“I want everyone to know that God is great. God is beautiful. God wants us to all pray, that we have love in our heart, that we help each other,” is the desire for maximum Napa Castro – known as “kitten” -, a Peruvian fisherman who never lost faith and that he was stranded on the dummy for 95 days, until he was finally rescued in the Sea of Ecuador.
Máximo shares with Ewtn News his intense story, which monopolized headlines worldwide, but now in a more intimate way, starting to admit that he has never read the Bible, something he now wants to do as soon as he has some money since he lost his boat, with which he obtained his daily livelihood.
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A little history
“Gatón” – as his friends call him because he could no longer be “kitten”, as his mother of little one said – comes from a family of humble origin who worked the earth sowing corn and cotton, something he simply did not like.
One day, when he was 13, his father told him to be with a relative who was a fisherman. And that day everything changed.
“I loved it. I live from that day in love with the sea. I love the sea. I conly with the sea,” he says and continues: “But before leaving, I knelt. I go with you, my beautiful father. Your will, always. I never stopped asking (to God) to take me and bring me. Never, never. And pray for my children, for my mother.”
Máximo lives in Marcona, a town located about eight hours by car south of Lima. There he always worked as a fisherman, and where perhaps he could not imagine what would happen since December 7, 2024.
The journey
Before going to the sea on the eve of the Immaculate Day, “Gatón” called on her mother and asked for the blessing. “Never in my life I thought this was going to happen to me, because I am used to and I go out alone.”
The first days and about 60 miles away, he achieved good fishing and filled seven bags of fish, which expected to get good money. On December 17 he decided to return but the engine did not light and then prepared for the worst, with food available as for a month. “My God, I said, uff. And there at that moment I began to save my food, my water. One day I ate, the next day I did not eat.”
He saw how little by little he moved away more, until he reached 150 miles and, already on the days of the New Year, his food was over. “And I knelt in the boat. I said, it’s everything (…) But I believe in you. I’m going to get out of this. I have to mentalize, not to despair, calmly.”
In January and already drinking rainwater, the provisions of all were over: “I had nothing. There I began to eat cockroaches,” however I kept praying.
“I woke up praying. I slept. Up to two months, almost, I think I didn’t feel his presence. I thought, have you abandoned me? Why? And I cried, didn’t I cry a lot, because I knew what situation I was in.”
In February he returned to experience the presence of the Lord with him. Around the 10 the birds that fell into their boat began to eat. On the 20th he continued with the fish that “he had given me. I told him, I know that you have sent me this fish. Thank you, father.”
Despite that they came even more days and began to claim the Lord, because in addition the fish of his sacks had spoiled and had to throw everything. “I have thrown all my products, almost 800 kilos that I had, more than 30,000 soles (about 7 thousand dollars)”, money with which I also wanted to buy something from your mother.
“Gatón” promised to change God if he saved him. “I have used drugs. And sometimes because of the drug I was very far from my family. As I live alone, fishing alone. And I could never. I could never. (…) But I wanted my children, my brother, they felt bad.”
In the first days of March everything was heading. “There was no water anymore, there was no food, there was no rain. He arrived on March 11. I was already, it was hard for me to breathe. It cost me. I had thrown myself into my deck. When I feel that my boat gives him a blow. What’s up? But I look there and it was a turtle. Incredible.”
Máximo took the turtle, took his knife, apologized to the animal, cut it and drank his blood “and there I feel like life is coming. But in all that process that was happening to me, I felt that he was the one who was doing all that.”
The rescue
Máximo waited in his boat without strength and suddenly saw a helicopter, and there, he says, he also saw Jesus. “And there I started seeing Wilson (the co -pilot). But when I see Wilson like that, I was stuck to Jesus’ face looking at me.”
A day before, on March 10, “Gatón” told God: “I know that you are going to move me in a helicopter or a plane. And when I see the helicopter … you did. And then Wilson tells me. Why did you point out like that? Because I wanted you to turn and see it. Jesus was attached to your cheek.”
“I saw him clear. I saw him white and his beautiful face. And I said. ‘You did, you did. You, you did it.’
Máximo was then taken to an Ecuadorian tuna ship, in which everyone played and repeated “is a miracle”; And from where he could do a video call to talk to his daughter, to tell him that he was still alive.
The next day, the captain told him that the ship should not happen on March 11 where it happened to rescue “Gatón”, and that the helicopter did not turn on the previous two days, only 11, and that everything had been “aligned” to rescue him, even a dream that the captain had with his mother, that he brought him to “leave outside” to see what he had there.
When the helicopter worked, the panel detected many birds in a location, which usually speaks of abundance of fish, but it was not that but the maximum boat. “Then Julio, the captain, is also convinced that everything was a chain and God did that.”
“Gatón” also says that he has always prayed at the end of the day, to thank God for life and for putting “a dish of food at my table. Thank you father for being with me.” He also recounts that in the medical checkups they have done, everything appears normal: “I have nothing, I have no diabetes” something that says, doctors cannot explain.
“Now we don’t know if the cockroach, the bird or turtle blood serve to cure diabetics,” he jokes.
The voice of the brothers
Flor Napa Castro, Máximo’s sister, tells Ewtn News that “my brother has not been a saint, sometimes people say why, why he chose him. It really always God, I don’t know, suddenly he sees his good heart that he has, because he has always had a good heart for everyone, not only for the family, for anyone who approached him, he always came, they came to ask and he did not doubt it, there he did not doubt it, there he did not hesitate. Pocket, if I had food, food gave them.
For Alberto, Gatón’s brother, having survived 95 days in the sea shows “that courage he has had to live all this journey. For me he is a warrior as a person, because I think there are few people who can pass that journey and save himself. But also thank the great Lord who has always had him in his bosom and has never abandoned him and he also did not lose the faith.”
Máximo had already survived other shipwrecks, also to a fire when one of his children was 13 years old and from which they both came out well. Despite everything he confesses that he wants to return to the sea, where he meets the Lord.
Collaborated in this note Abel Camasca, Ewtn News journalist
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.