We had to drink our own urine after the storm. “We didn’t think about hunger at first,” Alvarenga said. But with no mast and no flares, the tiny boat was invisible in the vast ocean. The men also had a bucket, which they used to bail water out of the boat.īy the time the storm lifted, Alvarenga knew they had drifted far from Mexico. The boat had no cover – just an icebox, a large trunk used by the fishermen to store their catch until they got to shore. In addition to the engine, Alvarenga lost his radio and fishing gear. The seas were so rough, Córdoba was tossed into the water once and was saved only because Alvarenga pulled him back in by the hair. “My engine gave out.”įor seven days, the storm thrashed their boat.

“It wasn’t the storm that was the problem,” remembered Alvarenga. Alvarenga knew a storm was coming, but he’d weathered many before. But he also found a way of life: play hard, work hard, fish deep.Īlvarenga, then 35, planned a two-day fishing trip with Córdoba, an inexperienced 22-year-old. An El Salvador native with little formal education, Alvarenga found a way to make money in the Mexican coastal village. The renegade fishermen, operating out of small, nimble fiberglass fishing boats, called themselves Los Tiburoneros, or “Shark Hunters.” They fished in the risky deep-sea waters 50 to 100 miles offshore. Novembegan like any other day for the intrepid shark fishermen of Costa Azul, Mexico, Alvarenga remembers. “Who am I going to talk to? Why is he dead and not me?” Alvarenga was now suffering an unimaginable, hellish journey on the ocean, alone.Įven now when Alvarenga speaks aloud the number of days he spent on the Pacific Ocean floating in a 25-foot fishing boat without a sail or motor, the number seems too large to comprehend. Alvarenga easily picked up his friend’s corpse, the thin frame now blackened under the hot sun, and slipped him into the water. He decided he needed to drop Córdoba’s body into the ocean to save his own sanity. Alvarenga snapped out of a haze, knowing he was slowly going crazy. Alvarenga craved the peace Córdoba had unfairly found by dying.Īlvarenga continued his one-sided conversation with Córdoba’s body for six days before he realized he was conversing seamlessly with a dead man. But in his final hours, the suffering lifted.

He remembered Córdoba, hysterical in the early days, crying about his mother and starving for tortillas. “Why wasn’t it both of us? Why am I the one who continues to suffer?” Alvarenga asked the corpse. It is peaceful.” Alvarenga looked out to the horizon, the ocean as endless as it had been for the last two months that they’d been lost at sea. So Alvarenga answered for his dead sea mate. “What is death like?”Įzequiel Córdoba, his body hardening and turning purple, did not reply. “Buenos dias,” Salvador Alvarenga said to his friend, who was propped up in the bow of their fishing boat.

438 days story