His employer was a man he called Willy, the operator of what some accounts described as a Blue Coast fishing operation based in Costa Azul. Willy provided the boats, the fuel, the bait, and the ice. Alvarenga provided the seamanship. By 2012, he was known as a capable and experienced shark fisherman, the kind of man who knew the weather patterns off this stretch of coast and understood the risks of going far offshore in a small open boat.
He was also, in the terms that describe people who live their lives close to physical risk, someone who had developed a practical relationship with danger. He knew what the Pacific looked like in bad weather. He knew how quickly conditions could change off the Mexican coast in November. And on November 17, 2012, he departed for what he expected to be a routine overnight trip — thirty hours out and back, the kind of work he had done many times before.
The man who went with him on that trip was someone he had barely spoken to.
## Ezequiel Córdoba: The Young Man on His First Trip
Ezequiel Córdoba’s age has been reported differently across early accounts — CBS News citing Mexican records listed him at 38, while Alvarenga’s account and his mother Roselia Díaz Cueto both placed him at 22. His mother’s account of her son, and the account given by other family members, consistently described a young man in his early twenties, and the 22-year-old figure is the one that subsequent reporting settled on.