She saw the guides react, and said, “I know, I know. We shouldn’t have gone. The temptation is to put the blame on Michael. It was his boat, he’d made the dive several times. But that’s bullshit. We were all adults, all certified divers, and we all agreed. We wanted to dive the Baja California, and, because we were still close to Marco Island, I guess we figured we would be protected from an east wind. It seemed fairly calm three miles out. What I didn’t know at the time was that you don’t measure a wave from its trough. You measure it from sea level. So, when we were anchored on Ben’s Barge, I thought the two-foot waves we were seeing were actually four to six feet high. That changed pretty quickly.”
Amelia said the seas were considerably worse once they were fifty-two nautical miles offshore and reached the Global Positioning System numbers (GPS) that marked the wreck, but the waves still didn’t seem overwhelming. She remembered Michael Sanford telling the group that it sometimes took him three or four times to get the boat anchored just right, but on that Friday, he dropped the anchor, fed out line, and nailed it first try.
“We could see the wreck on the screen of his electronic bottom recorder,” she said. “The bottom was flat, then all of a sudden there was this long geometric shape jutting up. It looked like a small, flat mountain. Michael explained to us that the little floating shapes we saw above the wreck were fish. There were fish all over it. Like a cloud. Because of that, we decided to fish first, then dive.”
Once again, the guides began to shake their heads. It was not a wise thing to do. Hooked fish send out stress vibrations. Stress vibrations attract predators. Why attract predators before getting into the water?
Amelia said, “We fished for maybe an hour. You know how barracuda will crash a live bait right by the boat? The girls had fun with that. But it was getting a little rougher out and Grace started to feel sick, so we decided to gear up and get into the water because we thought she’d feel better then.”
Gardner said that she paired up with Janet, and Sanford paired with Walker because she and Sanford were the two most experienced divers. “Plus I really liked Janet,” she said. “We hit it off the first time we met. She is… Janet was the sort of woman you know you can trust after just talking to her for a few minutes. With her, there wasn’t going to be any of that catty crap that so many men and women pull. No bitching, no whining. Right away, just being with her a couple of days, I was thinking that the two of us could start doing some dive trips together. Maybe some of you know, but good dive partners are hard to find. Especially women divers, the independent types willing to do some traveling.”
Before they got in the water, according to Gardner, Sanford told them that one of the rules of diving is that you never go off and leave a boat unattended. But, because the Baja California was so deep-it was in 110 feet of water-the divers would only have about fifteen minutes of bottom time, so maybe it was actually safer for them all to go at once. It might be wiser to have four divers together on that deep wreck than go in two isolated sets.
“It’s not like Michael called for a vote or anything,” Amelia said. “But nobody stood up and said, ‘Hey, absolutely not. Someone has to stay in the boat.’ I’ve seen other divers go off and leave their boats lots of times, and, the sad thing is, it was the first time I’d ever been with a group who did it.
“We were fifty miles offshore, there weren’t any other boats around, and I, or Janet, or Grace, should have put a foot down. It wasn’t just Michael’s fault. We all screwed up. But that mistake we made…” Amelia laced her fingers together and bowed her head slightly. “That mistake, leaving the boat alone, it’s when things really started to go south. We had the dive flag up and it never entered our minds that, in fifteen minutes, so much could go wrong.”
The four entered the water together, but when they got to a depth of about thirty feet, Grace Walker indicated that she was having trouble equalizing the pressure in her ears. “We followed Michael and Grace up to ten feet or so and waited until she decided to try it again. But Grace’s ears were still hurting her, I could tell. Michael indicated that he and Grace were going to return to the boat, and I signaled ‘okay.’ Janet and I watched them go to the surface, then we continued our dive.”
Gardner told us that she and Janet spent approximately thirteen minutes on the wreck, then started back up. When they were fifteen feet from the surface, they made a safety decompression stop of about three minutes. Then they surfaced. Gardner said she was shocked by what she saw.
“Only about three feet of the boat’s bow was sticking out of the water, and it was capsized. I couldn’t believe it. Janet was in shock, too, and we started swimming toward the boat. We couldn’t see Michael or Grace, and Janet started yelling out Michael’s name. Michael finally answered, but we still couldn’t see them because of the waves. The seas were running about four feet now which, as I told you, meant they were eight feet high or so from the trough. When you’re out there swimming… when you’re out there alone in the water, trying to swim, you spend a lot of time in the trough.”
I didn’t realize how quiet it had become until Amelia paused, then stretched her legs cat-like, giving herself some time, perhaps, to regain emotional control. There was a light breeze drifting out of the mangrove bog from the southwest, carrying the tumid odors of sulfur, tannin, iodine, and salt. The breeze touched the halyards of sailboats, caused a random, indifferent tapping, and carried across the water the sump -sound of the pump to my big fish tank.
No one was talking now. There was no fidgeting. All attention was on Amelia Gardner and the words her lips formed, everyone seeing the scene, the slow tragedy of it re-creating itself inside the minds of us all.
She said, “Janet swam straight to the boat while I swam toward Michael’s voice. When I got closer, I could see Michael and Grace in the water, drifting away. They both had their BCD vests inflated, with the tanks still attached, but they weren’t wearing them; they were using them as floats. They couldn’t get back to the boat because they weren’t wearing flippers, and the waves were pushing them farther and farther away. It was awful.”
Gardner told us that she and Janet swam to Michael and Grace, grabbed them, and helped the two jettison the tanks from their backpacks and get into their inflated vests. They then swam back to the boat, jettisoned their own weight belts, and hung on to the exposed length of the anchor line that was attached to the bow. There, Amelia said, she checked her watch. It was 3 P.M.
I didn’t want to interrupt, but had to. It was an important point. I asked her, “What color was your weight belt?”
She looked at me oddly. “Orange,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
I said, “Janet’s weight belt was a kind of blue-green. Teal, I guess you’d call it. Were the weight belts found? Did anyone go down and look?”
Now she was nodding, realized the implications. “Weight belts are so heavy, they would have dropped like rocks. If my story’s true, they’d be side by side. That’s what you’re saying. Maybe on top of one another.” She paused, still staring at me. “No. No one has gone down to confirm my story.”
I knew she was thinking about what we’d discussed earlier, but she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she continued.
“So… after we surfaced, and when things settled down, our first question, of course, was, what happened? Michael said he didn’t know. He said that he and Grace climbed up the dive ladder at the back of the boat and took off their vests and fins. Then he went to the front to take off the rest of his stuff. When he looked back, he said he was shocked to see water coming in over the transom where the engines were attached. The salvage divers told me later that, when they found the boat, it was still in gear. What must have happened was, Michael had Grace run the boat while he set the anchor, and she must have switched off the engines while they were still in forward. As most of you know a lot better than me, a boat won’t start when it’s in gear.
“But that still doesn’t explain why the boat was sinking, of c
ourse. Michael couldn’t figure it out. He talked a lot about that later, when it was dark. He said maybe the bilge pumps weren’t working, maybe one of the scuppers got plugged or something. He just didn’t know. With water flooding over the transom, he said the boat immediately started to tip sideways. He said it happened so fast, just like that, and that he and Grace jumped overboard. They didn’t have time to make a call on the radio, nothing. I remember thinking to myself that, when we were back on land, we’d find out exactly what happened.”
As Gardner spoke, I was calculating in my own mind what might have happened. My guess was, the boat was already sinking when they arrived at the Baja California. Or, at the very least, already had water in the inner hull. Why else would it have turned turtle after only a few minutes of inattention? If someone had stayed aboard, the results might have been very different.
I listened to Gardner say, in a weary, weary voice, “When we came up, though, and saw that the boat had capsized… it was awful. That began the longest night of my life.”
The four of them floated there, hanging on to a rope that was connected to the swamped boat, which, in turn, was held fast by several hundred feet of anchor line. The wind had picked up even more, and the waves, Amelia said, seemed a lot bigger than they had that morning.
Their plan was simple because they had no alternatives: to hang on to the rope, stay close to the boat, and wait for the Coast Guard to come and get them. Back on Marco, Sherry Meyer knew where they planned to dive and was expecting them back in time for dinner. She’d figure out soon enough that something was wrong and call for help.
For the next four hours, Gardner told us, she and her three companions floated on their backs alongside the boat, staying close to one another to keep warm. They tied an orange life jacket and a white bumper to the end of the rope, and Walker looped the rope into her flotation vest. The sun set at 5:38 P.M., and the crescent moon set an hour later. It was a black night, with stars hazed by tumbling clouds.
“By the time it got dark, the wind was blowing pretty hard. I was scared like I’ve never been scared in my life. I was shaking, my whole body was shaking down to the bones. I didn’t understand then if it was because of the cold or because I was just so absolutely terrified. I know the others were scared, too. But we kept the conversation light and tried to keep a cool head about everything. It’s weird, but when you know everyone’s fighting to stay calm, it sort of validates what you’re pretending to do. We talked about how this would be a story to tell our grandchildren. Someone said that we’d be best friends all our lives after this.”
Claudia hadn’t spoken a word, but now she did, and everyone leaned a little to hear her, because she talked in a small, small voice.
“How was my sister? How did Janet react? Did she maybe talk about something that I ought to know about?”
Emotion has a contagious component, and I watched Amelia wrestle to control herself, then gulp back Claudia’s tears. I watched her sit there, eyes shining, taking slow, deep breaths before she answered, “She was unbelievable, Claudia. I’m not saying that to make you feel good. I knew her for, what, two days, and I consider her one of the finest people I’ve ever met, just because of the way she handled herself that night. Janet, Grace, and Michael, they were all good people. I know that especially because… well, I’m going to admit something to you. It’s something I haven’t told the other families. I hired a private investigator to do background checks on them. That’s how paranoid I got when I started hearing all the nasty little stories about why we were out there. I wondered if the three strangers I’d met had somehow involved me in something I knew nothing about.
“I’m glad I did, too, because I got confirmation of what I learned about them that night at sea. They were very caring, productive people. They gave a lot and they had a lot more to give. Michael was a high school English teacher. He coached football and did a little modeling on the side. Grace was a Sarasota realtor who was very involved in community projects. Voluntary stuff, like charities. She was a black woman, very proud of her heritage, and she took her commitments seriously. Janet worked here, on Sanibel, for Doc Ford, who, I guess, almost everyone here knows and likes.”
Gardner paused to give me a brief, meaningful look when she said that, before continuing, “The point being, just through blind luck, I couldn’t have chosen three better people to be adrift with. That night, the way Janet behaved-” Gardner placed her hand on Claudia’s arm once again. “She was calm and brave as hell. There was something about your sister, Claudia, a real inner strength that seemed to make us all a little stronger, a little braver.
“When we were floating there, hanging on for our lives, Janet talked a lot about this crazy little marina of yours.” Gardner had matched faces with names, and now she looked from person to person to person as she said, “She talked about you, Doc. You were a common topic of conversation. And about Rhonda and Mack, and about you, Jeth. About how you two had your problems but that she loved you and couldn’t wait to get back to you, and about how pissed off you were going to be because she’d gone so far offshore in a small boat without you driving. She told us you’re a professional captain, right?”
I couldn’t bring myself to look at Jeth. He sat off by himself, a silhouetted figure beyond the dock lights. Everyone around me, I noticed, had turned their eyes away, leaving him alone to whatever was going on inside him. He responded, finally, with a muffled, “I’m a guide, yeah.”
As Claudia sniffed and touched a finger to her eye, Amelia was shaking her head, close to tears. At last, she said, “After what happened, it didn’t seem like it could possibly get worse. But it did. I learned one lesson out there on the Gulf that I’ll never forget: On the water, one bad thing leads to another and, once it starts, it happens way too fast to do much of anything to stop it. The momentum, I mean. You’re screwed unless you’re prepared way in advance. And we weren’t. We weren’t prepared for anything like what happened next.”
At 7 P.M. Amelia heard Janet yell, “Hey! Where’d the boat go?” and the anchor line they were holding was ripped from their hands, pulling Grace Walker, who’d tied a life jacket and the anchor line to her vest, under water. The rope pulled Sanford under briefly, too, and he used his dive knife to cut both himself and Walker free.
“He saved her life,” Amelia said. “How he managed to react so quickly, I don’t know. But he did. I’m aware that a lot of you helped during the Coast Guard search, and you probably heard that someone found a cut line tied to an orange life jacket more than twenty miles southwest of where we started. Well, that’s the story behind it. I guess the only reason the boat stayed afloat as long as it did was because some air pockets got trapped in it when it capsized. Once those air pockets were gone, though, it sank like a stone.”
So there they were: four people adrift in heavy seas on a November night. At first, there was a general panic among the group. Sanford was yelling, Walker began to cry. But then they got themselves under control once more.
“‘We’re going to make it,’ Janet kept telling us. She kept saying that we’d make it, we’d all make it, but we had to stick together.”
Staying together, though, wasn’t easy. Because of the drag of their inflated vests, the waves kept knocking them apart, even when they linked arms to stay together. Worse, because the wind was out of the east, the waves were sweeping them farther and farther from shore. One by one, they began to doubt whether drifting aimlessly was the best thing to do.
“It was Michael’s idea to swim to the light tower. He told us he’d fished it before, and he guessed it to be three, maybe four miles inshore of where we were. Out there, it’s the only light around. When we were on the top of a wave, it was so bright it was like seeing a camera flash go off. Civilization, that’s what it seemed to represent. And safety. So that’s what we decided to do. Swim for the tower.”
But if drifting as a group was difficult, swimming as a group was even harder. One reason was that Grace and Michael we
re no longer wearing fins. They’d removed theirs just before the boat capsized. Another reason was that neither Grace nor Janet was a strong swimmer.
“Grace kept saying she didn’t think she could make it, and Janet just kept telling her that we had to make it because we didn’t have a choice. She told Grace to think about all the weight they were going to lose, burning all those calories. Funny stuff to keep our spirits up.
“So we just plugged along, side by side, with me on one end and Michael on the other, Janet and Grace between us. I don’t know how long we swam. But we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. We’d kick toward the light, then a big wave would come out of nowhere and knock us back.”
Amelia said it was then that she lost all sense of time. They may have swam for only a few minutes, maybe half an hour.
“I’m sorry,” she told us, “that part is all hazy to me. I remember wondering, ‘Is this really happening?’ Like maybe it was some terrible nightmare. All I could see was that flashing light, and sometimes it seemed like it was a hundred miles away and sometimes it seemed like it flashed right in the middle of my brain. I became completely disoriented. Maybe we all did. But I really started to lose it. I was crying, but not loud, because I didn’t want the others to hear. I’d been swallowing a lot of salt water because it was so rough, and I couldn’t stop shaking. I knew we were in a lot of trouble. Then something happened to me that I’ve never felt before.”
Amelia Gardner experienced a cerebral gearing-down, like the arcing of a spark, that keyed the most primitive of our instincts, the fight-or-flight response. There was what she described as a tangible “wave” of fear followed by an inability to catch her breath, then overwhelming panic.
“I stopped swimming to try to get myself back under control, and I turned away from the others because I didn’t want them to hear me crying. Then there was a big wave, and another big wave. When I turned around, they were gone. All three of them. I heard Janet yelling to me, yelling, ‘Don’t leave us!’ and I could hear Michael calling, too. I swam toward their voices, but they were gone. I couldn’t find them. I kept calling, screaming their names. It was black and windy with a lot of big breakers, and I hope I never experience another moment like that in my life. I felt like I’d just fallen over a cliff and there was no way back. That’s when I thought I was lost for sure.”
Twelve Mile Limit df-9 Page 6