When Pi is 16 (and experiencing first love), his father decides to close the zoo and move his family to Canada, and sell the zoo animals. They book passage with their animals (to be sold in North America) on a Japanese freighter named the Tsimtsum. The ship encounters a heavy storm and begins to sink while Pi is on deck marveling at the storm. He tries to find his family, but a crew member throws him into a lifeboat; from the rough sea, he watches helplessly as the ship sinks, killing his family and its crew.
After the storm, Pi finds himself in the lifeboat with an injured zebra, and is joined by an orangutan who lost her offspring in the shipwreck. A hyena emerges from the tarp covering half of the boat, and kills the zebra. To Pi's distress, the hyena also mortally wounds the orangutan in a fight. Suddenly the tiger Richard Parker emerges from under the tarp, and kills and eats the hyena.
Pi finds emergency food and water rations on the boat. He builds a small raft of flotation devices so that he can stay at a safe distance from the tiger. Realizing that he must feed the tiger to protect himself, Pi begins fishing, with some success. He also collects rain water for both to drink. At one point, he makes a board ladder for the tiger to climb back into the boat after it had jumped off to hunt fish. In a nighttime encounter with a breaching whale, Pi loses much of his supplies. Faced with starvation, he eats raw fish. After many days at sea, Pi realizes that he can no longer live on the tiny raft and trains the tiger Richard Parker to accept him in the boat. He also realizes that caring for the tiger is keeping him alive.
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