09-Twelve Mile Limit (3 page)

I said, “And you said there are two other boats reported missing? Three in one day, that’s a pretty weird coincidence, isn’t it, Dalt?”

“Not missing, just reported overdue. The other two boats, they’ve been accounted for already. There’s a standard way we handle these things—our five stations do about two thousand SAR missions a year, so we’ve got it down to a science almost.”

SAR—search and rescue. The uniformed branches love acronyms. A language that outsiders can’t understand empowers and insulates.

He said, “The watch officers have formatted check-off sheets. When someone calls in an overdue vessel, there’re standard questions and we check the little boxes off the list one by one. Where’d the vessel leave from? Where’d they park their car? What kind of car? Who was aboard? That sort of thing.

“Meyer said the boat we’re talking about, the Seminole Wind, left from Marco Island Marina early yesterday morning and that her friends were due back at sunset because they were all supposed to go out to dinner that night at the Marco Island Inn. Ms. Meyer said—I’m reading from the incident sheet—‘Ms. Meyer said her friends had gone offshore to dive a wreck that’s called the California.’ Are you familiar with that wreck, Doc?”

I told him, “Yeah, I’ve dived it. Baja California, that’s the actual name. It’s not a simple dive—the thing’s in, what, a hundred-ten, a hundred-twenty feet of water, and the visibility’s usually not great. I don’t know how experienced the other three are, but my friend Janet has no business making a dive like that. She just took up the sport. Did her first open-water dive a month ago at Pennekamp off Key Largo with a guy we both know, John Martinez. So she’s a novice; the Baja California is way out of her league. You said they were in a small boat? How small’s small?”

“Let’s see … we’ve got it down as a twenty-five-footer with twin two-twenty-five Johnsons. The watch officer from Fort Myers Beach talked to a mechanic at Marco Island Marina and got a full description.”

“Over four hundred horsepower on a boat that size, it sounds like a floating rocket,” I said. “Who’s the manufacturer?”

I was hoping to hear a name like Grady White or Mako or Pursuit or any of the other reputable manufacturers of pleasure craft.

Instead, I heard, “It’s a custom boat. Built by a little shop near Lauderdale. A semi-V hull with a blue Bimini top, the name Seminole Wind in big red letters on the side.”

“The Baja, I can’t remember exactly, but it’s got to be at least fifty or sixty miles offshore. With winds like this, that’s way too far for a boat that size.”

Dalton said, “Well, according to Ms. Meyer, that’s where they were headed. When they still hadn’t come back by eight-thirty—they were all staying in a rental condo there—Meyer tried to call the marina, but they were closed, so she drove down and confirmed that Sanford’s SUV was still there and the boat wasn’t back.”

I checked my watch and, for the first time, felt a surge of the same anxiety that Jeth was feeling. “That was nearly twenty hours ago, and still no word from them. That’s not good.”

“Maybe, but don’t start worrying yet, Doc. The majority of the overdue reports we get, they’ve left from one marina, but end up going back to another. Because of engine trouble, or they decided at the last minute to go exploring, or because they started partying and got carried away.”

I said, “That doesn’t sound like my friend Janet.”

“Yeah, but like you said, you don’t know the others. You wouldn’t believe some of the cases we work. I’ll give you an example: Last month, we got an overdue report—this guy in a twenty-five-foot Mako—and we went through the whole procedure with his distraught wife. The call comes into us, we go through the checklist on the incident report. We have local law enforcement confirm the guy’s car is still parked at the marina and his boat’s definitely not there.

“So we call our district headquarters in Miami and discuss which of our assets to scramble. According to his wife, he was going to run offshore and fish the ledges. So we send out the big helo. No boat, no guy. So then we send out a C-130. Still nothing. Okay, now it’s panic time, so we deploy every asset we have. For three days, we search—all day, all night. You have any idea how much it costs per hour to fly a C-130?

“Turns out, the guy’s having an affair with his wife’s sister, and they’re shacked up on Siesta Key. He’s got the boat hidden in a friend’s canal.” Dalton has a husky, beer-drinker’s laugh.

“That’s just one example. For seventeen years, I’ve been in this business. We see it all, Doc. Unbelievable stuff.”

“Not my friend, Janet, Dalt. She’s one of the good ones. If we haven’t heard from her, there’s a reason. I think she’s in trouble.”

Dorsey told me they already had a H-60 chopper working the search, plus a C-130 flying a grid, along with their eighty-two-foot cutter Point Swift, and a forty-one-foot utility cruiser. Then he added, “But if you want, I’ll talk to my boss and see if we can get Miami to let us send the second helo.”

I told him any extra help would be appreciated, and added, “Another thing, Dalt. If you don’t mind, let your skippers know that some of Janet’s friends are headed down there with boats to join in the search. We’ll stay out of the way, cooperate however we can, but I’d like to maintain radio contact with your people, if that’s okay.”

We talked for a while longer before Dalton Dorsey ended the conversation, saying, “Believe me, if your lady friend is out there somewhere in a boat, we will find her.”

The next morning, Sunday, just before 10 A.M., as I was idling my skiff away from a Marco Island boat ramp, out Collier’s Bay toward Big Marco Pass, a petty officer aboard the cutter Point Swift contacted us via VHF radio. He asked me to switch from channel 16 to channel 22-Alpha.

It was then we learned that, two hours earlier, one of the Seminole Wind’s passengers had been found alive, standing atop a huge light tower, fifty-two nautical miles offshore.

Idling abreast of me, in big Felix Lane’s twenty-four-foot Parker, was Jeth Nicholes, listening to our radio conversation. I could see his face clearly. I watched his expression change from expectation, to delight, and, finally, anguish, when we learned that, according to the woman they’d rescued, the Seminole Wind had sunk early Friday evening, and she had not seen her fellow passengers since.

Unless someone had picked Janet up without notifying the Coast Guard, she had now been in water for more than forty hours.

For five straight days, we searched. We searched nonstop from just before sunrise until just after sunset, and ate aboard our small boats, never pausing.

JoAnn Smallwood and Rhonda Lister rousted their doughy old Chris Craft, the Satin Doll, from her berth at Dinkin’s Bay, and she became one mother ship. Dieter Rasmussen’s gorgeous Grand Banks trawler, Das Stasi, became another. No Mas, Tomlinson’s sun-bleached Morgan was a third. All were loaded with cans of gas and outboard oil, compliments of Mack at the marina, and boxes of food and drinks, compliments of Bailey’s General Store.

As search vessels, we had three skiffs from Dinkin’s Bay, including Ransom in her new Hewes, and Jensen’s Marina sent down its water taxi and all three of its fishing guides—seven fast boats in all.

The locals of Sanibel and Captiva Islands had joined forces to look for one of our own.

Because it seemed to make sense, we anchored the mother ships in fifteen-mile increments offshore and south of the actual wreck site. My friends with the Coast Guard shared every little scrap of information they had with us, including some high-tech computer software that plotted the set and drift of the Gulf’s inshore and offshore currents.

Anything adrift would travel southwest, toward the Dry Tortugas, the computer told us. The electronic drift buoys their ships dropped and monitored told us the same thing.

Yet we found nothing. Even though the H-60 choppers and search planes were using what the Coasties call FLIR—forward-looking infrared radar, which can detect the heat of a human body from nearly a mile away—there was not a trace.

It was maddening. Adding to the frustration was Amelia Gardner’s story, which the Coast Guard also shared with us. According to Gardner, Janet, Michael Sanford, and Grace Walker were all wearing wet suits and inflated buoyancy compensator vests. Even if they were dead, they would certainly still be afloat. So why hadn’t we found them?

On the fourth day of the Coast Guard search, Tuesday, November 8, we got a little break, a tiny glimmer of hope. About twenty-one nautical miles southwest of the wreck site, one of the Jensen guides found a dive bag and videocamera that belonged to Janet. A day later, in the same area, we found two empty air tanks and an orange life jacket with a section of rope tied to it.

But that was it. Not another piece of flotsam.

Working open water in a small boat is exhausting business. An autumnal high pressure system catalyzed steady, relentless winds, fifteen to twenty knots all day long, creating seas that whitecapped higher than my head as we surfed our little skiffs up one gray ridge, then down another, minute after minute, hour by hour, looking, searching, our eyes always straining to see. At sunset, we would return to our assigned mother ship and collapse into salon chairs, numb with fatigue, while a macrodome of silver stars revolved slowly above a black horizon.

Jeth and I stayed aboard the Satin Doll with Rhonda and JoAnn. I wanted Jeth with me because I didn’t trust his emotional condition. He blamed himself for keeping Janet at a distance because of a small infidelity in which he’d caught her—not an actual infidelity because, at the time, they were in an off-again cycle of their love affair. The few times he did speak, it was to denigrate himself or to repeat variations on a maxim that, sooner or later, we all learn to be true: “I didn’t know what I had, Doc, ’till I lost it.”

On the sixth day of the Coast Guard search, Lt. Cmdr. Dalton Dorsey contacted me via VHF and told me what I already knew: He’d extended the search time because of our friendship, but it had to stop. The Coast Guard and its assets had hunted more than 23,000 square miles of water on a carefully coordinated grid search, using the latest high-tech radar and heat-sensitive vector systems but had found nothing. It was as if all three people had fallen through a hole in the ocean, and vanished.

He also told me that, the previous day, marine salvage divers out of Sarasota had towed in Sanford’s boat, the Seminole Wind. Speaking more formally because he was on the radio, Dorsey told me, “They found it in one hundred and ten feet of water, lying upside-down atop the Baja California. They used air bags to refloat and right it.”

When I asked if the Coast Guard or the family of Michael Sanford had asked the salvage company to refloat the boat, his terse reply—“Absolutely not”—told me he was pissed off about it and would tell me more later.

That night, after the Coast Guard suspended what had been one of the most massive sea searches in the history of South Florida, JoAnn Smallwood came tippy-toe a’creeping up onto the stern deck where I was lying on the companion bench seat under a light blanket. She put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “You asleep?”

I said, “I wish I could sleep. I truly do.”

“I know, it’s impossible and I can’t stand it anymore. You mind some company?”

JoAnn and I have had a long and mutual sexual chemistry that we have carefully and successfully battled—dating within the communal marina family is much too risky—but this had to do with friendship, not physical attraction, so I scooched over and made room for the lady. I felt the heat of her skin on my bare legs, felt the bosomy softness beneath her T-shirt as she pulled herself close, using my chest for a pillow. Her breath was warmer than the wind as she said into my ear, “Should we go say something to him? How long can he keep that up?”

From the guest stateroom forward, muted by bulkheads of fiberglass and wood, came a booming thud-a-thud-a-thud backdropped by the sound of a grown man sobbing. It was Jeth, banging his fist or his head against the hull as he cried.

I said, “No. We’ve got to let him get it out in his own way. But after this, when we get home, we need to keep a close eye on him. There are all kinds of ways for people to self-destruct. I’d say he’s a prime candidate.”

She laid there quietly for a couple of minutes, holding me tight, hearing the wind, hearing Jeth, before she said, “What I hate to even think about, Doc, is that Janet’s still out there. Still alive and hoping we’ll find her, but that we haven’t looked in the right place. God, it just kills me when I think of that! Makes me feel so helpless.”

I hadn’t yet said anything to anyone about what I felt the chances were of Janet surviving for even twenty-four hours adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, but now I did. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I’m far from being an expert on human physiology, but because I’ve done a fair amount of diving, I’ve read the basic literature on survival at sea. Rightly or wrongly, I attempted to comfort her, because false hope is a common source of human pain.

I said, “Trust me, JoAnn, you don’t need to think about that anymore. You know about tropic hypothermia? Warm water hypothermia, it’s the same thing. I need to look it up again to be sure of the details, but I think I’m pretty close. Tropic hypothermia you get in water that’s eighty-two, eighty-three degrees, and it feels like bathwater. Stay in for a couple of hours, and you won’t even notice that your body’s core temperature is gradually dropping to match the temperature of the water. But that’s what happens.

“I didn’t memorize the tables exactly, but in water that’s in the low eighties, even a healthy person might survive for only twenty-four hours or so. I checked it our first day out—the water temp here’s seventy-seven degrees. I doubt that Janet or the other two made it through the second night still conscious.”

I was wrong, as I would learn later. Absolutely wrong in the face of the facts and the newest research data. Like mostly poorly informed people, though, I spoke with a conviction so firm that JoAnn was convinced.

“Oh God, Doc, that’s so sad. But they were wearing wet suits … wouldn’t that make it—”