It was a very warm night for late November. Even so, Gardner had gone to her Jeep for a jacket, as if affected by memories of the cold that night three weeks earlier. It wasn’t easy for her to talk about it. There was no mistaking the emotion in her voice, and I admired the way she fought her way through it.
I was holding a plastic cup of beer poured over ice, plus a wedge of squeezed lime, and I took a sip now, as she said, “I met Michael Sanford and Grace Walker when I was in the Keys, then again at a dive club party on Siesta Key. You guys ever eat at the old mullet restaurant there? That’s where the party was. They were with a woman by the name of Sherry Meyer, who was supposed to dive the Baja California with us. Lucky for her, though, she had a cold and didn’t make the trip. I wish to hell we’d all had colds that day-” She touched her hand to Claudia’s arm as she said that; Claudia patted Gardner’s hand in return. “But I guess destiny has its reasons and there’s no going back now. Janet was a friend of Michael’s, and I didn’t meet her until I got to Marco. He’d rented a three-bedroom condo-him in one room, we four women in the other two-and we went to bed early Thursday night so we could get up early Friday.”
Because I’d seen still shots of them in the newspapers and on television, I had a fixed mental image of both Sanford and Grace Walker, and impressions of both of them that may or may not have been valid. Michael Sanford could have been a fashion model-six foot four or so, probably 220 pounds, with the jaw, the dimpled chin, and dense, curly black hair that photographs well. Walker was his female, African-American counterpart-busty with makeup and lots of jewelry, a businesswoman in her thirties who was making money and fighting for causes in which she believed. They both knew how to look into the lens of a camera and smile.
Gardner told us that the four of them had left Marco River Marina in Sanford’s twenty-five-foot boat at around 8 A.M. and were headed out Big Marco Pass when Sanford noticed that one of his 225-horsepower Johnsons was overheating. They returned to the marina and had a mechanic switch out a thermostat, which solved the problem.
“Michael bought a second thermostat just in case,” she said. “I suppose most of you’ve heard the rumors that Michael-maybe all of us-ran offshore and sank the boat intentionally for the insurance money. Well, check with the marina. Why would he have bought a second thermostat if he’d planned on sinking his own boat? Why would he have bought a second thermostat if we’d planned on rendezvousing with a drug boat, sinking the Seminole Wind, and escaping? That’s another theory you’ve probably heard.”
Around me, I could see the island fishing guides-eight of them, sitting in their own little group-thinking about it, nodding their heads. Yeah, it didn’t make any sense. If you were going to sabotage your own vessel, you might buy new canvas or pay for a new paint job, just to make it convincing. But a backup thermostat? Very unlikely.
Gardner, an attorney, was already doing a good job of making her case.
On their way offshore, the four divers stopped at a wreck called Ben’s Barge, which is about three miles off Marco. Sanford, a fisherman, wanted to catch some bait so the four of them could fish the Baja California after diving it.
Using tiny hooks and bits of shrimp, they filled the stern’s bait well with small bluegill-shaped fish called pinfish.
“While we caught bait, we discussed what we wanted to do,” Gardner told us. “We were listening to the weather channel on the radio, and Michael told us it wouldn’t be real nice out there, but it should be okay. A couple days ago, I had got my hands on the actual forecast from NOAA. It was ‘small craft should exercise caution, wind out of the east southeast, fifteen to twenty knots, seas four to six feet, with bay and inland waters choppy.’”
She saw the guides react, and said, “I know, I know. We shouldn’t have gone. The temptation is to put the blame on Michael. It was his boat, he’d made the dive several times. But that’s bullshit. We were all adults, all certified divers, and we all agreed. We wanted to dive the Baja California, and, because we were still close to Marco Island, I guess we figured we would be protected from an east wind. It seemed fairly calm three miles out. What I didn’t know at the time was that you don’t measure a wave from its trough. You measure it from sea level. So, when we were anchored on Ben’s Barge, I thought the two-foot waves we were seeing were actually four to six feet high. That changed pretty quickly.”
Amelia said the seas were considerably worse once they were fifty-two nautical miles offshore and reached the Global Positioning System numbers (GPS) that marked the wreck, but the waves still didn’t seem overwhelming. She remembered Michael Sanford telling the group that it sometimes took him three or four times to get the boat anchored just right, but on that Friday, he dropped the anchor, fed out line, and nailed it first try.
“We could see the wreck on the screen of his electronic bottom recorder,” she said. “The bottom was flat, then all of a sudden there was this long geometric shape jutting up. It looked like a small, flat mountain. Michael explained to us that the little floating shapes we saw above the wreck were fish. There were fish all over it. Like a cloud. Because of that, we decided to fish first, then dive.”
Once again, the guides began to shake their heads. It was not a wise thing to do. Hooked fish send out stress vibrations. Stress vibrations attract predators. Why attract predators before getting into the water?
Amelia said, “We fished for maybe an hour. You know how barracuda will crash a live bait right by the boat? The girls had fun with that. But it was getting a little rougher out and Grace started to feel sick, so we decided to gear up and get into the water because we thought she’d feel better then.”
Gardner said that she paired up with Janet, and Sanford paired with Walker because she and Sanford were the two most experienced divers. “Plus I really liked Janet,” she said. “We hit it off the first time we met. She is… Janet was the sort of woman you know you can trust after just talking to her for a few minutes. With her, there wasn’t going to be any of that catty crap that so many men and women pull. No bitching, no whining. Right away, just being with her a couple of days, I was thinking that the two of us could start doing some dive trips together. Maybe some of you know, but good dive partners are hard to find. Especially women divers, the independent types willing to do some traveling.”
Before they got in the water, according to Gardner, Sanford told them that one of the rules of diving is that you never go off and leave a boat unattended. But, because the Baja California was so deep-it was in 110 feet of water-the divers would only have about fifteen minutes of bottom time, so maybe it was actually safer for them all to go at once. It might be wiser to have four divers together on that deep wreck than go in two isolated sets.
“It’s not like Michael called for a vote or anything,” Amelia said. “But nobody stood up and said, ‘Hey, absolutely not. Someone has to stay in the boat.’ I’ve seen other divers go off and leave their boats lots of times, and, the sad thing is, it was the first time I’d ever been with a group who did it.
“We were fifty miles offshore, there weren’t any other boats around, and I, or Janet, or Grace, should have put a foot down. It wasn’t just Michael’s fault. We all screwed up. But that mistake we made…” Amelia laced her fingers together and bowed her head slightly. “That mistake, leaving the boat alone, it’s when things really started to go south. We had the dive flag up and it never entered our minds that, in fifteen minutes, so much could go wrong.”
The four entered the water together, but when they got to a depth of about thirty feet, Grace Walker indicated that she was having trouble equalizing the pressure in her ears. “We followed Michael and Grace up to ten feet or so and waited until she decided to try it again. But Grace’s ears were still hurting her, I could tell. Michael indicated that he and Grace were going to return to the boat, and I signaled ‘okay.’ Janet and I watched them go to the surface, then we continued our dive.”