Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

Before we met, as a group, and listened to Amelia Gardner’s story, we made the sunset rounds in a marina caravan that increased the number of partygoers with each stop.

There wasn’t much doubt why. Word was out that the lone survivor was with us. Everyone on the islands wanted to hear what happened from Gardner’s own mouth.

We stopped at Jensen’s Marina for Claudia to join us. Seeing her come out the door of Janet’s little blue Holiday Mansion, with its curtained pilothouse windows, gave us all an emotional jolt. It wasn’t just the family resemblance, though that was part of it. It was the fact that Claudia was wearing a pale, peach-colored beach dress and makeup, and she had a bright red hibiscus bloom fixed behind her right ear.

It was exactly the sort of outfit that Janet typically wore to our Friday parties.

I was standing beside Jeth when Claudia made her entrance. I heard him whisper, “Jesus Christ, that’s almost too much to handle.”

I patted him on the back. “Nothing’s too much. That’s one of the things Janet taught us.”

We stopped at McCarthy’s Marina and boarded the Lady Chadwick for drinks, then we mobbed our way to the Green Flash, and then the Mucky Duck for sunset on the beach. Milled around swapping stories with Pat and Memo at the bar, listening to John Paul on the guitar before returning to Dinkin’s Bay.

The entire time, I noticed that Gardner kept her distance from me, still mad, apparently. Ransom, though, she liked. The two women fast became a pair.

Once, passing behind them, I paused to listen as Ransom, speaking in her musical Bahamian accent, told her “Amelia, darlin’. Let me tell you something ’bout these nice titties ah’ mine. They changed my womanly life, they surely did, and don’t let no man tell you he doan care about your boobies. A woman deserve to look how she want to look, my sister! Yes sir! I reckon they cost me four, maybe five, blow jobs apiece, and that cheap, girl! Very cheap! I were kind’a sweet on that lil’ doctor man anyway. I’d a’ made him feel good for free, no problem!”

I liked Gardner’s unembarrassed laughter-then she noticed me. She said to Ransom, “This big goon really is your brother?”

“Oh yes, oh yes, he one of the very few white ones in our family. He can be kind’a mulish sometimes when it come to women, but he good. Doan you doubt that. My brother, he a good man.”

Long after sunset, several dozen of us sat quietly listening to Amelia Gardner. She was sitting cross-legged atop one of the picnic tables, behind Dinkin’s Bay’s Red Pelican Gift Shop, facing the docks. Sitting to her left was Claudia. Ransom to her right.

The windy, high pressure system that had made our search so exhausting was gone now, replaced by a balmy, tropical low. Through the coconut palms, beyond the yellow windows of my house and lab, I could see drifting clouds and oily star paths on black water. Woodring’s Point and the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay were a charcoal hedge of mangroves two miles north.

It was a very warm night for late November. Even so, Gardner had gone to her Jeep for a jacket, as if affected by memories of the cold that night three weeks earlier. It wasn’t easy for her to talk about it. There was no mistaking the emotion in her voice, and I admired the way she fought her way through it.

I was holding a plastic cup of beer poured over ice, plus a wedge of squeezed lime, and I took a sip now, as she said, “I met Michael Sanford and Grace Walker when I was in the Keys, then again at a dive club party on Siesta Key. You guys ever eat at the old mullet restaurant there? That’s where the party was. They were with a woman by the name of Sherry Meyer, who was supposed to dive the Baja California with us. Lucky for her, though, she had a cold and didn’t make the trip. I wish to hell we’d all had colds that day-” She touched her hand to Claudia’s arm as she said that; Claudia patted Gardner’s hand in return. “But I guess destiny has its reasons and there’s no going back now. Janet was a friend of Michael’s, and I didn’t meet her until I got to Marco. He’d rented a three-bedroom condo-him in one room, we four women in the other two-and we went to bed early Thursday night so we could get up early Friday.”

Because I’d seen still shots of them in the newspapers and on television, I had a fixed mental image of both Sanford and Grace Walker, and impressions of both of them that may or may not have been valid. Michael Sanford could have been a fashion model-six foot four or so, probably 220 pounds, with the jaw, the dimpled chin, and dense, curly black hair that photographs well. Walker was his female, African-American counterpart-busty with makeup and lots of jewelry, a businesswoman in her thirties who was making money and fighting for causes in which she believed. They both knew how to look into the lens of a camera and smile.

Gardner told us that the four of them had left Marco River Marina in Sanford’s twenty-five-foot boat at around 8 A.M. and were headed out Big Marco Pass when Sanford noticed that one of his 225-horsepower Johnsons was overheating. They returned to the marina and had a mechanic switch out a thermostat, which solved the problem.

“Michael bought a second thermostat just in case,” she said. “I suppose most of you’ve heard the rumors that Michael-maybe all of us-ran offshore and sank the boat intentionally for the insurance money. Well, check with the marina. Why would he have bought a second thermostat if he’d planned on sinking his own boat? Why would he have bought a second thermostat if we’d planned on rendezvousing with a drug boat, sinking the Seminole Wind, and escaping? That’s another theory you’ve probably heard.”

Around me, I could see the island fishing guides-eight of them, sitting in their own little group-thinking about it, nodding their heads. Yeah, it didn’t make any sense. If you were going to sabotage your own vessel, you might buy new canvas or pay for a new paint job, just to make it convincing. But a backup thermostat? Very unlikely.

Gardner, an attorney, was already doing a good job of making her case.

On their way offshore, the four divers stopped at a wreck called Ben’s Barge, which is about three miles off Marco. Sanford, a fisherman, wanted to catch some bait so the four of them could fish the Baja California after diving it.

Using tiny hooks and bits of shrimp, they filled the stern’s bait well with small bluegill-shaped fish called pinfish.

“While we caught bait, we discussed what we wanted to do,” Gardner told us. “We were listening to the weather channel on the radio, and Michael told us it wouldn’t be real nice out there, but it should be okay. A couple days ago, I had got my hands on the actual forecast from NOAA. It was ‘small craft should exercise caution, wind out of the east southeast, fifteen to twenty knots, seas four to six feet, with bay and inland waters choppy.’”

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.