The decision to dump the fish — the 500 kilograms of catch they had accumulated — was a practical calculation made under pressure. A heavy load in the bottom of an open boat in rough seas makes the boat less responsive and more vulnerable to swamping. Getting rid of the catch was the right decision in the moment, even though it eliminated any commercial return from the trip and left behind the concrete product of the work they had come out to do. In the arithmetic of immediate survival, a slightly more maneuverable boat was worth more than 500 kilograms of fish.
The radio situation was similarly constrained. Alvarenga had managed to make contact with Willy before the radio’s backup battery died — Willy knew the boat was in trouble — but the position at the time of contact was not established, or not established precisely enough to be actionable. A search was launched on the basis of what was known: the departure point, the general direction, the approximate time of the last contact. It was not enough. The combination of bad weather and the failure to establish a precise position meant that the search area was too large and the conditions too poor for a two-day effort to find a small boat in a storm-disrupted expanse of Pacific water.
The search was ended. In practical terms, this meant that no one was looking for Alvarenga and Córdoba anymore. Any rescue from that point forward would have to come from chance — a passing vessel, a drift to inhabited land — rather than from directed effort.