What Alvarenga brought to this work was the accumulated competence of years in and around the Pacific. He understood ocean conditions. He could read weather. He knew the geography of the fishing grounds and the behavior of the species he was targeting. He knew how to maintain gear at sea and how to manage a boat in difficult conditions. These were not skills you picked up quickly; they were the product of sustained practice and the kind of repetitive experience that eventually becomes intuitive.
He was also carrying the specific knowledge of survival that experienced fishermen accumulate incidentally — not as a formal training program, but as the practical understanding of what the ocean contains and how to extract it. You learn which parts of a fish are edible and which are not. You learn how turtles behave when they surface. You learn what time of day birds can be approached and how close you can get before they take flight. You learn these things because they are part of the professional context you live in, not because you are preparing for an emergency. When the emergency came, the knowledge was there.
Ezequiel Córdoba, by contrast, was new to this particular work and new to working with Alvarenga. He had some experience with boats and fishing — the accounts from his family suggest he was not a complete novice — but he was twenty-two years old and signing on for his first trip with a captain he had never worked with before, for fifty dollars, heading into deep Pacific water for an overnight expedition. The economic calculus of that decision would have made sense to any young man in a Chiapas fishing community. The trip was routine, in the sense that trips like it were made routinely. The difference between a routine trip and a catastrophic one was, as it turned out, entirely a matter of what the weather decided to do.