Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

The huge tiger glided toward us, then banked slightly, black eyes passing us without interest or expression. The impression given by her indifference was probably accurate: The animal knew all there was to know about us, and there was nothing to be known. We were meaningless; we were irrelevant because we were not prey. We were a gathering of protoplasm, healthy seals or fish or manatee. Perhaps something would occur to change that. We might be wounded, show distress, or the shark’s own precise feeding instincts would reclassify us because of hunger.

It was an indifferent process. A biologist from Sanibel? An unreformed hipster who lived on a sailboat, who believed in God, who crossed his 7s, read his horoscope, and was a devotee of reincarnation?

Such things did not exist. Water, light, tide: all else was delusion. We were wind in the void. We were matter without purpose. It made no difference who we were, what we had accomplished, who we loved. Our fast hearts had a silly, finite number of beats remaining. There was always other prey.

We watched the shark drift past, descending, and saw her vanish over the diatom horizon.

Observing Tomlinson, I had the distinct and accurate impression he wanted to go after her, to be a part of whatever life adventure the tiger shark was on. So I grabbed his elbow, holding him until she’d been gone for a couple of minutes. Then I touched Amelia and Tomlinson both, signaling.

We completed our dive.

Using Dieter’s Grand Banks trawler, Das Stasi, as a dive platform, we spent Tuesday and Wednesday, December 9 and 10, a day, a night, and part of this next day over the wreck, diving and assembling evidence that, piece by piece, did much to confirm Amelia’s story. Salvage divers had already refloated and towed the Seminole Wind. But what she dumped when she sank was still below, and that debris told a story.

Because the Baja California is in 110 to 120 feet of water, we kept careful track of our bottom time and made each and every safety decompression stop longer than it needed to be. We calculated data from our personal dive computers but did not log the data until our figures had been rechecked and confirmed by at least one other person.

I have spent much of my life in the water and on the water, yet I have never become so comfortable that I allow myself to be sloppy. When we were under, our second dive team, consisting of Dieter, Jeth, and Dieter’s nubile, Jamaican secretary Moffid Seemer, stayed attentive topside. We did the same when they were down.

I also insisted on one very simple safety precaution that would have saved the lives of Janet, Michael, and Grace, had only one of them done the same: I asked that each member of our team attach a little, plastic strobe light to his or her BCD vest. The strobes are cheap, they come with long-life batteries, and, when activated, they can be seen at night from at least three miles away. Anyone who travels over water in foreign lands, aboard foreign vessels, or who dives, should carry one. Few boat passengers or sport divers expect to be in the water after dusk. But all sunny days over a reef ultimately darken, and accidents are never planned. Which is why, each year, a surprising number of passengers and sport divers are set adrift and die. A strobe is the cheapest possible insurance against disaster.

So we did the dives methodically, safely. I kept a close eye on Amelia. So did Dieter, a psychiatric physician. It had to be a hell of an emotional experience to return to the scene of the tragedy, and only thirty-five days after she’d made that long midnight swim.

She had some quiet moments. There were periods when her vision seemed to glaze, and her attention wandered to some faraway place. Generally, though, she handled herself well. The more I was around the lean redhead, the better I liked her. She was a competent dive partner, and she did more than her share of the menial labor aboard Das Stasi. Under crowded conditions at sea, a person’s core personality asserts itself quickly So far, she’d contributed much to a successful, productive trip.

Mostly, we all focused on collecting the remains of the Seminole Wind, which now lay atop the remains of the much older Baja California.

Dieter, with his German obsession for precise information, had provided us with some interesting history. The Baja California, he told us, was a 214-foot freighter built in 1914, and sunk with a single torpedo on July 18, 1942 by one of his country’s Nazi submarines, U-boat 84. The Baja California was under way to South America with a general cargo of tobacco, baby bottles, mercury, and American military vehicles. Three crew members were killed.

Now this place was the site of a second wreck, and it was an eerie experience to dive through 110 feet of murky water, then come upon the colorful detritus of an event that led, most likely, to the loss of three more lives. The old freighter was a fissure of rubble, the stillness of which implied a furious animation halted long ago. It might have been the remnants of a rock slide. It might have been a graveyard. Atop the rubble, scattered all around, were items that had once been aboard the Seminole Wind.

The day before, we’d arrived early enough to make two dives. We’d found much, and catalogued those items carefully. Lying among the debris we’d found a big tackle box and two smaller tackle boxes. They contained several hundred dollars’ worth of equipage and lures, including some new lures still in cellophane.

One of the rumors being parroted around South Florida was that Sanford had intentionally sunk the Seminole Wind for the insurance. Why would a man who planned to sink his own boat invest money in new lures? We also found the new thermostat that Amelia had told us about, the one Michael purchased as a backup the morning of November 4, the day they headed offshore. The thermostat was still in its now-sodden box, lying near the chassis of a military vehicle. You don’t buy backup parts for an engine you plan to scuttle.

No, the sinking certainly had not been intentional.

Another rumor, and one of the most popular, was that the foursome had not traveled offshore to fish or dive but actually to finalize a drug deal. From the evidence we gathered, that seemed unlikely.

Near the tackle boxes, we found several fishing rods, rigged and ready. Two of the rods were light tackle spinning rods, and one was still rigged with a number 3 hook-commonly used for catching bait, nothing else. Amelia had told the Coast Guard and us that they’d stopped on the way out to catch bait. The rod added credence to her story and implied a more general truth: No one would have gone to the trouble to rig a rod specifically for catching bait if their real intention was to rendezvous with a drug boat. If they wanted to costume themselves as fishermen, rods with standard-sized hooks would have sufficed.

Something else: Why the hell would they choose the Baja California as a meeting place? Wrecks attract divers and fishermen no matter how far offshore. There was no way they could have been certain that another boat wouldn’t have come along and surprised them out there. Any other GPS way point in international waters, beyond the twelve-mile limit, would have been a far more logical and likely choice.

We’d also found one SCUBA tank filled with air. Amelia told us that they had carried eight, which a Marco Island dive shop confirmed by telephone. The salvage divers had already retrieved five tanks that were nearly full (or they would not have sunk), and the Coast Guard had recovered two air tanks drifting miles from the site. Air tanks that are empty, or nearly empty, float. All tanks accounted for. It supported Amelia’s story that only she and Janet had completed the dive.

In my mind, the report that Tomlinson and I would submit jointly and simultaneously to the Coast Guard, as well as to several newspapers, was already taking shape. We had the credentials to be taken seriously, and we were assembling some compelling data.