Free 09-Twelve Mile Limit by Randy Wayne White Page B

their eyes away, leaving him alone to whatever was going on inside him. He responded, finally, with a muffled, “I’m a guide, yeah.”
    As Claudia sniffed and touched a finger to her eye, Amelia was shaking her head, close to tears. At last, she said, “After what happened, it didn’t seem like it could possibly get worse. But it did. I learned one lesson out there on the Gulf that I’ll never forget: On the water, one bad thing leads to another and, once it starts, it happens way too fast to do much of anything to stop it. The momentum, I mean. You’re screwed unless you’re prepared way in advance. And we weren’t. We weren’t prepared for anything like what happened next.”
    At 7 P.M. Amelia heard Janet yell, “Hey! Where’d the boat go?” and the anchor line they were holding was ripped from their hands, pulling Grace Walker, who’d tied a life jacket and the anchor line to her vest, under water. The rope pulled Sanford under briefly, too, and he used his dive knife to cut both himself and Walker free.
    “He saved her life,” Amelia said. “How he managed to react so quickly, I don’t know. But he did. I’m aware that a lot of you helped during the Coast Guard search, and you probably heard that someone found a cut line tied to an orange life jacket more than twenty miles southwest of where we started. Well, that’s the story behind it. I guess the only reason the boat stayed afloat as long as it did was because some air pockets got trapped in it when it capsized. Once those air pockets were gone, though, it sank like a stone.”
    So there they were: four people adrift in heavy seas on a November night. At first, there was a general panic among the group. Sanford was yelling, Walker began to cry. But then they got themselves under control once more.
    “‘We’re going to make it,’ Janet kept telling us. She kept saying that we’d make it, we’d all make it, but we had to stick together.”
    Staying together, though, wasn’t easy. Because of the drag of their inflated vests, the waves kept knocking them apart, even when they linked arms to stay together. Worse, because the wind was out of the east, the waves were sweeping them farther and farther from shore. One by one, they began to doubt whether drifting aimlessly was the best thing to do.
    “It was Michael’s idea to swim to the light tower. He told us he’d fished it before, and he guessed it to be three, maybe four miles inshore of where we were. Out there, it’s the only light around. When we were on the top of a wave, it was so bright it was like seeing a camera flash go off. Civilization, that’s what it seemed to represent. And safety. So that’s what we decided to do. Swim for the tower.”
    But if drifting as a group was difficult, swimming as a group was even harder. One reason was that Grace and Michael were no longer wearing fins. They’d removed theirs just before the boat capsized. Another reason was that neither Grace nor Janet was a strong swimmer.
    “Grace kept saying she didn’t think she could make it, and Janet just kept telling her that we had to make it because we didn’t have a choice. She told Grace to think about all the weight they were going to lose, burning all those calories. Funny stuff to keep our spirits up.
    “So we just plugged along, side by side, with me on one end and Michael on the other, Janet and Grace between us. I don’t know how long we swam. But we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. We’d kick toward the light, then a big wave would come out of nowhere and knock us back.”
    Amelia said it was then that she lost all sense of time. They may have swam for only a few minutes, maybe half an hour.
    “I’m sorry,” she told us, “that part is all hazy to me. I remember wondering, ‘Is this really happening?’ Like maybe it was some terrible nightmare. All I could see was that flashing light, and sometimes it seemed like it was a hundred miles away and sometimes it seemed like it flashed right in the middle of my brain. I became