Position: 550 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 11° 44' 18.06'' – W 101° 26' 6.47''
Day 13
Alvarenga was resting inside the icebox, a bucket of turtle scraps next to the wooden plank that was his bed, when he heard, Splat! Another bird, another mess, he thought. Splat . . . Splat . . . Splat. The rhythm of raindrops on the hard roof of the icebox was unmistakable. “Piñata! Piñata! Piñata!” Alvarenga screamed as he tilted up the icebox and slipped out. His crewmate awoke and joined him. Rushing across the deck, the two men deployed a jerry-rigged rainwater collection system that Alvarenga had been designing and imagining for a week. Córdoba scrubbed clean the bottom of the gray five-gallon bucket and positioned its mouth skyward. Alvarenga balanced the plastic housing to the outboard motor on the deck, jamming it at an angle to collect rainwater.
After days of drinking urine and turtle blood, licking up droplets of freshwater, munching turtle eggs and nearly dying of thirst, a storm finally bore down on the men. Dark clouds stalked overhead. The stormy weather came on fast and the men opened their mouths to the falling rain, stripped off their clothes and showered in a glorious deluge of freshwater. The men lapped up spoonful after spoonful of water as it dripped into the bucket. The growing swells rocked the boat, the water sloshing in the bucket a measure of their riches. Within an hour the bucket had an inch, then two inches of water. The men laughed and drank every couple of minutes. As water collected in the outboard motor housing they poured it into the gray bucket. After their initial attack on the water supplies the men vowed to maintain strict water rations. “What if we go another ten days without rain?” Alvarenga asked Córdoba.
The storm picked up. Swells now reached eight feet and swung the boat around and around. They had little ballast, no rudder and only the makeshift sea anchor dragging behind them to align the bow with the surging waves. Besides having no control over the boat, the men were half frozen. With the rain came a deep chill as their rehydrated bodies were still incapable of generating or holding body heat. Then too the men had not planned on wet clothes and their obsession with collecting water hadn’t included plans for keeping clothes dry. Their clothes sodden, the men shivered and entered the icebox, although it was daytime. Nearly naked they hugged.
Alvarenga and Córdoba tried to escape the water gathering at their feet by sitting on the plank, then for much of the stormy day they sought refuge in the box. When the rain poured down in sheets, visibility was little more than a hundred feet. The whistling wind played tricks with their minds. As darkness swept in, the men heard chilling screams. A voice—like taunting laughter—emerged from the ocean depths. Alvarenga was not sure whether this was a hallucination or a nightmare. Was he going mad? Were they going to be eaten alive?
After a day, the rain let up and as the sun began to cut through the thinning cloud patch, a calm silence returned. The men took stock of their new reality. They had transferred water from the indentations on deck to completely fill the five-gallon bucket with fresh water. It was enough for at least a week if rations were kept to a minimum. Though their thirst was sated the men’s hunger grew, as if the arrival of water had primed the body for the promise of food. Alvarenga began to attack the stock of three turtles—each one represented three full days of food.
Using his authority as captain, Alvarenga made an executive decision. He ordered Córdoba to eat. But instead of screaming or forcing the issue, Alvarenga instead seduced his mate into eating by presenting the turtle steaks as a gourmet delicacy. After cutting the meat into thin strips and dripping salt water for flavoring, he toasted them on a part of the outboard motor housing heated by the sun. Alvarenga sliced each strip into tiny squares and using the vertebrae of the triggerfish created what looked like a fancy appetizer. The turtle shell served as a plate and to the surprise of both men, Córdoba began to enjoy turtle meat. His body immediately overruled his mind—rich in fat, vitamins and protein, turtle meat was exactly what a starved human body required.
“It was really common for European sailors to gather sea turtles and turn them upside down in the holds of the ship, and tie their flippers together,” says Witherington. “The turtles would stay alive without any food or water for weeks and weeks and weeks.”
Alvarenga and Córdoba began a ritual of eating together as they slowly consumed equal-sized portions. “One myth about survivors is that people think you’re so starved that you bury your face into the food and it all tastes the same. It’s not that at all,” says Steve Callahan, author of Adrift, his memoir of survival at sea for seventy-six days aboard a tiny raft after his sailboat was sunk by a whale. “I would fantasize about all these subtle differences in flavor between different parts of the fish. I would hang the meat until it got really dry and it was like ‘Ahhhhh, that’s like toast, nice and crunchy.’ The liver was sweet, so that was dessert. . . . It’s not like you’re walking through the grocery store and you look at a package of fish for sale, you buy it, throw it in the cart, take it home, cook and eat it with absolutely no consciousness that this was an actual creature that had a life. Instead, you are connected to all that richness in a very close way.”
Turtle meat staved off the worst effects of starvation but there was never enough food. Salvation came in the unlikely form of a shark pack. “I would see stains—dark shadows in the water—as schools of fish passed by,” said Alvarenga. “The sharks were chasing them and the water boiled. When the sharks started eating them, the fish would slide up to the side of my boat and I would be scooping them out until the sharks left.”
The shark pack and feeding frenzy didn’t surprise Alvarenga, but Córdoba was stunned by the spectacle. He kept far from the waterline and brandished a wooden pole when the sharks launched an attack. “They banged and crashed around as they hunted,” said Alvarenga. “I would watch the sharks and tell them, ‘Someday we are coming back for you. All this torture you are causing us? We will be back.’ ”
Alvarenga was also talking to the outboard motor. He was still stunned by the machine’s betrayal. “I was very angry with the motor. I found some branches in the ocean and began smashing the motor. I was swearing. I smashed it with my machete and the wooden poles,” said Alvarenga. “Later I asked for forgiveness and I took it apart to try and make hooks. There was lots of metal inside.”
Position: 650 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 11° 03' 43.81'' – W 102° 10' 52.20''
Day 15
As he picked apart the motor, Alvarenga tried to decipher the cause of the engine failure. A single screw? A cracked motor housing? Wet spark plugs? Whatever lay at the root of this motor’s premature death, Alvarenga was certain it was something mundane and simple. Fixing the motor was beyond his limited mechanical capabilities, and anyway, weeks earlier they had watched as all their fuel containers sank beneath the waves, presumably to rest on the ocean floor. Alvarenga dissected the outboard motor in search of a sharp piece of metal he could fashion into a tool or a weapon. When he removed a foot-long rod it took him less than a day to shave one end into a sharp point and to fashion a makeshift harpoon. He needed only to anchor the harpoon system to the boat via a thin line of fishing filament and the men would have a reusable weapon capable of supplying them with fish. On the first toss the filament snapped. His handmade harpoon sank into the depths.
Alvarenga continued to strip pieces from the outboard motor in an effort to craft tools. Most of the motor was locked up by bolts and screws but through a combination of bashing the motor and prying it apart, the two men removed a second strip of metal, this one as long as a man’s forearm. Alvarenga placed the metal on the rail of the boat and using his heft bent it into the shape of the letter J. He imagined the curve of a gaffing hook. After half a day of exertion, Alvarenga had done it. There was no barb, but by scraping the metal along the edge of the propeller for hours he shaped a sharp tip.
Alvarenga was a lifelong hunter who always ate whatever he caught. The sport of hunting never appealed to him; it was food he was after. He began to experiment with his new weapon. Leaning over the edge of the boat, he would first grab triggerfish then cut them up and chum the water with blood and pieces of flesh. The bait attracted more triggerfish and the flat-headed mahimahi. His hands in the water, Alvarenga positioned the hook as deep as possible. Córdoba tossed more bait—including turtle entrails—and waited. Alvarenga’s plan was to position the hook under the soft underbelly of the mahimahi, then whip it up, in the hope of snagging the fish deep enough to haul it aboard before it wriggled free.
Two decades of hunting had taught him patience. He had vast experience killing raccoons with a slingshot and shooting birds out of the sky with a shotgun. Several times Alvarenga had mahimahi flirting with his bait, nearly lined up with the handmade hook. Still he waited. Even the slightest movement of the hook spooked the curious but cautious mahimahi. Finally, Alvarenga lined up a two-foot mahimahi. Snapping his arm up, he ripped the hook with such force that it cut through the fish. Writhing and in shock, the mahimahi fought but was aboard The Titanic in seconds. Córdoba smashed the fish in the head with the propeller, which he had removed from the motor. Alvarenga watched the beautiful creature’s chameleon death performance. Bright greens, brilliant blues, the fish seemed almost magical as it changed colors while dying. Alvarenga too was in shock. He had planned the whole sequence, no surprise there. But having a fresh fish as long as his arm changed everything. Córdoba was proud of his captain. The bounty felt communal.
Alvarenga prepared the mahimahi with obsessive attention to detail. He rescued every nugget of meat and added to each man’s portion one kidney and one eyeball. They didn’t divide the heart or liver for fear of losing precious drops of blood, so each man slowly chewed an entire organ. Their feast felt like a six-course meal. They even had extra meat, which they balanced atop the outboard motor housing to dry in the sun.
After the meal, Alvarenga went back to the hunt. Catching the second fish took less than an hour. Then Alvarenga got careless. When a third fish was within range he yanked the hook into the fish, a bit sideways but deep. The mahimahi lashed out and slipped the hook from Alvarenga’s grasp. He watched as the fish, trailing a stream of blood, darted away, the homemade hook impaled in its belly. “I felt like crying. I couldn’t believe it. It was gone,” said Alvarenga, who was back to fishing with his hands. They rationed the meat from the two mahimahi and cut it into nuggets the size of a kernel of corn. They savored each bite. “Sometimes I would just hold the piece in my mouth for five minutes, letting the flavor leak out,” said Alvarenga.
Position: 920 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 9° 48' 30.06'' – W 106° 58' 49.17''
Day 23
The two men were living off survival rations of three cups of water a day, piles of fresh turtle eggs and portions of dried turtle meat. Although they would collectively eat up to a dozen triggerfish every day, the men were extremely dehydrated. They maintained a strict ration of one cup of water in the morning, one cup at lunch and one in the evening. When Alvarenga licked his lips, at least he could celebrate that he no longer tasted salt. The rain had washed his body clean and the calm sea meant he was no longer constantly doused in salty sea spray. But his throat remained swollen and felt brittle. Could the skin be flaking off inside? Or was this just another creation of his ever more fertile imagination?
Córdoba was in worse shape. He pleaded with Alvarenga, “Oranges, bring me oranges.” Alvarenga stood above the prone man and assured him food was close. “Okay, I am going to the store, I will see if it is open, to bring you some food,” he said with conviction as he pointed to the horizon. “I will get tamales, oranges and shrimp.” Alvarenga strode with confidence for the few seconds it took to cross the length of the boat. After waiting for five minutes in silence, he strode back with bad news. “The store is closed, but don’t worry, they open in an hour and they have fresh tortillas.” To his surprise, the scheme worked. Córdoba stopped moaning and fell asleep. The game of visiting the store bought Alvarenga a few hours of respite from the cloud of fear that had seized Córdoba’s mind and rarely loosened its grip on the despairing young fisherman.
Despite brutal thirst and aching hunger, Alvarenga maintained a reserve of goodwill, and in an effort to humor his ever more despondent shipmate he made frequent visits to the grocery store. Alvarenga’s trick solved several deep psychological wants, including Córdoba’s need for a roadmap outlining a solution. Alvarenga’s clarity, purpose and determined explanations soothed much of Córdoba’s anxiety. Waiting for tamales, even imaginary tamales, was bearable.
Position: 950 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 9° 52' 06.79'' – W 106° 49' 04.27''
Day 25
Alvarenga began to look forward to his strolls to the store—it not only calmed Córdoba but also allowed him to imagine life on land. Dr. John Leach, senior research fellow in survival psychology at the Extreme Environments Laboratory at the University of Portsmouth, England, suggests that by nurturing his sick mate, Alvarenga was building a foundation to maintain his own mental health. “If you’ve got a task to do, then you’re concentrating on that task, which provides a degree of meaning in your life. That’s one of the reasons that people like doctors and nurses have quite a high survival rate in concentration camps during wars,” says Leach. “If you’re a doctor or nurse in camp, you’ve got an automatic task, you’ve got a job that gives meaning to your existence, which is looking after others.”
Before long, Alvarenga began taking his own imaginary journeys. He had never owned a car, but aboard The Titanic he imagined owning a brand-new pickup truck. He polished the chrome, tuned the booming radio, admired his jacked-up cab and the flirtatious looks he received as he cruised around Costa Azul, ripping up the dirt roads with knobby tires. Like Córdoba’s vision of a nearby grocery store, Alvarenga entered another dimension—although in his case as a result of deliberate self-hypnosis. Alvarenga spun ever more elaborate tales and whether it was a meal, a woman or an imaginary cold beer, his invented world provided a platform from which he could taste the myriad pleasures he so craved.
“The thing about survival is that there are moments when you have to be active in order to survive,” says Dr. Leach, who works frequently with prisoners and survivors of hostage situations. “But there are also times when you have to be passive. And it’s on those occasions that people will quite often retreat into their own head. What tends to happen in long-term survival is that there are changes in your memory structure . . . some aspects are improved because they are being exercised. Quite prodigious feats of memory can be performed by people who are isolated. The caveat is that it’s okay living inside your own head provided it doesn’t slip into psychosis.”
Alvarenga and Córdoba had no way to track time. They had no watch, no clock. But as a young boy, Alvarenga had been taught by his grandfather to mark the months by following the cycles of the moon. It was a skill that he picked up early and never abandoned. This ingrained habit allowed him to calculate their time at sea. They had left shore with nearly no moon, seen it grow during the storm and following days, and now its light was waning. The men had been adrift for roughly three weeks.
Position: 1,000 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 9° 25' 29.34'' – W 107° 39' 59.79''
Day 28
One evening as the men rested inside the icebox, a slight thump startled them. Then another thump. And a third. Emerging from a light sleep, the men found three flying fish flopping on the deck. “They whistled through the air and fell on the boat,” said Alvarenga. Córdoba defined the gift in religious terms, a delivery from heaven for which he thanked God. Alvarenga had long considered church just another landlubber’s scam. For him, the arrival of fresh fish was a reminder that food was bountiful and reinforced his belief that more than anything else, survival was his job, not God’s.
Except for the turtles, the two mahimahi caught with the hook, dozens of triggerfish grabbed from the sea and the gift of three flying fish, by the middle of December the men hadn’t eaten more than the equivalent of a single meal a day. The constant sun and limited supply of fresh water pulled their skin tight, an abnormal Botox-like shrinkage. Combined with the pallor from their malnourished blood, it made the men look like starved, haunted prisoners. “You have an invariable loss of about one and a half liters of water a day. Essentially you are a leaky bag,” explains Professor Michael Tipton, a survival physiologist with the Extreme Environments Laboratory at the University of Portsmouth, England, and coauthor of Essentials of Sea Survival. “Because your blood volume is reduced—and of course it’s your blood that is delivering oxygen around the body and to the brain—you have a decreased oxygen supply. That’s when you get things like hallucinations, delirium and finally death . . . dying of thirst is a pretty nasty way to go.”
Córdoba’s shirt hung loose. He was falling out of his clothes. He was shrinking, especially around his eyes, thought Alvarenga, who couldn’t avoid noticing the similarity between the skull and crossbones insignia stamped on Córdoba’s hoodie and his ever more bony face. Alvarenga’s girth too was several sizes smaller and his strength was ebbing away, but his mind remained sharp.
Córdoba was burning through his physical and mental reserves. He submitted himself to what he believed was a fate chosen by God. “I don’t want to suffer,” the skinny lad said. It was a phrase he repeated like a mantra. Córdoba had a vision of a heavenly palace complete with pearly gates. Alvarenga, who harbored a stubborn optimism, tried to humor him: “Even a random corner of that palace is good enough for me,” he said. “I don’t necessarily need his temple. Give me a street corner with golden skies and crystal oceans. Any old corner as long as it gets me out of this hell.”
Fifteen years older and a veteran of countless misadventures at sea, Alvarenga maintained an indefatigable will to survive, but ravaged by thirst and hunger he recognized their collective health was slipping rapidly. Yet all around them the sea teemed with life. Alvarenga felt he was in a cage where food was showcased tantalizingly close, just barely out of reach. Above their boat, the sky was dotted with the angular wings of gliding seabirds. On the horizon, fish chased by predators leapt out of the ocean. At sea level, islands of refuse washed by. Alvarenga—always a skilled hunter on land—began to stalk the seabirds. He imagined they were wild ducks and plotted to capture one to determine firsthand how much meat was stuck to its legs, breast and wings. “They would get away when I tried to catch them. It was impossible. For three days they all escaped. I was angry and hungry,” said Alvarenga. “I was trying to rush them and snatch them out of the air. It was a brute force attack, but they were too fast. I never even touched one.” Alvarenga spent fruitless—and meatless—days unsuccessfully hunting birds. “I stopped and tried to figure it out. How do you catch a bird? I told myself: think like a cat.”
Crouched flat like a soldier crawling through a battlefield, Alvarenga waited for a bird to land. When it first perched, the bird was attentive for several minutes, swinging its eyes, surveying the scene. Alvarenga didn’t move—instead he waited until the bird’s defenses relaxed. When the bird busied itself eating fleas, lice or whatever parasites lurked deep inside its plumage, he inched across the deck of the boat. Alvarenga avoided eye contact as he stalked his prey. When he crept closer, the bird snapped to attention so Alvarenga froze still and the bird resumed preening. When his prey was within reach, Alvarenga slid his arm up the side of the boat, his fingers clenched in a fist. Then he extended his fingers in slow motion, careful not to scrape the side of the boat. With a snapping motion he trapped the bird’s foot. A stinging pain ripped across his knuckles as the bird pecked and escaped. Studying the bloody welt on his hand and his overall strategy, Alvarenga noted a single flaw—he would have to ignore the pain of that first beak strike. If he could grab the bird’s neck with his other hand, he would have a solid meal and the beginning of a strategy for long-term survival.
It took several more attempts. Often the birds flitted into the sky while Alvarenga was still several feet away, and once he touched a bird but felt its legs slip between his fingertips. Then he did it. “Before I thought about what to do, I had the bird’s neck in one hand and a leg in the other.” The trapped bird shrieked and fought. Wary of stories that wild birds aim for the eyeball, Alvarenga kept the thrashing bird—which he called a duck—at arm’s length until a short crack confirmed he had broken its neck. Examining the bird, Alvarenga decided to fillet it like a chicken. He sliced open the chest cavity and, after plucking the feathers one by one, peeled off the skin to expose a skinny carcass that seemed to have already been stripped of meat. What could you eat? All that effort for this? Alvarenga was disappointed his hunt had culminated with such a miserly harvest.
An expert with a knife, Alvarenga felt like he was showing off as he cleaned the meager catch and laid out strips of glistening flesh. He added his only condiment—drops of seawater—onto strips warmed in the afternoon sun. He and Córdoba sat down to eat, if not enjoy, their first full meal since the flying fish. “In my mind, I prepared a feast with cilantro, onions and tomatoes,” said Alvarenga. He popped a sashimi-sized chunk of raw “duck” into his mouth and chewed with gusto.
Córdoba made a costly mistake: he smelled the seabird meat. Unlike Alvarenga, who conjured gourmet flavors, Córdoba revolted at the stench, like that of rotten fish. He wouldn’t try a bite. For four days Alvarenga alternately threatened and cajoled Córdoba to eat raw bird meat. Finally, the despondent mate took a tentative bite. Hunger had vanquished revulsion.
“See, I told you,” Alvarenga gloated. “Thought you didn’t like bird, eh?”
“Yeah, I like bird,” Córdoba admitted.
Now in their fourth week adrift, the two men abandoned traditional modesty and walked naked, squatted on the rim of the boat next to the motor to defecate into the sea and then washed their butts with seawater. To pee they stood and urinated into the ocean. From roughly ten a.m. to four p.m., the men escaped the sun by living inside the icebox. It was crowded, stinky, uncomfortable and flat-out painful to wedge two bodies into the box—Alvarenga developed constant lower back pain from being scrunched up. But there was no other way to avoid being burned by the sun. “Once you get sunburn over about five percent of your body surface, then that starts to impair your ability to maintain your body temperature,” says Professor Tipton. “How important was it that they created shade and stayed under it, minimizing the solar heat load? It was critical.”
Despite the boredom of long hours during the hottest part of the day cramped inside the icebox, the men recognized that this inconvenience mattered little compared with the shelter it provided from the harsh sun. Yet even with the shade, they were still sunburned and their skin was covered in blisters that erupted into a full-body rash. The salty spray became painful. But the icebox kept them from being toasted alive.
After the first successful capture of a seabird, Alvarenga and Córdoba became accomplished “duck” hunters. The two men hunted wild birds in earnest. “Catching a bird standing on the side of the boat was difficult as they often flew away,” said Alvarenga. The easiest way to catch the birds was at night. Alvarenga lay on his back, under the pole where the birds liked to perch. He waited until the birds were comfortably settled or even asleep. Then in a one-two move, he grabbed a leg with one hand and the neck with the other. If he planned to eat the bird immediately, he broke the neck with the casual familiarity of a man popping open a can of beer. Sometimes he even used his body to trap the birds. “They would always land on the boat to rest so I learned their strategy. I would hear them circling so I would stand still and they liked to land on my head. I was afraid they would take out my eyes,” Alvarenga said. “Then I would grab them off my head.”
When it was time to eat, they divided up the catch, an equal number of birds each. A path to survival was now mapped. “I would eat the feathers, the bones, even the feet,” said Alvarenga. To pass the time, Alvarenga would sometimes kill two birds and then chop them up like ceviche. “I would not kill them and just stuff them in my mouth. I chopped them and chopped them into very fine pieces, then placed them in a bucket and used fish spines like toothpicks to serve it up. That was one way to pass the time, eating each piece, one by one.”
Steve Callahan, reflecting on the seventy-six days he spent drifting alone in the Atlantic Ocean in 1982, says, “People think you just sit around, and wait to wash up on something. And I have always pointed out to people that survival is not a passive activity, it’s an active pursuit. If you don’t work at it, you are screwed. I have a pet theory that one of the most dangerous things you can do in life is try to minimize all risks. You never fall on your face, nothing happens, and so when something big happens, you’re totally unprepared, you have no tool kit.”
Inside the icebox, Alvarenga noticed that his hearing was becoming sharp. “I could tell the size of the bird by the sounds. Sometimes I would hear a deep whoosh sound, and I knew it was a big bird. The birds flew low over the icebox on the first loop. Then looped again a second and a third time, then landed on the icebox. ‘Yes!’ I would say. ‘Now I am going to eat duck.’ ”
When the wind and temperature permitted, the two men spent hours at night outside the icebox creating games with the sky, inventing competitions to see who could call out a shooting star first. They fell asleep counting stars—it was a game that Córdoba usually won: “He passed a thousand stars,” said Alvarenga.
“Sometimes when we were both in the box and heard a bird, I would hold up the edge, he would creep out. He was good,” said Alvarenga with pride. “The icebox would not bump down on the deck and scare away the bird.” While Córdoba became a skilled hunter, he still retched at the sensation of swallowing raw bird meat. Alvarenga, however, went native. His brain, set on survival and long accustomed to raw food, ranging from iguana to crabs, adapted to whatever might provide nutrition.
At night, before going to sleep, the men set fish traps. They sliced a hole in the side of five empty bottles of bleach—previously used to float their fishing line. For bait they stuffed feathers and chunks of bird meat into the bottles. A pair of intact Clorox bottles with screw-on caps kept the traps floating near the surface. The men trolled their traps, attached to the boat by one of the few pieces of solid twine available, behind them. Occasionally they found small fish trapped in the bleach bottle and even if the traps were empty, the thrill and possibility of a catch helped bolster the dream of a more steady food supply.