Position: Approximately 500 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 12° 35' 35.09.89'' – W 99° 20.21''
Day 8
The men passed another full day without water. They had now lost the ability to conserve body heat. “We could climb inside [the icebox] and though it was tight, we could both huddle inside; one of us could stretch his legs up the side and we were protected from the wind, and if we hugged,” said Alvarenga, “we could maintain at least some warmth. My face swelled up. My tongue was dry, I had no saliva.”
Again and again the men searched the boat but could not find a single fishing hook. Alvarenga remembered the moment when the wave had crashed over them. If he had only grabbed the toolbox, he would have saved an invaluable supply of hooks, lines, thread, a pair of knives and a sharpening stone. But it had gone sliding over the rail as he’d watched bug-eyed and held on tightly.
Alvarenga’s Titanic was now headed southwest, a fortunate deviation that allowed him to avoid the Equatorial Countercurrent—an enormous ocean eddy that would have hijacked his westerly course and spun him into a circular, counterclockwise loop—perhaps not letting them free for weeks. As he drifted, Alvarenga was shocked by the amount of trash and flotsam in the water around there. Abandoned fishing lines migrated with the current. Riddled with hooks, nooks and crannies, these “ghost lines” became the nucleus of an organism that provided a home to crabs, small fish and turtles.
“I was so hungry that I was eating my own fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces,” said Alvarenga, who began to grab jellyfish from the water, scooping them up in his hands and swallowing them whole. “It burned the top part of my throat,” he said, “but wasn’t so bad. I ate two of the purple jellyfish, those burn more.” But jellyfish did little to satiate his hunger so he began to fantasize that he could eat his own finger. “I needed a piece of something.” He was right-handed so it would have to be on his left hand. The pinky was the most useless. It would be the first to go. Alvarenga prepared for a gruesome operation. He would hack off his pinky with the machete, stanch the blood flow and then dice up his own finger and eat it. The amount of meat was minimal, probably a few bites. Hunger was teasing the sensibility out of his mind. But his plan had a potentially fatal flaw: he might bleed to death. Alvarenga was not convinced that he could stem the blood flow from his own finger. “I would have died, bled to death or got halfway through and stopped because of the pain.”
As they drifted southwest, Alvarenga eyed the small triggerfish—seven inches long—that had been chewing on his boat the night before. Known as “sea piranhas,” the triggerfish practically sanded the bottom of the boat clean with their teeth. Staring into the clear water, Alvarenga identified other members of a growing retinue. With a flat squarish head—like a miniature sperm whale—and an unmistakable green skin that passed in a flash, the prized game fish mahimahi zipped by in schools of a dozen.
While the fish activity under their boat increased, so did the prevalence of sharks. “I needed hooks. Or a net to catch fish. Or a harpoon,” said Alvarenga. “I could see the fish go by and in my mouth I tasted them. With a harpoon I would have been set. But I didn’t have it so I had to imagine what to do. I had a pole and tied a knife to it and tried to spear them. I speared two fish but didn’t land them. I dove into the water trying to grab them with my hands.” The fish got away.
Alvarenga invented another strategy to catch fish. He kneeled alongside the edge of the boat—eyes scanning for sharks—and shoved his arms into the water up to his shoulders. With his chest tightly pressed to the side of the boat, Alvarenga set a trap for the fish. He kept his hands steady, ten inches apart. When a fish swam between his hands, he smashed them shut, digging his fingernails into the rough scales. Many escaped but soon Alvarenga mastered the tactic—“Sometimes after the triggerfish finished eating they would just float for a minute and I would grab them”—and he began to snatch the fish and toss them into the boat while trying to avoid the teeth. “The triggerfish teeth are terribly sharp and they nipped off the end of my fingertips or small pieces from the palm of my hand,” said Alvarenga, who was able to capture as many as thirty of the small fish in a single session. “They would bite me but I hardly felt it. Who cares if they bit, I had caught them.”
The men set up a mini fish-processing plant. Alvarenga would snare them, and with the fishing knife, Córdoba expertly cleaned and sliced the flesh into finger-sized strips that were left to dry in the sun. When Córdoba dumped the bloody innards of the palm-sized triggerfish into the water it was rarely more than a few minutes before mako and blue sharks feasted. The four-foot sharks scraped their rough skin along the bottom of the boat, sending up a jolting blow and a noisy reminder of how little separated these two worlds.
Alvarenga ate fish after fish. He stuffed raw meat and dried meat into his mouth, hardly noticing or caring about the difference. He was famished after days without a meal, yet his body was still in a state of adrenal overdrive that allowed him to ignore basic human needs like sleep in order to focus on the more crucial task of finding water.
Alvarenga began to drink his urine. He wasn’t embarrassed and he encouraged Córdoba to follow suit. It was salty but not revolting as he drank, urinated, drank again, peed again, in a cycle that felt like it provided at least minimal hydration to his body. But urine, being filled with salts, throws the body’s internal equilibriums off balance and requires the body to consume even more precious water in an attempt to flush out the salts. Drinking urine, both men realized, was a desperate measure. They needed protein, calories and hydration, so they scanned the ocean surface for food and tools. Vegetation was extensive, ranging from the trunks of palm trees to mats of seaweed.
Alvarenga and Córdoba divided their time between scanning the horizon for ships and inspecting the nonstop parade of floating garbage. They became astute scavengers and learned to distinguish the myriad varieties of plastic that float across the ocean, littering the surface with a permanent mark of the petroleum age. Garbage was so prevalent that trash became a constant source of possibilities. Alvarenga and Córdoba grabbed and stored every empty water bottle they found bobbing in the water. Nearly every day they could see dozens of the floating bottles, and when they drifted nearby they used the flagpole with the burn marks from the T-shirt to snag them. At least now if it rained, they had a plan. They would clean out one of the plastic indentations on the boat, eliminate the salt and gunk and then transfer the collected water into the plastic half-liter bottles. Their plastic bottle collection, which grew almost daily, formed the basis of their first line of defense against thirst. Trash was now a tool.
When a stuffed green garbage bag drifted within reach, the men snared it, hauled it aboard and ripped open the plastic. They forensically inspected every item in the bag. A crust of bread would have been heavenly; a tortilla, the Holy Grail. When the men found a wad of prechewed gum, they divided the almond-sized lump, each man feasting on the wealth of sensorial pleasures. Underneath a layer of sodden kitchen oil, they found riches: half a head of cabbage, some carrots and a quart of milk. It was half rancid but still they drank it. It was the first fresh food the two men had seen in a week. They treated the soggy carrots with reverence befitting a Thanksgiving dinner. “We didn’t eat it quickly at all,” recalled Alvarenga. “Instead we chopped it up very fine and prepared an entire meal.” With the precision of diamond dealers, they enthusiastically divided the loot. “I found a plastic bottle of soft drink floating in the ocean with just a little drop inside, but ahhhh! How sweet! I imagined that I was back in the world,” said Alvarenga. “What a pleasure it was.”
The two men hauled aboard every batch of seaweed within reach. Sometimes a crab or small fish could be found tangled in the spiderweb of plants. The men were at the epicenter of a newly hatched ecosystem—the few square yards of ocean under the drifting boat’s hull now a petri dish where barnacles, crabs and fish began to congregate.
Tuna fishermen in this area of the Pacific are known to dump tree trunks into the ocean, then return in two days and circle the area with their lines. “Fish in the open ocean tend to aggregate under anything that provides any sort of structure. A boat that is floating for a long period of time acts as a magnet for fish,” says Daniel Cartamil, a shark expert with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who describes the rapid buildup of a food chain in which the smaller fish “would act as a magnet for predators,” including sharks. “Once sharks have found food, they will pretty much hang around all day,” says Cartamil. “They won’t leave.”
The two men could see that food was plentiful and nearby. Seabirds dove into the water to scoop up sardines. Tuna fish flashed under the boat chasing smaller fish. Birds landed on the prow of The Titanic to swallow a recent catch. The birds soiled the deck with syrupy excrement that smelled horrendous and which the men feared might foul any freshwater stores. The two men shooed the birds away, cursing the fact that their boat was a landing pad. A pea-sized drop of excrement could foul an entire section of the boat that might later fill with rainwater, thus the men’s vigilance to scare away the birds and prevent them from landing. They considered building a scarecrow. Without realizing it, they were becoming experts on the behavior of these frequent visitors.
After nine days of minimal water and only a few servings of dried fish, milk, cabbage and carrots, Alvarenga and Córdoba were so desperate that they began searching for minuscule microdroplets. The men divided the boat in equal halves, from bow to stern, with an imaginary line running down the middle of the hull. Then they crouched and began licking the entire surface of the boat, especially the molded indentations, which tended to hold a few drops of morning dew. “Like cows,” said Alvarenga, who discovered and explored the secret contours of his boat with a slow and desperate intimacy.
Position: 520 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 12° 02.57.25'' – W 100° 55' 06.14''
Day 10
Alvarenga was so thirsty and hungry he began to imagine a new source of food. He had a vision of pure nutrition: sea turtles. “I was taking these short half breaths, and wanting water and not having water. I thought I would die from the anguish,” said Alvarenga. “My breaths were getting short. I started to suffocate. It felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t get the oxygen; it was horrible. I thought a turtle might save me.”
Finding a sea turtle would not be difficult as the Mexican coastline was host to coastal marine sanctuaries that included sea turtle conservation and hatchery programs. From September through January, tens of thousands of sea turtles come to nest and lay their eggs. These eggs are then fenced off, allowing tourists to photograph the hatchlings as they crawl back toward the surf to face the odds. “They say the [sea] turtles are in extinction, but we go forty kilometers [twenty-five miles] from here and they are everywhere—like rocks on a mountainside,” says Mino, Alvarenga’s supervisor. “You have to swerve this way and that to avoid them and sometimes ‘bang!’ You hit a turtle at God-knows-how-many revolutions per second. Sometimes they are half sunk so you can’t see them. We are talking thousands of turtles out there.”
Thousands of these turtles are caught every year by fishermen and sold for fifty dollars apiece on the black market. Although “Fresh Turtle Steak” is rarely printed on the menu, the savvy gourmet along the Mexican coast never has to search far to find a local restaurant willing to serve up the illegal delicacy. Despite the threat of fines and public awareness campaigns, turtle meat finds its way into household cooking pots and commercial kitchens all along the coast.
Sea turtles in the open ocean dive when boats appear. It is common, however, that when a boat is still, the sea turtles approach. Attracted to floating objects that might serve as a rest stop or source of food, sea turtles along the coast routinely swim toward a stationary fisherman’s boat and make a racket as they try to climb aboard.
The first turtles Alvarenga and Córdoba found were dead. “They fill up like a balloon and turn purple,” said Alvarenga. “The smell is terrible, we couldn’t eat them. It was impossible.”
But in late November—roughly ten days after losing their engine—Alvarenga heard a “thunk” in the night. He thought a log had bumped the boat. Climbing out from under the icebox, he was surprised to see an eye. Then a second eye. He grabbed the two-foot-long turtle by the back and tossed him aboard.
“Let’s eat the turtle,” Salvador told his stunned companion. “We can drink the blood! If we are really this thirsty, we drink blood!”
“No. No. No. That would be a sin. Let’s catch fish,” Córdoba replied, shocked by the radical proposal.
“Sin? What are you talking about? A sin?” said Alvarenga. He prepared his knife.
Alvarenga’s mouth was dry and his tongue swollen. He did not hesitate. “I killed the turtle with the knife and there were some tubes coming off the motor. I sliced a piece of tubing off the motor and used it like a straw.” Turtles were gorged with a thick merlot-colored blood with hints of violet. If thirst was the problem, Alvarenga reasoned, then turtle blood was the solution. He slurped pint after pint of the liquid blood and later ate the congealed blood that formed into a Jell-O-like consistency.
“Eat it, eat it!” Alvarenga pleaded to his companion.
“No. No. I can’t,” Córdoba said, balking at the thought.
Then Alvarenga began to carve up the meat. He began with the flippers. Cutting into the thick skin was wrenching and slow work. To crack open the shell and reach the thick meat in the tail took an hour of work. Inside the turtle’s stomach he found a collection of garbage including plastic bottle caps as well as clams and barnacles.
Laying out the turtle steaks, Alvarenga tried to kindle a fire. His lighter was long since dead, so he tried with his mirror. He had used a turtle shell as a frying pan before. Wood could be shaved off the plank they slept on. But with his lighter dead and the mirror useless in creating a flame, Alvarenga settled on the sun to warm up his fresh meat. But his patience was limited. Less than an hour after laying out the thick purple meat he was slicing finger-long strips of raw turtle meat and chewing it with glee. He smiled as he savored the luscious flavors. Nothing about the meal made him retch; to the contrary, he felt feted by the sea.
Lying awake inside his icebox home after his first day of turtle food, Alvarenga felt his body surging to life. His thirst temporarily quenched by blood, his appetite sated by raw turtle steaks, he gave thanks for the turtle and for his good fortune. Alvarenga saw the turtle as a venerated gift, handed to him by a benevolent sea.
Once he began scouring the open ocean for turtles, Alvarenga found they were as common as sharks. When a turtle came up for air, the head and nose rippled the surface and sometimes the animal would float, as if sunning on the surface. “A resting turtle at the surface would not be expecting any danger from a big chunk of flotsam,” says Blair Witherington, a research scientist with more than twenty-five years’ experience in sea turtle biology and conservation. “Turtles often like to hang out around stuff that floats. And it could be they just saw Alvarenga’s boat as just flotsam out there. . . . Some of these turtles may be diving deep for food and the water down there is cold. By the time the turtle comes up, it might want to soak up sun.”
Alvarenga’s entire day mutated into an obsessive turtle hunt. Córdoba was also an eager hunter even if he refused the nutrients and energy contained in the blood. Despite no rain and intense sun, turtle meat kept the two men alive and they began recovering strength.
At every meal, Alvarenga divided the blood and meat with a solemn equanimity but Córdoba ate only the meat; he resisted the blood, so Alvarenga was drinking double portions. Alvarenga began to stockpile food—he caught three turtles and penned them up in a small pool of water on the deck. The turtles climbed and tumbled around, creating a racket day and night and a counter note to the crunching of triggerfish.
Alvarenga’s taste for turtle was not limited to the blood and meat. “I would pull out the eggs. Córdoba did not like the meat but he ate it, but when he tried an egg he loved it. Then he ate many, many turtle eggs. There were lots and lots of turtles around there. I would catch them, kill them and then put my hands in and pull out the eggs.”
Invigorated by the food, the men planned to escape. Using the turtle shells, they decided to row across the Pacific. “I had a turtle shell in each arm and for two hours rowed and rowed,” said Alvarenga. “Then I thought, ‘This is impossible, what am I doing?’ ”