It was the boat from Indian Harbor Marina. I didn’t want to believe it. Bern Heller was giving it another shot after being so sick the day before?
No…it was Augie up there on the high flybridge. It looked like his buddy Oswald was beside him. Both wearing yellow rain jackets—Augie shaped like a brick, Oswald pudgy enough to resemble a squash.
Jeth was furious. “If they think they can come out here and chase us off this wreck, they can by God kiss my ass on the county square. Not after what we’ve been through already!”
Our day had not gone smoothly. Javier had failed to show, and then we couldn’t find the wreck. Not at first, anyway. We’d banged, yawed, and surfed toward the horizon for more than an hour in the burly trawler before our electronic navigation equipment told us that we were 12.1 miles off Sanibel Lighthouse.
“We should be right on it,” Jeth had said, then scampered below to use the GPS and a better sonar unit.
He’d programmed the computer with the lat-long numbers and we all focused on the sonar screen as the GPS directed us the last few yards to our destination. For an instant, the wreck appeared on the screen: a geometric shape etched in red sitting on a white digital line that represented sand bottom—soft sand, because the line was thin.
An instant later, the wreck was gone.
Jeth swung the trawler around and tried again. Same thing happened.
Problem was, waves and tidal current were pushing us with such force that it was impossible to stay over the wreck for more than a few seconds. Even with twin diesels, the Island Gypsy wasn’t nimble. It was built for open water cruising, not sharpshooting bottom structure in heavy seas.
After a half-dozen failed attempts to hover above the wreck, Jeth hinted that maybe I’d have to change the dive plan. I told him yes, I could do that, but it would take time, which meant we’d have to come back another day. This kind of sea was no place to experiment with a haphazard underwater attack.
I had a plan. We were going to stick with it.
We’d made marker buoys—used the noodle-shaped Styrofoam floats you see at the beach and a hundred feet of fishing leader to attach them to concrete blocks. The foam noodles were six feet long, red or orange, which would make them easier to see in big water.
My plan was to idle back and forth, watching the sonar, and to drop buoys to create a rough outline of the wreck that would be visible on the surface. Anchoring was going to be tough enough in this mess without a visual reference.
When I told Jeth that I’d scrub the dive before changing the plan, he made a couple more tries and got lucky. He held the sonar’s transducer over the wreck long enough for us to get a buoy out.
After that, it was easier to get the other markers positioned, but things still didn’t go smoothly. Two of the buoys drifted away because they were weighted with only half blocks of cement.
It took me several attempts to swim the boat’s big Danforth to the bottom and get the anchor buried where we wanted it. The sand was soft, which is why the anchor pulled free on the first two tries.
Then one of our three safety lines got fouled in the starboard prop. Bobbing around beneath a brass propeller sawing at a rope wasn’t fun. The prop’s blades were sharp and the propeller dropped like a guillotine as each wave swept past. As I was cutting the rope, I swung my head to avoid the prop and the driveshaft caught me on the side of the head.
Great. Blood in the water and a new scar.
It was after 3 P.M. by the time the boat was positioned and our gear was ready. Everyone aboard had a copy of the dive plan; presumably, they’d gone over it. Even so, I risked offending my pals by insisting on a meeting to review. The maxim sounds as stuffy as a spinster teacher: Plan your dive and dive your plan.
I don’t care if I did seem officious. The term recreational dive is one of those fun misnomers, like recreational sex. Both, if approached recklessly, will put you in the hospital with something penicillin can’t cure. Or in the grave.
Under the covers, spontaneity is good. Underwater, spontaneity is usually bad.
Tomlinson, Jeth, and I would dive. Safety was our only imperative. Salvaging items from the bottom was secondary, I told them.
Along with standard dive systems—inflatable BC vests, gauges, weight belts, regulators, and tanks—each of us would wear heavy gloves, carry a waterproof light, an inflatable six-foot distress buoy, and also a strobe light attached to our BCs. We could activate the strobes below or above the surface by screwing the lens cap tight.
I didn’t have to tell Jeth and Tomlinson that I am aware of at least six people—divers and fishermen—who’d still be alive if they’d carried little pocket-sized strobe lights with them. Both men knew. They’d lived it.
The wreck wasn’t deep, only forty feet. Jeth and Tomlinson were using standard tanks and air, so their maximum safe bottom time at that depth—three atmospheres, for the sake of calculating—was eighty minutes. They could expect their air supply to last around an hour or so but, to be on the safe side, we’d stay down for no longer that forty minutes.
An extra safety cushion was that I was using an Azimuth rebreather system with a nitrox gas mix. If needed, I had a maximum safe bottom time of more than three hours.
Arlis would remain aboard the Island Gypsy, standing by with the additional tank and regulator I’d rigged to a safety line clipped to a big red rubber buoy. If he needed to communicate with us, he would start both engines. The sound of rumbling engines is unmistakable underwater.
The most likely emergency was that our anchor would pull free—the signal for that was to rev the engines at steady three- or four-second intervals, like blowing a whistle. The signal meant: Grab a line and prepare to be dragged along the bottom. Surface slowly.
The emergency signal—or diver recall—would be several short staccato revs of the engine.
Arlis bristled when I told him he had to wear a safety line and a life jacket while we were underwater. “I ain’t never worn that crap, and I never will.”
I was tempted to tell him to stop behaving like an irritable old asshole…and realized I was getting a little irritable myself.
Instead, I reminded him what we all knew but seldom stopped to think about: In rough seas, if we got separated from the boat the odds were against survival. In all likelihood, we’d probably never be found. If Arlis fell overboard and we surfaced one minute later? No more Arlis. If he fell overboard and the boat pulled anchor? We would all die.
The water was warm—eighty-three degrees. Even so, tropical hypothermia, a little-known phenomenon, gradually slows the heart until it stops. Hypothermia wasn’t the primary danger, though. It was the size of the waves and the water color. Under these conditions, it would be unlikely to find a lone swimmer.
I’d tossed a sixty-foot safety line off the stern, a six-foot Styrofoam noodle attached. I pointed at it now. “Have a look.” The noodle was orange, but it was invisible except for a microsecond when it was buoyed to the peak of a wave.
In these seas? For a swimmer, the fatal edge of visibility was thirty yards. Even from the top of a wave. Any farther and the boat would vanish, probably never to be seen again. Nor would a swimmer be visible from the boat.
Thirty yards of separation—that was the distance to the abyss.
“You are wearing the damn safety line,” Jeth told Arlis. “And a life jacket, too.”
A moment later, Jeth saw the Viking hounding toward us, and added, “Sonuvabitch.”
I t was Augie and Oswald all alone in the big white boat with the flybridge tower, bright chrome and red canvas, and outriggers swaying. Half a million dollars of fiberglass, electronics, five-star amenities, and serious naval architecture.