09-Twelve Mile Limit (8 page)

“But that still doesn’t explain why the boat was sinking, of course. 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 were 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.”

Her only hope of finding her friends, and safety, she realized, was to somehow make it to the light tower. So, once again, she turned eastward and started swimming. Once again, though, because of her inflated vest, the waves kept knocking her back. Still terrified and panicked, Amelia Gardner then did a very brave thing—not that she described it to us as brave or gave herself any credit. What she did was take a leap of faith. She decided that she might well die, but she was going to make at least one last and final best effort to find a way to survive. She jettisoned her vest, her only guaranteed way to stay afloat. Then she turned into the waves and began to swim again.

Four hours or so later, she washed into the girder-sized pilings of a 160-foot light tower, far off the Everglades coast of Florida. It took her a while to locate the service ladder, and then she climbed up onto the tower’s lowest deck. “I laid down on the platform just to sort of reassure myself that I’d really made it,” she told us. “It was still like some terrible dream. But, after a while, I got up and started calling for the other three. As the night went on, I kept thinking I heard their voices, heard them calling to me for help. The wind makes strange sounds out there. I kept getting up and calling back, calling their names.

“I expected them to arrive at any minute,” she added, once again struggling to keep her emotions in check. She paused, took several slow breaths, before finishing, “They … the three of them… those three good people … they never did show up. I was there alone for another day and another night, and I kept screaming for them, calling their names. But they never answered, they never came.”

Tomlinson stood, suddenly, walked to Amelia, and touched his palm to the back of her head as she sat there, face now in her hands, still taking slow, controlled breaths. The woman needed a break. Her voice had gotten softer and softer, as if revisiting that tragic night, the horror of it, was once again leaching the strength out of her. There was no way she could continue to talk without breaking down completely. For reasons I don’t understand, the stronger a person is, the more painful it is to watch them founder.

Which is why we were all a little relieved when Tomlinson said, “That’s enough for now, Amelia. And thanks for the courage it took and the love it took to come to us and tell us what happened.”

He stood there, patting her head, as he then looked to us and said, “This woman’s our guest and we need to take good care of her. So here’s what I suggest. She can tell us more later, if she feels like it, or maybe tomorrow, if Ransom or the good ladies of the Satin Doll can talk her into spending the night with us here at the marina. But I warn you right now, Amelia, stay at Dinkin’s Bay tonight, and you’re in for an evening of blissful excesses …” He smiled at her, his haunted eyes telling her something, offering comfort, perhaps, as he added, “Blissful excess or maybe even some wholesale debauchery. We’ll have all the food and drink you can handle.”

Right on cue, people hooted and applauded.

That quick, he’d changed the mood. Amelia lifted her face from her hands. He’d earned a little smile.

Later that night, what started as a typical bar fight nearly escalated into a riot, and, as I told Tomlinson later, we should have both seen it coming and found a way to put a halt to it before it got started.

“How was I supposed to stop anything?” he asked me. “I had a pitcher of margaritas in me, four Singapore slings, three grande mojitos made with delicious fresh mint, a six-pack of Corona, plus two joints of very fine Voodoo Surprise. There also may have been pills involved—I remember very distinctly speaking to that lady anesthetist from Englewood. We both know she tends to be overly generous with her recreational pharmaceuticals. No telling what poison that Asiatic brute may have put into my hands. My friend—” he was shaking his head, being serious, “it is impossible for one to impose social order when one is lying facedown, puking, in the sand next to the totem pole at Jensen’s Marina.”