Alvarenga would eventually travel to Mexico to meet with Córdoba’s family — honoring, his lawyer said, a pact the two men had made: that whoever reached land would go to the other’s family and tell them what had happened. Whatever passed in that meeting was private, and it remains so.
## The Departure: November 17, 2012
The boat Alvarenga and Córdoba departed in was a seven-meter (approximately 23- to 25-foot) fiberglass skiff — open-topped, with a single outboard motor, a refrigerator-sized icebox for storing the catch, and the basic equipment of a deep-water fishing operation: hooks, lines, bait, fuel tanks, water, and a radio.
The boat had no sails, no oars, no anchor, and no running lights. It was not designed for extended offshore voyaging; it was designed for day fishing and overnight trips within a reasonable distance of the coast, where a motor failure or a bad storm could be addressed by rescue services. It was the standard vessel for the shark-hunting operation Alvarenga worked for, and it was sufficient for the kind of work he had done dozens of times before.
They departed on November 17, 2012, heading roughly southwest into the Pacific to reach the deep water where the large pelagic fish they were targeting lived. The plan, as Alvarenga described it, was a thirty-hour trip — out overnight, fish during the day, return. His employer Willy expected them back within that window. The fishing grounds they were heading for were approximately 80 to 85 miles offshore, according to Jaime Marroquin, the Chiapas State Civil Protection official who later corroborated the basic facts of the departure.