Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

“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 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.”