Position: 5,000 miles off the coast of Mexico
N 5° 40' 54.14'' – W 166° 29' 50.44''
Day 219
As he rested inside the icebox shelter, a nauseating stench startled Alvarenga. He climbed out to the deck, glanced around his boat and surveyed the horizon, looking for the source of the overwhelming stink. Had a dead fish splashed aboard? Had one of his captive boobies died? He saw a flurry of movement barely visible amid the intense midday glare. A thick flock of birds circled and dove. “Probably a school of tuna,” thought Alvarenga, who immediately went into hunting mode. Without a harpoon or a net, his chances of hauling in a dazzlingly agile swimmer like a tuna were slim, but tuna ate smaller fish that might be snatched by hand. Feeding tuna produced enough bloody leftovers to attract packs of predators so Alvarenga was careful to keep his hands out of the water and an eye out for shark fins at the surface. As he drifted closer to the hubbub, the odor became unbearably thick, almost sticky. His eyes watered. He wanted to retch.
Then Alvarenga saw the commotion—a floating whale. A chunk of flesh the size of his boat had been pecked from the floating carcass and the feeding frenzy gave him a chill. The decomposing giant was being pecked and pulled apart by hundreds of birds. Like an iceberg, the bulk of the whale floated below the surface and Alvarenga was sure dozens of sharks were ripping from below. The whale seemed to vibrate from the nonstop attacks, as if it were being disassembled by a hundred mini jackhammers. The death of the whale was less upsetting than the pace at which it was being consumed. The feast was accompanied by a raucous sound track. Fighting birds squawked and shrilled as they battled for access to the booty.
Alvarenga was desperate to get upwind and past the gruesome spectacle until he realized the spillover effect. “The birds were eating the rotten flesh, then came to my boat to rest. I caught many of them but I wasn’t sure if I could eat them they stunk so bad,” Alvarenga said. “I had to wash the meat over and over to get rid of the stink.”
The bonanza of birds from the dead whale launched a new round of bountiful catch. In the late afternoon and evening, birds, including small black terns, landed on the boat to rest then sleep. Alvarenga ambushed them again and again until he had filled his boat to maximum capacity: thirty birds, including boobies and a host of other species he had never seen before. It was a living pantry. The noise, smell and commotion of this thirty-member flock made life aboard the boat as chaotic as life inside a chicken coop, but the chattering flock also added a dose of civility to his lonesome world. Without the need to constantly hunt, Alvarenga spent hours observing the birds. “They were all different sizes—big, small and even a tiny bird the size of my pinky,” he said. “I ate them all.”
Alvarenga talked incessantly to his captive flock. “I would say, ‘Speak to me; I have no one to talk to!’ They would cock their heads and look at me.” Alvarenga asked the birds how they could be such idiots “flying out here in the middle of the ocean when land was over there?” Then he offered advice. “If I were you, I’d be staying onshore.”
Alvarenga also attempted to build a message delivery system using the legs of the birds he considered most likely to fly to land. Without pen or paper he had no way to write a formal message so instead he scratched his name onto the tiny metal bands that he had taken from the turtles as well as three birds that arrived already wearing metal ankle “bands.” He bent the metal rings back onto the birds’ legs and instead of breaking a wing to keep them hostage, implored them to leave, to visit faraway lands and summon forth a rescue. He was never confident that the birds would deliver his cryptic scratching but the sight of a messenger bird flapping into the distance always kindled hope.
Alvarenga next invented games with the animals. He used a dried puffer fish as a soccer ball and tossed it midship, which became “midfield.” Because it was covered in spines the birds could not puncture the balloonlike fish, but due to their hunger they struck it again and again, flipping the “ball” from one end of the “field” to the other. To stir up action Alvarenga tossed chunks of fish and bird entrails across the deck, then watched as the captive birds attacked and chased the puffer fish. He named one bird Cristiano Ronaldo, another Rolando and put Maradona and Messi on the same team. Alvarenga spent entire afternoons as both fan and announcer, immersed in this world of bird football. His favorite matches were Mexico vs. Brazil. In this world, Mexico always won.
When a brown bird the size of a goose but with thick legs arrived it was a rarity to Alvarenga, who was studying birds like an obsessive ornithologist. “He was so beautiful with a black head, that’s why I didn’t eat him. The other birds were ugly, really ugly, but he was unusual, he was one of a kind.” The flock ostracized the newcomer and Alvarenga began to cultivate a relationship with the bird he called “a sea duck.” He lured it closer with food and found it so social that he began to domesticate the wild bird. “If I banged my finger he would come over. I would pretend I was speaking to a person and would talk with him for hours. He was an animal that was alive, like me.”
Alvarenga and his “sea duck” lived inside the icebox together. “He sang all day and I learned to copy his song,” Alvarenga said. “When I fed him, I would sing to him.” He named the bird Francisco, which he shortened to Pancho. Alvarenga let Pancho sleep inside the icebox with him at night. “He didn’t try to escape. Inside the icebox, I fed him small pieces of fish. I gave him water in a turtle shell. I used to ask him when he was going to get married.”
Alvarenga had now drifted five thousand miles—the distance from Rio de Janeiro to Paris—at an average speed of one mile an hour. Had a baby been crawling alongside, Alvarenga would have been left behind. Researchers at the US Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue unit as well as experts at the University of Hawaii have now re-created Alvarenga’s drift using a model of his boat, ocean currents and known wind speed. For the first eight months he likely tracked on a westerly path with the small deviations like the rise and slump of rolling country hills. But in July 2013, his path went haywire. First north, then east, west and south. Like a child drawing a five-pointed star, Alvarenga zigzagged erratically in every direction. He was trapped in a huge circular current known as an “ocean eddy.” Fortunately, the lack of forward movement was accompanied by a bountiful environment rich with sea life and new food possibilities.
One of the maxims of open-ocean commercial fishing is “follow the eddy.” Fishermen don’t guess where fish are, they plot points on the map where fish will soon gather, explains sport fisherman Jody Bright. “If you look at the drift chart, which is almost a current chart, you’ll see there are a lot of eddies and back eddies, and things like that. That’s where the fish will tend to congregate as long as that eddy is spinning. What those eddies do is congregate all sorts of life together as it swirls around. And so everything finds each other. The commercial boys will watch that with their satellites and all their technology and they’ll see the eddies form, and sometimes get there before all the fish. And as the eddy builds and it strengthens, they’re in the right place at the right time. That’s the key to commercial fishing nowadays.”
As Alvarenga swirled aimlessly, adrift at the mercy of surface wind and the ocean currents, he was stalked by his fear of the ocean depths. The deep ocean shrouded and sheltered giant beasts that emerged, especially at night. Sea monsters existed; Alvarenga had heard their roars. The splashing. The grunts and howls. He had tracked the streaks of light, like underwater rockets. “What tends to happen at night is you get phosphorescence in the water. So if there are dolphins or anything around they look like torpedoes,” explains environmentalist Ivan Macfadyen, describing the bioluminescent bacteria that produce a tail of light behind moving objects. Alvarenga delighted in seeing his boat’s wake alit at night, looking as if a path had been drawn through the endless contours of the ocean, and he imagined a route home. But he was terrified by the sounds of these huge unseen animals—whales perhaps—as they rumbled up from the depths. Their invisible splashing felt like an attack launched by forces hiding thousands of feet deep and directly below his boat.
Sixteenth-century explorers populated the open oceans with so many sea monsters and serpents that as early as 1545, Norwegian scientists published a Sea Monster Chart depicting sea serpents and horned fish with an appetite for ships of all sizes. In one illustration, a twelve-foot lobster is seizing a sailor in his left claw as he appears ready to devour the man. Nearby, a green and orange beast like a wild boar with sharp fangs emerges from the depths, plumes of water erupting from twin blowholes like steam from a locomotive, while giant squid, with the face and whiskers of a cat, prowl the surface.
Not all the stories were fables. Leatherback turtles cruising the open Pacific weigh up to two thousand pounds with front flippers eight feet long. A giant squid caught in the Pacific had an eye that measured sixteen inches across. Most of these animals surface at night in a cacophony of grunts, splashes and, according to Alvarenga, piercing shrieks.
Alvarenga’s clothes were now shredded. The sun, salt and wind wore away his shorts. His T-shirt looked like a dirty rag. Only the skull and crossbones sweatshirt—stripped from his mate’s withered corpse—protected Alvarenga against the sun. From the waist down he was naked except for a pair of ratty underwear and yet another random floating sneaker snatched from the sea. Atop his head a burled mane of copper-colored hair rose in coils and was held in place by hairpins made of fish vertebrae. From his face a thick beard exploded outward then tumbled down to mid-chest. Alvarenga’s mouth was shrouded by a convulsion of hair. Burned by the sun, the tip of his nose glowed red. Multiple bites from triggerfish left his fingertips bloodied and small chunks of flesh had been torn from the palm of his hand. His forearms were pockmarked with scabs that bore witness to the risks of hunting wild birds with sharp beaks. Despite the nonstop suffering embedded in his daily routines, survival was no longer a goal but a way of life.
Alvarenga had passed through fear, despair and terror to find peace and the mental space to experience “inner qualities such as humility and empathy” akin to what Jason Lewis felt when he traversed the Pacific Ocean and first suffered then found a deep peace. “Feeling compassion towards all things seems easier out here than it does on land,” Lewis wrote in his journal. “This is a threshold point at which the drowning element is finally suffocated. The sensation of panic is replaced by a warm, cozy feeling like a return to the womb.”
Alvarenga’s reflexes and entire body were now honed for hunting. He could identify a leaping sailfish hundreds of feet across the flat ocean. His sense of taste was hyper-sensitized to the distinct flavors of turtle hearts, triggerfish livers, sea turtle kidneys and shark brains. His fishing techniques were also an efficient and established routine. Every morning he hauled in the ever more tattered line and inspected the bleach bottles that he had converted into fish traps. When he found fresh fish, which happened three or four times a week, Alvarenga delighted in playing chef. He spent hours slicing the meat, drying it in the sun and then storing the sun-baked fillets.
As he prepared meals, Alvarenga chewed the edible organs and lapped up drops of fresh blood. He chopped up the brain, the eyes and the intestines and stored the ceviche in an empty Clorox bottle. Dried bird’s feet were snack food that he kept next to his bed in the icebox. Hunting and gathering for food now consumed roughly five hours a day—a huge improvement over an earlier stage of his journey when an entire day of hunting often yielded nothing. A green trim of mold sprouted under the seats and blossomed. Bird bones littered the deck and feathers were stuck between shards of turtle shells and a pile of bird beaks that Alvarenga used as back scratchers and unsuccessfully as musical instruments as he tried to drum out rhythms on the fiberglass seats.
Thanks to the circular eddy that congregated life, the ecosystem beneath his boat surged. An entire food chain flourished and regenerated beneath the confines of his boat and its accompanying underwater growths. Bobbing atop this vibrant habitat, Alvarenga felt he was king of his own food pyramid, though he was the first to admit it was an empire in which there was little permanence in the roles of hunter and hunted.
Alvarenga tossed feathers into the ocean to measure the current and watched as they hardly budged. Impatient, he began pestering the ocean with questions.
“Are you going to take me to shore or out to sea? I want to know,” he pleaded.
“To the shore. Only a few more days, don’t worry,” he imagined the response.
“How about tomorrow? Send me a signal that you are not lying,” pleaded Alvarenga.
“I am alive,” the ocean replied. “And I don’t lie, I speak the truth.”
“Show me you are not lying,” ordered Alvarenga. “Send a signal so I can trust your words.”
“Very soon there will be a signal, a perfect signal,” replied the ocean. It was a comforting response that allowed the beleaguered fisherman to relax.
The frequent but brief cloudbursts and the two-day storms drenched Alvarenga. He now maintained three separate stocks of water, including approximately sixty half-liter plastic bottles, the gray five-gallon bucket and the half-full fifty-five-gallon barrel. He estimated that he could survive for many weeks without rain.
His icebox shelter was waterproof and undamaged. The edges were cracked but the roof didn’t leak, the walls were solid and when he climbed inside, wind and rain were largely kept out. He considered scratching messages or a count of full moons on the inside of his home but both ideas felt like capitulations etched by a dying mariner. Alvarenga planned on telling his survival story in person.
When the rain stopped or when he passed through the eye of a storm, Alvarenga was able to marvel at the natural wonders of his lonesome world. He imagined the sea was decorated with glittering diamonds and stared in wonder at the stars. He could scan the sky and instantly spot the moving dots, including satellites, airplanes and shooting stars.
With food, water and shelter established, Alvarenga was increasingly adapted to his new world. He no longer felt a desperate desire to escape. He ate more and suffered less. “My mind had adapted. I didn’t feel lost. It all seemed normal. I was not asking, ‘What do I do tomorrow?’ I knew. When I was first lost, every day was a mystery about how to survive. Now I asked God to bring me enough turtles, birds and fish to survive until I hit land or someone found me.”
The maddening spiral drift was now more obvious than ever. Sometimes the sun would rise off his bow, other times directly aligned with the stern. Alvarenga’s fantasies turned to the sky. “I imagined taking the wings off the birds and attaching them so I could fly home. Tie them to my shoulders and fly home.”
Alvarenga had many hours that he considered “free time.” Daily life became not only bearable but oddly enjoyable. Using the central spine from the fin atop a triggerfish as his needle, he began to sew. His black facemask was falling to pieces but individual threads were strong, so he unraveled the strands and used them to repair Córdoba’s tattered skull and crossbones sweatshirt. The hood was in danger of falling off and he needed shade on the back of his neck. Sitting on the fiberglass bench—now cracked, buckling and frayed around the edges—he sewed neat lines of stitching back and forth in a losing battle to preserve the frayed union between sweatshirt and hood. Sewing allowed him to relax so he started designing a pair of sharkskin moccasins. The skin from sharks was rippled with what felt like thousands of invisible barbs. Placing the skin side toward the ground, Alvarenga measured then cut around his foot as he designed shoes. Strapped on like sandals, his rough footwear covered the sole of his foot, left his toes exposed and allowed water to slosh out.
For a pillow and chair he used a round buoy the size of a soccer ball rescued from the gathering force of the giant ocean swirl that tended to drag in trash and flotsam. Made of a hollow metal ball and covered in chipped paint, the buoy was his favorite piece of deck furniture. Propping his head on the buoy and his feet on the bench, Alvarenga rested his aching back, stretched his legs and allowed his mind to be mesmerized by a galaxy of brilliant stars. The moonlight glared off the surface and beneath him he could see the silhouettes of tuna, sharks and turtles, and mysterious shadows that swirled deeper in the black sea.
From his captured birds, Alvarenga removed the most exotic tail feathers then stuck them into his bushy crown of hair. Using the water as a mirror he designed a collection of feather headdresses. When he needed shade on his face, a bowl-shaped turtle shell became his sombrero, providing relief and a dash of style.
In an attempt to rebuild muscle mass, Alvarenga instituted a physical fitness campaign: sit-ups on deck and forced marches back and forth two hundred lengths of the boat—which measured eight paces. But a gym routine was too much for his unsettled mind. Leisure and downtime felt like a reward for becoming an expert hunter and he quickly lost interest in adding gym classes to his daily routine. With a stable, then growing, food supply, Alvarenga’s weight loss stabilized; his core health improved. A thin layer of body fat rebuilt upon his gangly frame. The religious fasts that he had held with Córdoba were a bygone ritual. Alvarenga greedily feasted. “I ate up to eight little birds a day. Twice I got very sick as I ate too much. I gorged myself and had to go on a diet. I was just eating too much so I started to schedule my meals. Instead of eating all day, I would have three meals a day—breakfast, lunch and dinner. At the proper hours.”
Although Alvarenga was unaware, he carried the optimum body type and precise age for an extreme survival situation. He was exceptionally strong but not too tall or muscled to require massive caloric intake, and at thirty-four years old near the perfect vortex of maximum strength and maximum experience.
In a trick to maintain mental health, Alvarenga traveled deep into fantasyland. He cleaved his identity into two personas who might have been dubbed “Alvarenga the Victim” and “Alvarenga the Storyteller,” and while his body habituated the former, his mind migrated to the latter.
He spent entire evenings chatting with the ocean. He pleaded with the sea—which he always addressed as feminine—“to just dump me off” and cheerfully berated his hostess. “When, oh when, are you going to get me out of here?” Alvarenga laced his soliloquy with irony: “I must be a bother, toss me ashore. . . . I am so heavy, you don’t deserve this. . . . You have been carrying me for oh-so-long, you must be bored. . . . Don’t carry me any longer, I am not even paying you.”
“Humor is a signature characteristic of survival. And in a survival situation, it is the first thing that goes and the last thing that comes back,” says Dr. John Leach, the survival physiologist. “We’ve got an expression: we talk about somebody having a ‘sense-of-humor failure.’ So if you’ve got a survivor that shows a proper sense of humor, then that person has adapted.”
Suffering from an acute case of physical isolation and emotional deprivation, Alvarenga sought shelter by living inside his own custom-designed virtual reality. He had an abundance of free time and a deficit of the most basic pleasures. “I didn’t see a living plant or tree,” said Alvarenga. “I didn’t talk to another human being.” He invented tales of beautiful women and honed his abilities to dream while awake. His stories became shields.
Psychologists describe this technique as a combination of self-hypnosis and self-delusion. For Alvarenga it was a method to graft pleasures onto a world overflowing with horrors. Steve Callahan describes his mental state during his ten weeks lost in a life raft in the Atlantic Ocean as one of permanent instability. “Your ups are the greatest highs you will ever have. You make some little repair to something that was a real challenge and you think you’re the king of the world,” he says, describing his emotions during his seventy-six days adrift. “And then you suffer some teeny, teeny little setback, and you’re just crushed.”
Alvarenga imagined an alternative reality so believable that he could later say with total honesty that alone at sea he tasted the greatest meals of his life and experienced the most delicious sex. “In my mind,” he said, “I brewed fresh coffee every morning.”
In the US Navy SEALs, “self-talk is using positive affirmations, positive terms to yourself,” said one trainer. “We’re talking to ourselves all the time. Sometimes we’re critiquing ourselves, sometimes we’re subvocalizing what the bad things are around us. . . . There’s a lot of goodness that comes from that. It also helps you resist those temptations to resort to a state of fear or panic.”
Alvarenga was mastering the art of turning his solitude into a Fantasia-like world. He started his mornings with a long walk. “I would stroll back and forth on the boat and imagine that I was wandering the world. In my mind it was a highway, so I would climb inside my car and go for a drive. Other times I would take out my bicycle and go for a bike ride. By doing this I could induce my mind into the belief that I was actually doing something. Not just sitting there, thinking about dying.”
But just as a bountiful autumn leads to a stingy winter, in the open Pacific feast and famine followed sequentially. As the new moon rose, Alvarenga was suddenly tossed out of the eddy and sent again on a westerly course. It had taken him an eternity to escape the swirl. His forward motion during this eternity that was five full cycles of the moon was minimal. During the course of two full lunar cycles he actually drifted east—back toward Mexico. But now he was churning west at a brisk two miles an hour. Alvarenga admired his wake but quickly made an awful discovery—leaving the eddy meant leaving the bounty. Food began to disappear. He was back in the desert.