Stranded at sea, no signal

The boat engine sputtered twice, then went silent.

We were somewhere in the Sea of Cortez, off the coast of the Sonoran desert, returning from a Bufo ceremony with the Comcaac tribe. Sunset was approaching. Eight people on an open-air boat. And we’d just run out of gas.

For a moment, nobody said anything. The kind of silence where you can feel everyone doing the same math in their head.

No cell service. Miles from shore. Almost no food. Very little water. Some of us in t-shirts and shorts. And the cold was coming.

Stranded with the Comcaac

The Comcaac are the indigenous people who first discovered the Bufo toad, whose glands secrete 5-MeO-DMT. They’ve used it in ceremony for generations. The closest village to us was theirs: a few hundred homes, no cell towers, and most residents only reachable through Starlink internet and WhatsApp.

We tried everything at first. An LED light from my bag, waved in the air. Phone torches synchronized as a distress signal. Someone found a conch shell from the ceremony and started blowing it like an air horn across the water.

At one point, we spotted another boat in the distance. We waved, yelled, flashed everything we had.

They didn’t see us. And then they were gone.

Our guide, Hector, the shaman who’d led the ceremony, started showing signs of hypothermia and severe seasickness. He had to lie down under whatever blankets we could find.

Which meant our guide couldn’t guide.

That’s when Tristan remembered something: iPhones can connect to satellites in emergencies.

We started waving phones at the sky, trying to lock onto a signal. When it connected, we got a text window, 500 characters max.

Here’s where it got interesting.

Our first instinct was to text someone in the village. But they only use WhatsApp, which satellite SMS can’t reach. We tried finding someone who might have regular texting. No luck. We started spiraling through contacts, looking for anyone local who might pick up.

And then it clicked.

We didn’t need to reach someone in the village. We had satellite. We could reach anyone on the planet.

So I texted Sarah.

I explained the situation in 500 characters: stranded, eight people, open boat, emergency satellite only. I told her I’d send phone numbers. That they only spoke Spanish. That she’d need to call someone who could translate, or use Google Translate on the fly. And if she couldn’t reach the locals, try the Coast Guard.

I ended the message with: “Not joking.”

Within minutes, Sarah was on it. She called a friend who could translate. That friend called a contact in the village. That contact found Gabriel’s wife, who had a boat.

Three and a half hours later, pitch black, freezing, we heard a faint engine sound in the distance. We turned on every phone we had and waved them toward the noise.

The rescue boat was only a couple hundred feet away before we could see it. They passed over a jug of gas, and we followed them in. The tide had gone out so far we had to walk the last half mile through ankle-deep water to reach shore.

But here’s what I keep thinking about.

When the engine died, nobody came to save us. There was no obvious solution. The problem was clear, cold, stranded, limited resources, but nobody knew what to do next.

And I realized: that’s most of life.

We walk around in situations that are just as stuck. Just as uncertain. But because it’s not a boat in the middle of the ocean, we don’t feel the urgency. We wait. We hope someone else will figure it out. We stay stranded without even realizing it.

First Principles Thinking

The breakthrough that night wasn’t courage or creativity. It was demolishing a bad assumption.

For the first 60 minutes, we operated under one belief: we have to reach someone in the village. That belief seemed obvious. They were close. They knew the area. They could send help.

But it was an expensive assumption. Because village contacts only used WhatsApp. And we only had satellite SMS. We were trying to force a solution through a channel that couldn’t work.

The moment we asked “Wait, who CAN we actually reach?”, everything changed.

First principles thinking isn’t complicated. It’s just asking: What’s actually true here? And what am I assuming?

Here’s how to apply it:

• Name the constraint you’re working around. (For us: “We need to contact someone in the village.”)

• Ask: Is this actually a fact, or an assumption? (It was an assumption.)

• Identify what IS actually true. (We had satellite. We could reach anyone with a phone.)

• Rebuild from there. (Best person to help = someone who speaks English, solves problems fast, and can relay information.)

The lesson: When you’re stuck, you’re usually not missing information. You’re trapped by an assumption you haven’t questioned.

You know what stays with me from that night?

The silence after the engine died.

Nobody panicked. But nobody moved either. For a long moment, we just sat there, eight people on a boat in the dark, waiting for someone to do something.

And then, slowly, people started trying things. Bad ideas. Good ideas. Ideas that didn’t work but led to ones that did.

That’s the thing about being stuck. The way out almost never appears fully formed. It emerges from motion. From refusing to wait for rescue.

I think about how often we’re stranded in our own lives, stuck in careers, relationships, creative blocks, business problems, and we just… wait. We wait for clarity. For permission. For someone to show up with a jug of gas.

But nobody’s coming. Not because people don’t care. Because they don’t know you’re stranded.

You have to signal. You have to move. You have to question the assumptions that feel so obvious you’ve stopped seeing them.

Until next week, keep questioning, keep signaling, keep moving.

• Patrick