Five Against the Sea

It was January 19, 1988. The waters were calm and the skies cloudless as five fishermen set off on a week-long trip off the Costa Rican coast. Five days later, their twenty-nine-foot wooden craft was foundering against thirty-foot waves as a dreaded north wind -- El Norte -- struck with full force. Set adrift in a badly leaking vessel, they faced the perils of more storms, shark attacks, near-madness, a mutiny, and bouts of starvation and thirst. Continuously bailing, the five men endured a record 142 days lost at sea -- until they were rescued 4,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean. ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ron Arias has also written a novel, The Road to Tamazunchale, which was nominated for a National Book Award; Healing from the Heart, with Dr. Mehmet Oz, and the forthcoming Moving Target: A Memoir of Pursuit. An avid sea kayaker, he is married and living in Hermosa Beach, Calif. AUTHOR COMMENTS: My deep appreciation goes to the five fishermen and their families for enduring my endless, pestering questions about their lives before and during the nearly five months of the Cairo III's unintended, fateful voyage. The warm hospitality of the Costa Rican people also made my research stay a pleasant one. The many hours I spent individually recording the fresh memories of the five crewmen and others especially helped me in the recreation of their thoughts, conversation and actions during pivotal moments and interludes throughout their saga on land and at sea. I must also applaud the meticulous efforts of my friend Akihide Teraoka of Fujieda City, Japan, for interviewing a number of Japanese men who were key characters in the story of the five Costa Ricans. Additionally, I am pleased that John P. Kaufman, a publisher of nautical books, and his chief reader believed in the enduring, universal quality of this story, which first appeared in 1989 in book form with another publisher. For the present edition, I have made slight revisions throughout, mostly re-wordings and additions for more clarity and dramatic effect. Most of all, I want to thank my wife, Joan, who steered me right in shaping the early chapters, and my son, Michael, who proofread the manuscript and caught some choice goofs. To all concerned in this project, I can only hope the story as told in the following pages reflects an accurate and faithful account of the crew's relentless struggle to survive. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Chapter 1 Departures Chapter 2 A Great Catch Chapter 3 El Norte Chapter 4 The Big Hole Chapter 5 Missing Chapter 6 Last Chance Chapter 7 Separate Quarters Chapter 8 Pandora Chapter 9 The Island Chapter 10 Sharks Chapter 11 The Whale Chapter 12 The Net Chapter 13 May 10 Chapter 14 Last Entry Chapter 15 Thirst Chapter 16 Dreams Chapter 17 Rain Chapter 18 Rescue Chapter 19 Home Afterword FIRST CHAPTER EXCERPT: DEPARTURES Puntarenas, Costa Rica January 19, 1988 Just before dawn Edith Gonzalez awoke to a rooster's crowing. It was a reassuring sound, she thought, an announcement that the world was still here and the day could now begin. She listened for other signs -- barking dogs, birds, a distant cough, muffled voices. A faint light shone around the edges of the window curtains, and she pictured the sky's creamy reddish glow over the mountains to the east. Soon the fishing barrio called Veinte de Noviembre would be filled with the sounds of wide-awake life: babies crying, vendors shouting, boat engines sputtering. But for now, for these few moments by the side of her husband, the time was quiet, peaceful. Joel Gonzalez moved restlessly under the sheets. "What time is it?" he whispered. "Sleep," Edith said. "You don't have to get up yet." For days they had been anxious about the fishing trip planned for today. The last two eight-day trips out into the Gulf of Nicoya and beyond into the Pacific Ocean had been failures, with such small catches that the Cairo III's captain and his four crewmen hardly had any earnings to divide up. Now Joel, one of the crew, was about to leave for another eight days, giving Edith the last of their savings -- about fifteen dollars -- to buy food for her and their four girls. If the trip went well, he had told her, maybe it would be one of his last. After all, he only worked at fishing out of need; what he really would like to do while he was still young -- not even thirty yet -- is run a business of his own or work in an office, at least something where he could use his high school education. Edith looked at the quiet figure beside her and silently prayed that their luck would change. Joel, she was convinced, was meant for cleaner, less risky work, something with a future. If only he could earn enough to quit fishing, if only the little bakery they had started behind the house with hired help could prosper, if only they could move to higher ground where there were fewer mosquitoes. . . . Suddenly Elke stirred in her crib, and Edith, her twenty-five-year-old body still slender and shapely after four births, slipped out of bed to nurse the baby. A neighbor: I don't know what his friends call him, but we called him the Salvadoran. I think he left El Salvador when he was little, but once he had moved in here, if you asked for Joel Omar Gonzalez, people would say, "Oh, the Salvadoran." You see, we're all known as something around here. We're getting a lot of Nicaraguans lately, so they're known as Nicas. And of course we Costa Ricans are the Ticos. Then you get all kinds of nicknames, like Toad or Big Ears. But really, it doesn't matter where you come from or what you look like. What matters is who you are. Names are something extra. With Joel, we just thought he was a serious young man who had gone to school. He wasn't rich but it looked like he had plans and they didn't include fishing all his life. * * * 6:30 A. M.: Pastor Lopez, another of the four crewmen, hurriedly drank the last of the coffee his wife, Rita, had prepared, then he lit a cigarette. After drawing deeply on the filterless tip, he fixed a blank, frowning stare on his sleepy-eyed, four-year-old son, Alvaro; the boy had just entered the tiny kitchen, having left his asthmatic baby brother asleep behind the partition where the family slept. "The boat's leaking," Pastor said flatly. Rita, who was mixing some cooked rice and black beans together in a saucepan, stabbed the fork into the mound of speckled mush and eyed her husband intently. Pastor then continued in a monotone, "Too much water, too much water, all night too much water." "It can't be all that bad," Rita said innocently. "Oh, yes it can," Pastor said, now frowning. "All night the water came in. I could hear it trickling and trickling." A small young man with light-brown hair, Pastor was a clam-digger, and it was only in the last month that he had started fishing regularly for a living. But fishing was only a temporary job he took during the Christmas holidays when a few of the boat's regular crew were missing and the owner needed a fifth hand to complete the usual complement of five on board. Today's departure would be Pastor's third time out on the Cairo III and the start of his last trip -- definitely his last, he had decided. Even though he liked the others on the boat well enough to continue with them, he was eager to return to digging in the soft mud around the mangrove trees. Clamming didn't earn him much, but at least he was his own master. For a restless, feisty man with a quick temper, a life without many rules suited him fine. "I'm me and I do what I want," he would say with a laugh. "Nobody bosses me, nobody crosses me." As his son approached for a good-bye hug, Pastor went on about the boat, as if in a trance, saying the leaks in the hull needed patching. Shipworms had eaten finger-size holes in the wood along the sides and near the bow, but worse were the cracks in the higher, sun-exposed planks near the stern. Yesterday they had loaded the water, food, fuel, bait, and ice to store the fish. Now the boat sat lower in the water, which had begun to seep and spurt through parts of the dry, split seams. As the crew's newest member, Pastor was asked to spend the night on board guarding the boat's cargo of necessities, and it was then that he had noticed the water collecting beneath the engine compartment. "Daddy," his son Alvaro blurted, interrupting his father's anxious thoughts. "Don't go!" Pastor reached out to hold his son by the shoulders. Then he knelt on one knee. "Listen, little man," he said. "I want you to do something for me." "Don't go," the boy said, shaking his head. "I have to," Pastor said. "Just one more time, then it's back to the clams. I promise." "And some money," Rita added. "The baby's sick, and if I need more money for medicine, what then?" "Look, little Alvaro," Pastor continued, ignoring the question, "just do one thing for me. Pray to God that this trip goes well. Pray with all your heart. Can you do that for me?" The boy nodded, and Pastor -- dressed in short pants and a t-shirt -- kissed his wife and son, retrieved a handbag with a few changes of clothes, and left with a smile and a wave. Hilda Rojas, Pastor's mother: What got him into prison was a fight in a bar. With a policeman, of all people. Well, what happened in the end, so not to go into details he knows better than I do -- what happened was that he was sent to a year and a half on San Lucas Island. That's where he grew up, he said. He learned a lot. That was his classroom, the place where he learned to survive. * * * Late morning: Gerardo Obregon, the dark, stocky captain of the Cairo III, startled his wife Lidia when he appeared in the doorway of their small, rented house, a cigarette in one hand. "What happened?" she said. "I thought you'd be out to sea by now." "We're fixing some leaks," Gerardo answered, entering and sitting down at the table with a sigh. "Can you make me some lunch?" Lidia wiped her hands on her apron, then she snapped her fingers. "Lunch. Just like that, huh? Why didn't you let me know you were coming back? I could have bought something. This is lunch for the kids." "Never mind. I'll have coffee." "Oh, no, you'll eat. I'll fry you an egg with a little rice." Gerardo, squinting through his cigarette smoke, made a face as if he were gagging. "Ah, the delicate one," Lidia said. "The lion doesn't like egg, doesn't eat bread. He only eats steak." It was true. For most of his thirty-three years Gerardo had been a picky eater and lover of beef. Although he fished for a living, he never liked to eat fish, preferring barnyard meats like pork, chicken, goat, lamb, and his breakfast favorite, beef sirloin, medium rare. The barrel-chested captain had even taken to calling himself a "carnivore," as if he had finally discovered a word whose sound and meaning fit him perfectly. On a wall next to the kitchen table hung a cloth print of a lion, Gerardo's birth sign and spiritual mascot. Lidia slid a scrambled egg from the skillet onto a plate. Not only did he sometimes blame her for his drinking, she felt like saying, but he would also probably blame her for starving him. "Here," she said, plunking the egg and a big scoop of mushy rice in front of him, "you're worse than the kids." Reluctantly, Gerardo lifted a fork and dug in.