirt to the top of a wooden pole they had pulled from the ocean. They scoured the ocean for ships. Each man searched 180 degrees of horizon. The rising sun played tricks with shadows and as it glinted off the ocean it created a web of illusions. Faux ships dissolved into the clouds like mirages in the desert.
Alvarenga was sure they would be rescued soon, so he rehearsed and practiced. If a ship was seen, Alvarenga was ready to pull a small cigarette lighter from his pocket (where it was protected from the salt and water) and set the shirt afire. Córdoba would hoist the flaming shirt and the fire would send up a cloud of smoke to alert the passing ship. At night the chance of the flame being spotted was far greater, but it was going to be a random encounter.
After nearly a full day and a dozen false alarms they finally heard the growl of a ship’s engine. It was late afternoon when the vibrations came up through the hull. The men scanned and squinted but couldn’t see anything. Córdoba placed his ear to the deck and confirmed the rumble of a far-off motor. Then they spotted it. Far to the north, a container ship was approaching. They could not see individual containers or read the ship’s name. It was little more than a Lego block on the horizon. They calculated that the container ship was not going to pass even within a mile of them so when the two ships were closest, Alvarenga held the T-shirt while Córdoba set it afire. The shirt wouldn’t burn. It was damp, laden with salt and the small puffs of smoke were less a distress signal than a pathetic reminder of their predicament. Alvarenga shouted and waved his other shirt. Oblivious, the container ship chugged along. The men had no flare gun, no searchlights and their only mirror was so small it barely served for shaving. They flashed light from the mirror in the boat’s direction but watched in frustration as the Lego block marched steadily across the horizon. “That’s when I had a first lump of fear. We were very, very far from the coast,” said Alvarenga. “A place where no fishermen go.”
As Córdoba began to panic, Alvarenga tried to calm his novice mate. “We are lost but we are going to live.” Córdoba pestered Alvarenga with his fears. “Where will we get our water? And our food?”
Alvarenga distracted his distraught mate by ordering him to keep watch on deck. Alvarenga was busy trying to design a shelter from the wind and sun. He flipped the box on its side so that he could sit in the shade and still scan the ocean while he brainstormed.
“Just the fact that he saw a box he put fish in, and was able to take that and turn it into a shelter, shows that he is wired well for survival,” suggests Joseph “Butch” Flythe of the US Coast Guard. “There are people in this world who would have sat in that boat and complained that the sun was cooking them. There are even people who are in a survival situation for quite a while and they have a cell phone in their pocket and don’t use it.”
The sun was now insufferable. The combination of salt, sweat and blistering heat made it feel like they were being cooked alive. Gusty winds were gone and the clouds far away, like distant drawings. The two men huddled in the shade of the tiny structure and prepared to nap as a school of palm-sized triggerfish gnawed at the fuzzy green mold growing on the hull, their clacking and crunching a background sound track to an otherwise overwhelming desolation. “I found it comforting, it reminded me we were not alone,” said Alvarenga.
Alvarenga insisted that rains would soon arrive and provide drinking water. Córdoba was impatient. “I can’t take it, I am so thirsty,” he complained. Córdoba could see no salvation. Without even a distant shore to feed his dreams, he was sure they would both die.
The sea was so calm it was unnerving. The temperature soared above 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the dry air teased the remaining moisture from their bodies. When Alvarenga swallowed, the spittle seemed to bump and rattle down his throat. He worried that his throat might swell and cut off access to his stomach. Was this the way he was going to die? Córdoba’s lips were swollen to twice their normal size and, sucked dry by the sun, began to crack. Red welts, caused by salt blocking up his sweat pores, began to pop out along his arms and legs, breaking the layers of skin that were now shrunken and tight. It felt like his skin would pop open and lay bare the muscles and tendons beneath. Fat reserves that offered a chance to extend life were being converted to basic life-support energy. But without sufficient water and carbohydrates, their bodies began to lose the capability to break down fat. Lethargy laid siege to Córdoba’s normal functions. Alvarenga, accustomed to days without food or water, fared far better.
Finding fresh water became the men’s obsession. “You are drying up, you feel desperate,” said Alvarenga. “You are surrounded by water and you are going to die of thirst, what a punishment.” They began to identify and track clouds on the horizon. They begged the clouds to gather force and churn into a thunderstorm. Still it didn’t rain. The clouds would bunch up, thunderstorms ripped on the horizon, lightning sliced down, wisps of wind a sign rain was imminent, but it never rained. The close calls began to haunt the men. How could storms and rain be all around them and yet they remained as dry as a desert? Was it bad luck? A curse? The two men were dumbfounded. Alvarenga’s experience at sea had long ago taught him the dangers of drinking seawater. Despite their desperate condition and longing for liquid to slosh in their mouths they each resisted swallowing even a cupful of the endless salt water that surrounded them.
