Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (20 page)

When the Griffiths eventually did get out on
Honey May
, the experience was almost more stressful than it was worth. Losing Sophie overboard in an instant had driven it home to Dave how easy it was for accidents to
happen out there. He'd always been cautious and even a little nervous on the boat, but now he wondered if it was possible to be careful enough. He would talk to Bridget about how he kept imagining what it would have been like if they'd lost a person overboard. “It scared the crap out of him,” says Bridget.

Dave became anxious about making sure that everyone was where he could see them while the boat was moving. He spent a lot of his time looking over the edge of the flybridge and reminding everyone on board not to move around too much while the boat was in motion and not to stand close to the edge. He refused to have any more than five people on board. “If he couldn't see someone, he would freak out,” says Bridget. “It turned out to be not such a fun thing for him any more.”

But Dave was determined to get back out there. He knew that trying to regain his confidence on the boat was the only way to get through his grief. He told himself and Jan that they still had each other, and they continued their routines, working, cooking, planning overseas trips, breakfasting at Oscar's every day. But a major part of their lives was missing, and they both knew it.

A
t some point after Brian Kinderman's encounter with her and two or more months since she'd been flung into the wild, Sophie Tucker readied for another swim. It had been months since she'd fed on a steak and months since she'd had her red bowl of water waiting for her whenever she was the least bit thirsty. As far as Keswick residents knew, she was getting scrawnier and mangier by the day. She might have been digging holes and sucking up any water left in the forests, but the island was still experiencing a dry spell, so it couldn't possibly have been much. It didn't seem likely that she'd been sneaking up to the houses for a drink from potted plants, especially since no one had seen her. Brian's pursuit of the dog was the only
substantial interaction anyone had had over there but no one on Keswick doubted that the mysterious hound was having serious trouble finding sustenance—there just wasn't enough food on the island for a grown dog to survive without coming into the houses. It was already scrawny when Brian saw it; it must have been getting worse.

When she was sniffing through the hills and the bush day in and day out, she must have been hanging on for a whiff of meat and devastated when this smell consistently eluded her. That was the smell that would have meant some much needed fat on her bones. But eventually she must have learned to navigate a new set of scents. She was a cattle dog after all, bred to hunt and control animals far larger than herself. Whether it took a week or a month, at some point, Sophie's hunger had to have got the better of her and turned her into a huntress.

The problem was that on Keswick there wasn't a lot for a dog to hunt.

She was probably finding bird eggs or catching pheasants, scrub fowls or curlews, all of which Sophie knew from the backyard at home. Her paw prints on Arthur Bay suggest she was spending part of her days ferreting around the rocks of Keswick's beaches, catching the scuttling crabs with her tongue and trapping scurrying skinks with her paws as they attempted to disappear between rocks.

Perhaps she managed to catch a monitor lizard, creeping up on it in the sun and using her paws to pin
it down by the tail or claw before biting its head off. She'd have had a good meal that way, but it would have been risky. Monitor lizards are fast, stealthy and can be vicious if they feel they are in danger. A swipe or a bite at Sophie could have injured her terribly.

She might well have gone fishing. She loved to swim and must have been feeling increasingly confident in the water; she probably took dips for reasons of both hygiene and refreshment. There are hundreds of fish on the fringes of Keswick, some of them beautiful to look at, but many of them would have been too small to provide a whole lot of sustenance for a carnivorous dog. At high tide, though, meaty fish, like the sweet lip emperor and blue tusk, hover near Keswick feeding themselves on the shoals of tiny fish. Sophie hadn't fished before but the stealth lessons she'd had from Jordy in how to claw down birds might have kicked in. Perhaps Sophie learned to pin a slower, bigger fish down with her paws or to take a bite at it beneath the surface of the water. She might have got lucky and occasionally found some part of a fish washed up on the beach.

What is known is that Sophie was not looking good when Brian saw her less than two months after she went missing from
Honey May
. She was skinny to the point that her ribs were visible, a little dusty, and her face was drawn. She wasn't aggressive or threatening in any way. She was edgy but inquisitive, suspicious and coy. She wasn't healthy looking but also not that bad. Had Brian
had a chance, he'd have plied her with food, but seemingly that wasn't on Sophie's agenda.

Sometime around December 13th, Sophie may have finally awoken to something similar to the smell of meat. The smell, which Jero swears he can sometimes pick up while paddling near St. Bees, was most likely that of goats. It's thought that goats were introduced to St. Bees and other islands up Australia's east coast in the nineteenth century by sailors, as a food source for others who ran into trouble and needed to moor on one of the islands until help was on its way. As goats are wont to do, they have bred and continue to breed. So, in 2007, the QPWS Mackay office decided that the goats posed too great a threat to the native flora and fauna, and that the best form of action would be to gradually eradicate them.

“When we first started we were probably getting six hundred in one cull,” says ranger Ross Courtenay. In three years, the rangers rid St. Bees of over two and a half thousand goats, mostly using helicopters to shoot from the air, but also with some land control. The eradication program model was similar to that adopted in the Galapagos Islands, where eighty thousand goats that were threatening the environment for the island's native tortoises, were eradicated in just fifty-two months. To complete their task, the rangers used Judas goats—animals that had been captured and fitted with radio collars that inevitably found their kind and led the rangers to the herd. For the more wary male goats on St. Bees,
QPWS marine park rangers use sterilized females to lure out the tougher guys.

Animal activists might cringe, but the Parks and Wildlife Service had to choose between feral goats and native flora and fauna—the goats have wreaked havoc on the island's vegetation, which has had all sorts of spin-off effects, such as mini-landslides, which threaten to spill soil into the ocean, affecting the water quality of a wider part of the Great Barrier Reef. The goats, hungry grazers that they are, have also all but devoured the seedlings of the blue gum and poplar gum trees, which the St. Bees koalas eat.

If she wasn't smelling goats on Keswick Island, it's also possible that Sophie was smelling water coming from across the Passage. Unlike dry Keswick, St. Bees has a number of natural springs. Locals know the story of the Bussuttin family who owned Keswick and St. Bees in the early part of the twentieth century and initially used them both as farmland. They had horses and sheep and cattle on both islands but the animals on Keswick would frequently swim the Egremont Passage at nightfall to get to St. Bees, where the family lived. It became clear to the Bussuttins that the animals could sense the water over there.

So Sophie, possibly lured by the smell of either goats or water, prepped herself for another swim. Her survival instincts must have been screaming at her that time was running out; she had to get to the smell of sustenance and she must have known that her only way there was
back across the channel, the Egremont Passage that she had likely already braved at least once before.

The Egremont Passage is one-third of a mile at its narrowest and just over half a mile at its widest. Luckily for Sophie, she could never have known that it has claimed several grown men's lives. In January 2007, two years previously and at the same time of year that Sophie swam it herself, a search went on in the Egremont Passage not an hour after sixty-five-year-old skipper Roy McKibbon dived in to fix an anchor rope attached to his forty-five foot yacht,
Finesse,
and failed to resurface. Locals got into dinghies to search the Passage, with no success, until the Search and Rescue folk requested that everyone clear the water, realizing the possibility of more danger. For three days, Volunteer Marine Rescue workers, along with an Australian Customs vessel full of police divers, searched in 15-square mile grids. A 30-mile aerial search was also conducted. Waves were at ten feet high and the current was rushing at ten knots. McKibbon, who had sailed around the world in
Finesse
, was never found.

Most recently, in September 2010, locals awoke to the sound of helicopters and small planes circling overhead and boats motoring in the Passage. A twenty-one-year-old Irish tourist had disappeared the evening before from the fishing trawler,
Guiding Star
, that he'd been hired to work on just four days earlier. The man went off to the upper deck level to take photos and never came back.
The crew sounded the alarms. Helicopters, police boats, small aircraft, State Emergency Service workers and Volunteer Marine Rescue workers from Mackay and Airlie Beach searched for seven days to find him. By the fourth day, they were looking for a body; any remnants of the boy that his family could say goodbye to. To no avail. He was last seen at five p.m., camera in hand and the glint in his eye of a tourist who believed he was in paradise.

The residents of Keswick Island wouldn't dream of swimming in Egremont Passage and only the keen ones would dare to even paddle it in a kayak at anything other than the hour between low and high tide, when the water is perfectly still.

“I wouldn't like to swim it,” says Brian, who snorkels in the Passage at the cusp of the tide. “All of a sudden I can start to feel the current,” he says, of the moment when the tide picks up and it's time for him to get back to shore. “You really need the flippers just to get out of that current. Once it's going it makes it very difficult.”

Jero Andrews, who propels a blokart—a buggy powered by a windsurfer sail—up and down Basil Bay beach just for fun, and races against his Mackay mates (often, he admits, coming a distant last) shakes his head at the prospect of swimming it himself, let alone Sophie. He monitors the tides on a daily basis and, like Brian, will only get his wave ski out on the Passage in the first or last hour of a tide, when the water is slowing to a still. “Some days I worry that I won't be able
to paddle the one thousand feet back to shore, the tide is so strong,” he says. Currents through Egremont run to the south towards Mackay when the tide is coming in, and north when it's outgoing, up towards the vast Coral Sea.

The tides aren't the only problem. Keswick residents have seen hammerheads, bronze whales and tiger sharks swimming in the Passage, some of them taking residence there for months at a time and scaring off the protected and fragile green sea turtles who lose flippers and their lives.

All these stories feed the Griffiths' horror when they have to confront how close and how often Sophie came to danger after she disappeared off
Honey May
. Sophie wasn't afraid of the water, though any sane human would have been after the ordeal she had suffered at the behest of the ocean. She was still a sea dog and a very experienced one by that point. If the paw prints on the beaches that various Keswick residents spotted are anything to go by, she was swimming most days. The Griffiths imagine her trotting into the waves and swimming around in circles with her tongue lapping out and her ears alert. It would still have been a therapeutic feeling, the salt and cold crunch of the water cleaning her fur and skin before she ambled back onto shore and shook it all out.

So on the December day that she took the channel from Keswick to St. Bees, Sophie wouldn't have had to weigh it up too much—how far it was from Keswick to
the smells on St. Bees, how fast the current in Egremont Passage was really rushing. Had she been able to comprehend that the tides around Keswick in December and January are the highest that they are all year, she might have lost her nerve. Had she realized that she'd be swimming against currents of five to eight and possibly ten knots, which is about five to ten miles an hour—sometimes faster through the channel—she might have stayed on Keswick. But she was a dog and her nose was leading her.

Whether or not she had been tracking the tides in preparation for her swim is impossible to know. It's not out of the question, though: local rangers tell stories of seeing wallabies on the popular resort Hamilton Island, thirty-seven miles northwest of St. Bees, gaze out to sea for days before leaping into the water and swimming a half a mile to neighboring Dent Island.

What is certain is that, for Sophie, the dangerous swim was a matter of life or starvation. It's highly possible that, having covered up to ten nautical miles of ocean in deep shock after falling overboard, and having spent over fifty days with time to spare to watch the tides come in and out of the Egremont Passage, Sophie had worked out when the water was at its friendliest. She might have sat on the shore for hours, watching the sea rise and fall. Whether it was luck or planning, anyone who knows anything about Sophie's ordeal believes that she must have swum the Passage at low tide, because the water was just too fierce at
high tide—its frequent casualties proved it—and would either have swept her out to sea or crashed her up against the coral near the islands.