The search was not closed. On Friday, 16 October, the U.S. Coast Guard pulled 16 Mexican nationals from the Pacific. Survivors said 27 people had been on the boat. Eleven remain missing. The boat went down about 225 kilometres west of Ensenada, Baja California — Mexican waters, not American. Charlie Valor, of the Guard, said on Saturday why they launched anyway: they were able to help, so they put assets in the air.

The mayday came around 1 a.m. Friday, Lieutenant Santiago Tamburini said. The helicopter arrived about two hours later. It took some 90 minutes, with a rescue swimmer, to lift the 16. They were holding on to each other, to debris, treading water. Not all had a vest. At the rescue site the Guard found only wreckage. Type of boat, destination, what they were doing there: unclear. Tamburini: fishing and leisure boats use that water — and so do smugglers. “We just don’t know what they were doing out there. We all know it’s a suspected smuggling route. The sea is unforgiving.” This case has not been shown to be a migrant run.

Several of those pulled had severe injuries consistent with shark bites, the Guard said on Saturday. They were given first aid on the way to San Diego. Some reached Scripps hospitals. Three went to Mercy, including a suspected bite case and two treated for cold. Three others to Memorial La Jolla, then discharged. The city of San Diego spoke of two patients in critical condition. It was not clear whether the suspected bite was among them. The Mexican consulate in San Diego offered help. Names were not released.

The search ran over some 3,200 square kilometres, with helicopters, a fixed-wing aircraft, a cutter, a U.S. Navy combat ship. The Mexican Navy put out from Ensenada. Another helicopter was due on Saturday. On Sunday, 18 October, Al Jazeera and AP wrote that the 11 had not been found. The area is about 130 kilometres south of San Diego by road. On the water, the distance to Ensenada’s shore is larger than it looks on a map, at night, with no engine.

The Guard said it did not know whether the boat got lost, lost its engine, was swept out, or meant to go that far. That is the edge of the facts. The rest — who boarded them, toward which beach, for what money — is not in the statements. In 2023, eight people died off San Diego when a boat capsized in surf, in fog. In May 2025, at least three, 56 kilometres north of the border. Those are accidents on the same coast, not proof of this case.

Sixteen people are ashore. Eleven are not. Until they are found, dead or alive, the count stays open. This is not a finished rescue. It is a night in the Pacific, 140 miles off Ensenada, and a list that has not closed.

Image: Isaacmoon, Ensenada harbour, Baja California, 21 April 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows the shore port, not the wreck site 225 km offshore.

Sources consulted: Search continues for 11 missing after boat sank off Mexico’s Baja coast — Al Jazeera; U.S. Coast Guard rescues 16 people floating in the Pacific — CBC/AP.