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not good.
    The pump is what gets the water out of the boat. You do not stay afloat for long if your pump is not functioning.
    We’re carrying about a hundred tons of sardines and we’re sitting low and taking on water. Without the pump, we immediately begin taking on a lot more water. We are about two thousand feet off an island called Pacheca, which is next to Contadora. We are starting to sink.
    There is no time to deliberate. My father has an immediate decision to make—a decision no captain ever wants to make.
    We’re going to bring the boat into Pacheca, right onto the sand, my father says. There isn’t time to get to Contadora.
    He heads directly for the island and we are about halfway there, maybe a thousand feet away, when the belt mysteriously starts working again. Nobody knows why, and nobody is launching aninvestigation. Water begins to get pumped out and the boat rises in the water. My father is relieved, and you can see it on his face; he knows all about the risks involved with trying to pilot such a big boat onto shore. We could hit a rock or a coral reef, and the hull would get shredded like cheese in a grater. We’d take on too much sandy water, and the engine would be gummed up for the rest of time.
    We are two hours from our base, and with the pump back in commission, my father says we’re going back to Contadora. The wind is picking up and the swells in the ocean are getting bigger, but he is confident it will be no problem.
    We need to get back and unload the fish, he says. As long as the belt is good and the pump is good, it will be fine.
    My father has been fishing these waters for years, and has keen instincts about what’s safe and what isn’t. Those instincts have served him well, but that doesn’t mean they are always right. He reverses field and pulls away from Pacheca. We don’t get more than fifteen hundred feet before the pump stops again.
    It is almost 9:00 p.m. now. The water in the boat starts rising, of course. The wind keeps getting stronger, and soon the swells are eight or ten feet, crashing over the sides of the boat. The conditions are worsening by the second. The boat is taking on water at a terrifying rate.
    Now there is no decision to make, because there is only one alternative.
    We’re heading back to Pacheca, my father shouts. He turns the boat around. The shoreline has literally become our only port in the storm.
    It is not going to be an easy or fast trip, not with the water on board and the seas so heavy.
    Let’s just get to safety, get to shore, no matter how slow going it is.
I know this is what my father must be thinking.
    And then the engine knocks off.
    It doesn’t sputter or wheeze. It just dies. The engine is in the front of the boat and probably just got drowned by all the water.
    Now what do we do? I ask my father.
    We get down there and try to crank-start it, he says. He seems remarkably poised, given the circumstances.
    We clamber down the metal steps into the hull, through the wet and darkness, and I grip a thick metal handle and start cranking and cranking on a device that pumps air to generate power to jump-start the engine.
    Nothing.
    I crank some more. The engine is still not responding.
    Our ninety-foot boat is bobbing in the water like a cork now. It is sinking fast. There is no more time for cranking. We scramble up and out to the main deck, almost waist-high in water.
    Everybody onto the lifeboat, my father hollers.
    The lifeboat is made of iron, deep-hulled and fifteen feet long. We fight the wind and walls of water and finally wrestle the lifeboat into the sea, and all nine of us get in. It is supposed to be equipped with life jackets, but it isn’t. My father starts the engine and steers us slowly away from
Lisa,
waves crashing and cresting, tossing the lifeboat as if it were a bathtub toy.
    Behind us, I see my father’s boat—and our family’s livelihood—keel over on its side and then turn upside down. In minutes it disappears