Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

“I felt like I was dreaming,” she said. “The only time it was bright enough to see was every four seconds when the light at the top of the tower exploded. You know those strobe lights they use at parties sometimes when people are dancing? It was kind of like that. Very weird, nightmarish. My muscles were quivering, and I knew the barnacles had cut me up pretty good. But, after a while, I got up and started calling for the other three. As the night went on, I kept thinking I heard them. The wind makes strange sounds out there. I kept getting up and calling back, calling their names.”

Around midnight, Amelia saw what she correctly believed to be a Coast Guard helicopter off in the distance, with its searchlight fanning the water.

“My eyes just kept following the helicopter,” she said. “It went east, then south a bit, and I moved with it around the tower. I watched it for a long time, the helicopter’s flashing lights, and then it seemed to settle over an area near where I guessed our boat went down, but a couple miles too far west. Like it was too far out, understand? Right on the edge of the horizon. I thought, ‘There’s no way I could have swum that far.’”

We were back on Tarpon Bay Road now, walking shoulder to shoulder, me getting the occasional whiff of girl sweat and the morning’s shampoo. Every few minutes, she’d pull her T-shirt up to wipe her face dry, a jockish mannerism that I found endearing. I told her, “It’s tough to gauge distance over water. Sometimes things seem closer than they are, sometimes they seem farther. It’s doubly hard at night. The chopper probably used GPS coordinates to settle down right over the Baja California. ”

She touched my arm, communicating her agreement. “That’s exactly what I finally decided. The copter had found my friends. Why else would it hover like that? Which made me feel good. I didn’t stop to wonder why Janet, Michael, and Grace had swum back to the wreck site or how they could have even found it. See? My brain wasn’t working right. I was exhausted and cold and just not tracking.”

At about the same time, she also saw the lights of what she believed was a large boat. “It was out there in the same general area, several miles to the west, only it didn’t seem nearly so far out as the helicopter.”

I said, “But not the mystery boat? The boat with the foul smell, the one you say went by the next morning.”

“No, absolutely not. I’ll tell you how I know in a second. But seeing boat lights out there, the way my mind processed it, the helicopter had found Michael, Grace, and Janet, and they’d called a boat in to pick them up. A Coast Guard cutter. That’s what I wanted to be happening. But after a little bit of time, the boat seemed to head off to the southwest, so then I figured, after rescuing those three, they’d found my inflated vest. The one I’d taken off because I couldn’t swim with it. So they’d found the vest, couldn’t figure out where I was, and were now looking for me. I started jumping up and down, screaming and waving my arms, trying to time it to the strobe. Yelling ‘Here I am, I’m okay!’ As if anybody could see that far. Or hear.”

She made a soft noise in her throat, a sound of despair, or of visceral pain. Then she was quiet for a few moments before she added, “Out there, your mind has no familiar reference point, so it plays weird tricks. I was trying to make sense of what the boat was doing because I wanted to believe it so much. In real life, your boat doesn’t sink. Your friends don’t vanish. People aren’t swallowed up by the dark, leaving their loved ones back home wondering what in the hell happened.”

She made the same sad sound again, and I listened to it become a soft chuckle, then fade. “At least, that’s the way my reality was. Every story, every event has a rational, plausible ending, right? But not this one. Which is why my life has seemed a little unreal… sometimes like some really bad dream ever since.” Amelia stopped and looked at me. “You want to hear something ironic? Something way too damn tragic for me to even want to think about it?”

She told me the irony was that the boat she saw that night wasn’t a Coast Guard vessel. It was the Ellen Clair, a ninety-foot charter boat out of Fort Myers Beach. Captain Ken Peterson, with a party of ten aboard, had stopped to fish the Baja California while en route to the Dry Tortugas, fifty miles away. The Coast Guard had contacted the Ellen Clair by VHF and weeks later Lad provided Amelia with a telephone number for the boat’s captain.

“I’ve been trying to put all the pieces together,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened and why it happened. That charter boat was a tiny little piece of the puzzle of that night. So I called Captain Peterson on the phone. He told me that he first spotted the helicopter when he was about ten miles north of the Baja California. It had its spotlight on, in a search pattern. The helicopter did a fly-by of his boat, contacted him on the radio, then continued searching.

“So here’s the ironic thing. Peterson anchored on the Baja at around 1 A.M. and they sat there and fished for about an hour. Had some soft drinks, looked at the stars, the engines off. If Michael’s boat had stayed afloat for just a few hours longer, they’d have found us. If we could have found some way to stay in the area for just a littler longer, they would have found us. Michael, Janet, and Grace would be here now. Or someplace in Florida. We’d probably all be laughing about what a great adventure we’d had.”

Amelia, who hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since Friday morning, spent the next thirty-five hours on the tower, hearing noises, waving to boats, planes, and helicopters that never saw her until 9:45 Sunday morning.

One of the boats, she said, was the mystery boat. The boat without lights, the boat with the strange odor, the vessel she could smell before it was close enough to see.

“It came from the opposite direction the wind was blowing,” Amelia told me. The boat came out of the southwest, she explained, heading toward coastal Florida, maybe Marco Island, or the Ten Thousand Islands, a mangrove maze that fringes the Florida Everglades. “First I heard the engine, way off in the distance. Then the stink. That’s how strong it was. The wind wasn’t strong enough to blow it away. It was an hour or so before sunrise. Over the noise of the wind and that creaking tower, the engine kept getting closer and closer.”

We were back in my house now, cooling down from the run. Sitting on the upper deck outside my lab drinking water from plastic liter bottles that were cold from my little ship’s fridge. I’ve got a few cane-backed barstools on the deck (the higher the elevation, the easier it is to see fish when looking down into the water) and a couple of old rockers. We sat in the rockers, Amelia staring out over the bay, still inside herself, reliving the tragedy as she spoke.

That first night, she didn’t sleep at all. Suffered through a couple of more panic attacks similar to the one she experienced while in the water. She continued to hear her friends’ voices, too. Imagined voices.

“As crazy as I was that first night, though,” she said, “the boat’s engine was real. You know how, just before first light, way before sunrise, the sky seems to turn a misty charcoal color? There’s no light in the sky. Even the stars fade to gray. But things, individual objects-the frame of the tower I was on, the face of a wave-solids and liquids seem to have a little bit of light inside them. Not strong. Like a sky so black causes friction, so anything that moves sparks a little. That’s how I saw the boat. But that’s also why I didn’t get a good enough look to describe it.”

Amelia told me the boat passed within a quarter-mile, probably less, but there was no way to judge for certain.