Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

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.”