Gardner told us that she and Janet spent approximately thirteen minutes on the wreck, then started back up. When they were fifteen feet from the surface, they made a safety decompression stop of about three minutes. Then they surfaced. Gardner said she was shocked by what she saw.
“Only about three feet of the boat’s bow was sticking out of the water, and it was capsized. I couldn’t believe it. Janet was in shock, too, and we started swimming toward the boat. We couldn’t see Michael or Grace, and Janet started yelling out Michael’s name. Michael finally answered, but we still couldn’t see them because of the waves. The seas were running about four feet now which, as I told you, meant they were eight feet high or so from the trough. When you’re out there swimming… when you’re out there alone in the water, trying to swim, you spend a lot of time in the trough.”
I didn’t realize how quiet it had become until Amelia paused, then stretched her legs cat-like, giving herself some time, perhaps, to regain emotional control. There was a light breeze drifting out of the mangrove bog from the southwest, carrying the tumid odors of sulfur, tannin, iodine, and salt. The breeze touched the halyards of sailboats, caused a random, indifferent tapping, and carried across the water the sump -sound of the pump to my big fish tank.
No one was talking now. There was no fidgeting. All attention was on Amelia Gardner and the words her lips formed, everyone seeing the scene, the slow tragedy of it re-creating itself inside the minds of us all.
She said, “Janet swam straight to the boat while I swam toward Michael’s voice. When I got closer, I could see Michael and Grace in the water, drifting away. They both had their BCD vests inflated, with the tanks still attached, but they weren’t wearing them; they were using them as floats. They couldn’t get back to the boat because they weren’t wearing flippers, and the waves were pushing them farther and farther away. It was awful.”
Gardner told us that she and Janet swam to Michael and Grace, grabbed them, and helped the two jettison the tanks from their backpacks and get into their inflated vests. They then swam back to the boat, jettisoned their own weight belts, and hung on to the exposed length of the anchor line that was attached to the bow. There, Amelia said, she checked her watch. It was 3 P.M.
I didn’t want to interrupt, but had to. It was an important point. I asked her, “What color was your weight belt?”
She looked at me oddly. “Orange,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
I said, “Janet’s weight belt was a kind of blue-green. Teal, I guess you’d call it. Were the weight belts found? Did anyone go down and look?”
Now she was nodding, realized the implications. “Weight belts are so heavy, they would have dropped like rocks. If my story’s true, they’d be side by side. That’s what you’re saying. Maybe on top of one another.” She paused, still staring at me. “No. No one has gone down to confirm my story.”
I knew she was thinking about what we’d discussed earlier, but she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she continued.
“So… after we surfaced, and when things settled down, our first question, of course, was, what happened? Michael said he didn’t know. He said that he and Grace climbed up the dive ladder at the back of the boat and took off their vests and fins. Then he went to the front to take off the rest of his stuff. When he looked back, he said he was shocked to see water coming in over the transom where the engines were attached. The salvage divers told me later that, when they found the boat, it was still in gear. What must have happened was, Michael had Grace run the boat while he set the anchor, and she must have switched off the engines while they were still in forward. As most of you know a lot better than me, a boat won’t start when it’s in gear.
“But that still doesn’t explain why the boat was sinking, of course. Michael couldn’t figure it out. He talked a lot about that later, when it was dark. He said maybe the bilge pumps weren’t working, maybe one of the scuppers got plugged or something. He just didn’t know. With water flooding over the transom, he said the boat immediately started to tip sideways. He said it happened so fast, just like that, and that he and Grace jumped overboard. They didn’t have time to make a call on the radio, nothing. I remember thinking to myself that, when we were back on land, we’d find out exactly what happened.”
As Gardner spoke, I was calculating in my own mind what might have happened. My guess was, the boat was already sinking when they arrived at the Baja California. Or, at the very least, already had water in the inner hull. Why else would it have turned turtle after only a few minutes of inattention? If someone had stayed aboard, the results might have been very different.
I listened to Gardner say, in a weary, weary voice, “When we came up, though, and saw that the boat had capsized… it was awful. That began the longest night of my life.”
The four of them floated there, hanging on to a rope that was connected to the swamped boat, which, in turn, was held fast by several hundred feet of anchor line. The wind had picked up even more, and the waves, Amelia said, seemed a lot bigger than they had that morning.
Their plan was simple because they had no alternatives: to hang on to the rope, stay close to the boat, and wait for the Coast Guard to come and get them. Back on Marco, Sherry Meyer knew where they planned to dive and was expecting them back in time for dinner. She’d figure out soon enough that something was wrong and call for help.
For the next four hours, Gardner told us, she and her three companions floated on their backs alongside the boat, staying close to one another to keep warm. They tied an orange life jacket and a white bumper to the end of the rope, and Walker looped the rope into her flotation vest. The sun set at 5:38 P.M., and the crescent moon set an hour later. It was a black night, with stars hazed by tumbling clouds.
“By the time it got dark, the wind was blowing pretty hard. I was scared like I’ve never been scared in my life. I was shaking, my whole body was shaking down to the bones. I didn’t understand then if it was because of the cold or because I was just so absolutely terrified. I know the others were scared, too. But we kept the conversation light and tried to keep a cool head about everything. It’s weird, but when you know everyone’s fighting to stay calm, it sort of validates what you’re pretending to do. We talked about how this would be a story to tell our grandchildren. Someone said that we’d be best friends all our lives after this.”
Claudia hadn’t spoken a word, but now she did, and everyone leaned a little to hear her, because she talked in a small, small voice.
“How was my sister? How did Janet react? Did she maybe talk about something that I ought to know about?”
Emotion has a contagious component, and I watched Amelia wrestle to control herself, then gulp back Claudia’s tears. I watched her sit there, eyes shining, taking slow, deep breaths before she answered, “She was unbelievable, Claudia. I’m not saying that to make you feel good. I knew her for, what, two days, and I consider her one of the finest people I’ve ever met, just because of the way she handled herself that night. Janet, Grace, and Michael, they were all good people. I know that especially because… well, I’m going to admit something to you. It’s something I haven’t told the other families. I hired a private investigator to do background checks on them. That’s how paranoid I got when I started hearing all the nasty little stories about why we were out there. I wondered if the three strangers I’d met had somehow involved me in something I knew nothing about.