Otis tore down the walls of large buildings. He made the houses shake. He felled parotas and ceibas. And that was on land, where people who took refuge in closets can’t forget the sound of it. Marlon Valdez is 24 years old, he is a sailor and he was on a boat in Acapulco Bay when the category five hurricane arrived, the maximum on the Saffir-Simpson scale. He was taking care of his boss’s yacht. There were hundreds like his in the main port of Guerrero. Of everything that was there, nothing remains. He does not know the exact number, perhaps there were 200 or more, 400. Only in his area, in what is called Aguada, there were about 40 boats. Inside each of them there were at least two people. After the hurricane, there are many who have not been heard from again.
Marlon’s story is the story of a city that left everything to turn to tourism. Valdez studied Marketing at the university, but he couldn’t find a job that would allow him to live off his studies, so thanks to a friend he entered the port. There he worked four months for free to learn. When he got his sea book, the passport that allows sailors to find work in any port in the world, he was 22 years old.
The yacht he worked on was rented for three to five hours for a party, event or outing. It circled the bay and anchored for tourists to swim. Marlon is in charge of keeping everything safe, but also preparing the drinks and meals, because tips are a key part of his salary. Finding a turtle or a dolphin became a key part of his life.
Since he started as a sailor, Marlon had had to sail boats many times. He says that it is a common practice in the sector: “It is a task that is drawerIn other words, it’s not about whether you want it or not. “You as a sailor have the obligation and responsibility to take care of your boat and to go down with it.” She only watches when there is a storm. So the owners instruct their crew to stay on the boats to take care of them, prevent them from breaking down, from colliding with others. There is usually no extra payment for that sleepless night protecting valuable property of others.
In the early morning of October 24, Marlon and his partner received a dinner for taking care of a 42-foot yacht: a kilo of shepherd’s meat was payment for surviving. Otis.
During the interview, he makes parentheses to explain the technical terms, recognizes that for the shock has some flashbacks and that there are still fragments of that morning missing. They come back to him in nightmares at night. He is calm and says that at least he no longer cries when he tells it. This is the incredible story of the sailor who managed to survive and save his companion during the hurricane that devastated one of the main cities in Mexico.
The calls
It rained all day Tuesday, so the yacht had no tourists that afternoon. The owner commissioned Marlon, who is normally a sailor, to become a captain to take care of one of his boats. He was accompanied by a 19-year-old boy to help him. They arrived at the yacht accompanied by some bags of potatoes, food and water to last the night. Everyone in the port knew about the alerts. “We knew it was coming pretty hard, but we were supposedly ‘prepared’ for that kind of thing,” says the sailor ironically.
At 11:30 at night the wind began to pick up. He did everything that was scheduled: he placed fenders—the balloons that absorb the blows of other ships—around the yacht, he turned on the engines, began to give ahead —accelerations— so that the ropes that together with the anchor held the yacht firm would not burst, they put on their vests. “At 12 I saw that everything is now out of our hands,” he says, resigned. The ends began to come loose one by one. “With that ship in ahead I arrived at the other end of the bay in 15 minutes and with the hurricane it didn’t even move.” The wind began to carry other boats, one of them collided with his. They broke the hull and the fracture in the starboard side caused water to enter.
He first asked for help: “There was no one to help you on the radio, I radioed the navy, I radioed the port captain, they were also the same. They had dead people too. The fact that the sea does not forgive anyone, not even boats as big as the ones they have. So I guess they are also safeguarding themselves from all the relaxation that the hurricane was causing.”
The yacht sank with Marlon and his sailor on board. He made two calls, the first was to the owner of the boat: “I warned him that he couldn’t save his boat. He told me to hold on, to cut the ropes of the ships that were hitting us. He told me ‘if you see that you can’t do it anymore, jump, but hold on, please.’ That was it and I said ‘ok, done’. He did what the boss asked, it didn’t help. Then, he called his mother: “I told her ‘don’t worry, I’ll be fine, she called you after a while’ and that’s it. She was already bringing me down.”
At this moment, Marlon’s partner began to cry. “I had to reassure him, because if not, he was of no use to me, he was in my way. First it was calming him down, then I thought that you had to wait until a certain point to be able to jump. Because when the ship sinks it pulls you, it sucks you, so we jumped when there was already a little bit of nothing left.” They jumped and the hurricane continued. “It was still 12:30, I went under very early.”
The 10 meters
“Everything looked white, there was no way to see where I was going. You could see debris, you could see diesel, the diesel shines colorfully in the water. So we were swimming in diesel debris, well, floating, because we couldn’t even swim. “You don’t have the body to go against the current.” The goal was to hold on. During the 40 minutes they were at the mercy of the hurricane, they even saw part of a pier pass by. A piece of wood pierced his partner’s arm. “The only thing I told him was to cover the back of your neck and breathe as much air as you can, because the waves were sinking us, they were rolling us over. “I told him, hold on to something that floats.”
Then, Marlon heard the engines of a boat turning on. Under water you can hear the sound better, he explains. It was about 10 meters away, they had to swim. How do you swim 10 meters during a hurricane? Marlon arrived carrying his partner, who was bleeding to death and could no longer swim. “So my goal was to get there with him, it was always to get there with him, because when we got involved I told him ‘if you want to die, I don’t, take care of me because I’m going to take care of you.'” He arrived and grabbed a broken rope from the boat. He started screaming.
“At that moment what I thought was that they weren’t going to clutch — to clutch is to move the machines because if they engage the propeller, which is like the fan type, it can grab you — so I wouldn’t let go of him, but I wouldn’t let go of the rope either and I tried to climb up. and I saw that there was someone and the only thing I shouted was: “Don’t clutch and help!”, until the man came out and helped me get my sailor on.”
The man was not a crew member of that boat, but he was able to jump onto it when his sailboat began to sink. The three remained sheltered there for the next few hours, they were now closer to the club, and other boats were stopping the wind. When it was all over he looked for a first aid kit to help his companion, water and food. He also with a flashlight saw everything that had moved. Nobody understood how they got there.
First thing in the morning, he went out to the yacht club and saw how everything was destroyed. He had to look for his best friend, who was also guarding another boat. They sent him to identify the first seven bodies they had recovered. “They were people I knew that I had said hello to hours before, but they weren’t my friend, so I tried to continue.”
The return
Marlon walked the first part of the way home barefoot. Acapulco after Otis only had razed buildings, trees, poles and signs knocked down. An apocalyptic panorama, which was complemented by looting. “I grabbed some flip flops, I couldn’t afford to loot a place after almost dying.” And he continued.
During that time, his mother, Ivonne Villagómez, had taken the same path but in reverse, to go look for him. “I just wanted him to come by so I could go look for him. I spent the whole night clinging to the window, asking God not to save me, but to save him,” says the excited woman. “When he called me, I noticed in his voice that he was scared, he didn’t tell me, but he is my son and I know him. We are like muégano, we are both alone, I am divorced,” she points out. “He told me later that telling me that he was going to be fine helped him continue.”
In the morning, while Marlon was walking through the rubble of a destroyed city, his friend arrived at his mother’s house. “He came on a motorcycle and told me that Marlon was fine, that he had survived, I told him ‘son, don’t lie to me.'” While taking him to his mother’s house, Marlon arrived at this building in the neighborhood in the center of Acapulco. “Everyone was waiting for me,” says the excited boy.
The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has recognized 43 deaths and 36 missing after the hurricane. Everything on the coast of Acapulco was destroyed. “At this point, there is nothing. The entire Yacht Club, the entire Marina, the Santa Lucía Marina, the Puerto Marqués Marina, the Performance, which is where the boats can arrive, the Aguada, which is where they anchor… There is nothing,” says Marlon Valdez. The party ships disappeared, the Acarey sank and the Bonanza ran ashore crushing all the other ships.
“To a certain extent I feel helpless for not being able to help others, because that was my job, being a sailor is saving lives, it is helping people at sea,” says the young man and remembers: “The fact that next to For example, there was a sailboat near me and the kids who were taking care of it were 17 or 18 years old and they yelled at me to help them. I feel helpless, for telling them that no, that I couldn’t help them, because it was them or me. There are many people who I don’t know if they are alive or not.”
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