by Casey, Susan
Wind speed had risen to the point where the anemometer, a weather gauge positioned near East Landing, had broken into pieces, half of it sailing off into the sky. The Weather Voice delivered a continuous loop of information, though by now it had lost all credibility, and no one believed a word it said. And it had a lot to say, all of a sudden: “High surf advisory continues from Point Arena to Point Piedras Blancas. A series of strong systems have moved into the Pacific Northwest. In addition to the large swell, gale-force northwest winds are forecast over much of the coastal waters this evening, adding to the hazardous sea conditions. Mariners are urged to exercise extreme caution. Those in and near the surf zone should take necessary action to protect themselves and property from dangerous sea conditions.”
We had been listening to the radio every single day and had never heard the Voice talk about anything but numbers. Certainly, it had never dispensed advice. The Voice had never before seemed agitated or perturbed, never so judiciously inclined. It was an alarming development.
“This is the Farallones,” Peter said, lighting the stove. “You can never tell it what to do.” He was making dinner, still wearing his jacket and his Giants cap, sweeping armfuls of half-eaten entrées out of the refrigerator and into a big pot. He sighed and leaned both elbows on the counter, looking out the kitchen window, which rattled and shook with every jolt of wind. Actually, the whole house seemed to be twisting.
As we sat down to eat, Peter pulled out the journals. “I’m not going to write that much about the helicopter incident,” he said. “What’s there to say? Buncha shit went in the drink.” His eyes were red with exhaustion and stress. “It has been a trying day.”
There had been two attacks today, both in Maintop, but the weather had sapped everyone’s energy and details were few. Peter, who’d been on Sharkwatch duty for both, described them with haiku brevity: “Big sharks. Lotta thrashing. Everywhere. Red.”
A fat and sinister moon hung over the ocean, making it somewhat easier to check on Just Imagine. Luckily I’d left the mast light on, and it was a simple thing to stick one’s head out the front door every half hour, confirm that the light was jouncing around in the same place, and then duck into the house. Seemingly, the worst was over; it was a foregone conclusion that if the sailboat had survived this day, it would make it through the night. After dinner, everyone had turned in except for Kristie and me, and we sat in the living room, reading. I was buried in the journals again, deep into an account of a ship called Grunt V that had a near miss here in 1994. “Sea very lumpy,” someone had written. “Rain squalls. At high water Grunt V hit submerged rocks. Damage to both props and rudders. Current and swells carried boat to northwest end of Fisherman’s Bay—bounced and grounded broadside to breaking waves. 12 passengers stranded on Southeast Farallon. Called urgent Mayday.” The account made for an uncomfortable reminder about the sailboat, and at ten o’clock I dashed out, glimpsed the mast light, watched it gyrating for a second, and dashed back in. “Just Imagine is still out there!” I wrote in my notebook. “THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.”
At 10:45 the day’s fatigue caught up with me, and I was about to turn in, but instead of heading straight up the stairs, I found myself opening the front door for one last yacht check. I fully expected to see the mast light; this final peek was just for good measure. Stepping outside and down the front steps, I hunched to meet the wind’s blast. The sky was overloaded with stars; they seemed crammed into every square inch of the night. Which is why it took me a moment to get my bearings—which glittering pinprick belonged to the mast light? Confused, I looked to where it had been only forty-five minutes earlier and couldn’t spot it. I stared harder. It wasn’t there. Surely this is a mistake, I told myself. My night vision, some sort of delusion. I tore barefoot down the cart path, into the teeth of the gale. There was no mast light. There was no sailboat. In shock, I sprinted back to the house and flew up the stairs. “The mast light is gone! The boat is gone!” I turned and ran back down to the landing with Peter and Scot on my heels. We looked out. Waves churned over the anchorage, but the entire area was barren, yachtless. “Where the hell did it go?” I yelled. And then we saw it: a barely visible twinkle of Just Imagine’s only light, galloping over the horizon.
Chapter 11
We seem to be going all to pieces. The day commenced badly…. No schooner; no change in the weather; tobacco giving out, and not a grain of good humour to be had in the market.
—CHARLES WARREN STODDARD, WITH THE EGG PICKERS OF THE FARALLONES, 1881
OCTOBER 10–11, 2003
The ocean is filled with unfinished stories: endings with unknown beginnings, blind guesses where there are usually facts. On a blustery and frigid December day in 1981, the nineteenth to be exact, a yellow surfboard washed ashore at Asilomar Beach, near Monterey. Two men, who happened by on their way to do some surfing of their own, stumbled across it. The board sent a ghastly message: A massive, ragged half circle had been ripped from its center. And its provenance was all too well known: It had belonged to a twenty-four-year-old surfer named Lewis Boren, who had last been seen taking advantage of a fifteen-foot storm swell, surfing by himself just north of Pebble Beach. Boren was nowhere in evidence now. He had disappeared as of yesterday, and suddenly it was clear why, and how.
Later, after the board was examined and found to be smeared with blood that wasn’t Boren’s (rather, it belonged to the shark); after the scientists who examined the gaping hole concluded that the great white responsible was one of the largest ever documented—twenty feet long, or more—a memorial bonfire was held on the beach. Boren’s surfing compatriots fed their boards into the flames as an offering to the shark gods and stared at the black water, wondering how they would find the heart to get back out there. When the body, identifiable by, among other things, a seagull tattoo on the right shoulder, was discovered half a mile up the beach, most of the chest cavity had been torn away, suggesting that the shark had sheared through both Boren and his surfboard in one mighty bite as he was paddling to catch a wave.
“We want him dead or alive,” a self-proclaimed shark hunter named David Fisse announced at a press conference, vowing that he would hunt the creature all the way to the Farallones, where the man-eaters were known to hide out. “That shark killed someone,” he said indignantly. “That’s murder to me.” Fisse and two assistants, including a Modoc Indian whom Fisse claimed could “shoot eyes out at two hundred yards,” arrived in Monterey with an eighteen-foot aluminum skiff full of knives, shotguns, rifles, pistols, and a “bang stick”—a three-foot pole topped with a .38-caliber charge. Using this weapon, he explained, he intended to swim beneath the shark’s jaws and deliver a shot to the spinal cord. The hit would incapacitate the shark but stop short of killing it, at which point he would lasso its tail and tow it back to the marina, where it would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Fisse acknowledged that there were some potential complications with his plan. “A shark is tremendously strong,” he told reporters. “I might antagonize him—they can do a lot of damage.” For protection while diving, he planned to wear a motorcycle helmet. The hunt hit a snag when Fisse, neglecting to don a wetsuit for his first foray into fifty-degree Monterey Bay, developed hypothermia, forcing a rescue by a charter fishing boat. “The feeling is he’s a donkey or a knucklehead,” the charter captain said afterward, adding that by the time he was yanked from the sea, Fisse had been “pretty far gone” and on the verge of drowning.
The professionals stepped up next, two men from Florida who claimed to have collectively captured some four thousand sharks for aquariums, including eight great whites. They, too, held a press conference. Their goal, they explained, was to help scientists discern why white shark attacks were on the upswing, and to that end they planned to catch the animals using longlines baited with bonito and Spanish mackerel. Sponsors had signed on to fund the mission, dubbed the Great White Expedition, which would be shoving off from Fisherman’s Wharf that weekend. Their first destination?
The Farallon Islands.
Despite the concerted efforts, the shark that had killed Lewis Boren evaded all attempts at capture, and she (for twenty feet was clearly Sister-sized) was never seen again. Maybe she was one of the female sharks who returned to the Farallones every other year, one of the semimythical twenty-footers who had amazed Peter and Scot and Ron over the seasons. Maybe it was even Stumpy, chasing down yet another surfboard. No one would ever know. She had vanished beneath the waves.
WHO DO YOU CALL WHEN YOU’VE LOST A YACHT? AND WE REALLY AND truly had. Lost a yacht. In less than an hour, Just Imagine disappeared from sight, even through the scope. As the boat approached the horizon it was riding sideways, broadside to the terrible swells, and the mast light lurched through the darkness, rising and falling and bucking and yawing in a procession of twenty-foot free falls. At the edge of visibility the sky imploded into the sea, leaving one vast black question mark out there, unknowable as outer space. Until the sailboat vanished, we could see that it was heading south, but there was the hope that it wasn’t also heading east, toward land.
There had been a brief but tense standoff on the landing, all of us shouting as the wind swallowed our voices. Peter had wanted to launch the whaler immediately and go after the sailboat and then—well he wasn’t exactly sure what then, but at least it would be something. Later, he described a faint path that he had seen on the ocean’s surface, an improbable calm corridor between the swells that he believed he could have followed to the yacht. He admitted that once there, however, he probably would’ve taken a flying leap and tried to land on Just Imagine, something I’m certain that he would’ve done and that he might have even pulled off, against the odds. However, a miss of any kind in these conditions was likely to be permanent. The stakes were far too high to contemplate, and Scot had quietly but firmly emphasized that no one was going out in any boats. In fact, we shouldn’t even have been standing at East Landing during a storm this ferocious. In the past, waves had swept people from the island.
Without Scot’s assistance, the option of launching our own search-and-recovery mission was off the table. The attempt would have required all hands. Somebody would have had to drive the whaler through the twenty-foot swell; somebody else would have been needed to crane it back up in the forty-knot wind. Moonlight glanced off seething boils in the gulch beneath the boom, and surf exploded against the cliff, shattering like a crystal goblet hurled at a wall. If it wasn’t suicide to drop a seventeen-foot boat in there tonight, it was something very near to it.
I saw the truth of this register in Peter’s eyes, and he seemed to snap back from the extreme place that compelled him to act, despite the dangers. It was a mind-set formed by a quarter century of experience on this island, by rescuing people and boats and animals and pulling off landings that nobody else could’ve managed, by countless hours of face time with great white sharks, by successfully walking a razor-thin line between bowing to nature in its more furious moments and challenging it to an arm wrestle. He was hard-wired to fix any problems that arose out here, with giant swaths of duct tape if necessary, with jury-rigged parts and triple-tied ropes and no hope of an easy or convenient solution. Even so, when the moment passed and we backed away from the whaler, I felt a wave of relief roll over all of us, Peter included.
I held out the dim hope that the coast guard would fetch the sailboat, sort of like a Triple-A of the sea. Cash would be required, I assumed, perhaps large amounts of it, but surely we could get Just Imagine back with a few well-placed Maydays? I asked if this was the case; no one knew. Things had never happened this way before. Among all the wrecked and missing boats, the lost boats, the boats with engine trouble and wrong-place-wrong-time misfortune, there had never been a renegade yacht covered in dried blood and hissing shit out of its deck fixtures, lighting out for the far Pacific with no one on board, towing the valiant Tubby.
The nearest radio was located in the carpentry shop, about fifty yards from the landing. It was a long, low building with a faint hobbity tinge, filled with every possible tool and widget, a competent person’s miniature heaven. Peter reached for a handheld receiver that was mounted on the wall. It was only then that I noticed his ensemble: He was wearing his heavy weather jacket, his omnipresent knee-high rubber boots, and his faded Hawaiian-print boxer shorts. I stood beside him in my bare feet as he hailed the coast guard on channel 16, the emergency marine frequency. We were expecting solace, I suppose, in the form of smart, can-do action from the nation’s front guard of the seas, but the response was not reassuring.
The operator’s voice was groggy and slurred, as though we’d just woken him up. He sounded approximately twelve years old. Peter launched into the awkward one-way conversation that radio communication requires, explaining that a sixty-foot sailboat had broken its mooring at Southeast Farallon Island and was now cantering, skipperless, across the ocean.
“How many people on the vessel?” the operator asked, after having already been told the boat was unmanned.
“No people on board,” Peter said. “It is a derelict boat. Over.”
“What is the Farallon Island? Is that the name of the vessel?”
“Uh, negative,” Peter said. “We are on Southeast Farallon Island. The vessel’s name is Just Imagine.”
Between yawns, the operator clarified the extent of our predicament. The coast guard, he said, would do nothing to help us unless there were people aboard the sailboat as it spun across the sea, propelled by riot wind into the shipping lane. Our only hope, he said, was to roust a private marine salvage company and persuade it to chase down Just Imagine. And just like that, we were shunted to the mercenary world of for-hire yacht retrieval.
Marine salvage laws have existed for about three thousand years, and they’ve changed surprisingly little since then, the idea being that the smorgasbord of troubles you can get into at sea hasn’t changed much since then either. Snatching an imperiled vessel from a wreckage fate is dangerous business, the reasoning goes, and so the law provides for a “salvage reward” going to whomever makes the attempt. Fair enough, in theory. But the “salvage reward” itself is notorious, involving a usurious sliding scale of fees ranging from 1 percent of the boat’s value—to 100 percent. The amount of payola has to do with a subjective interpretation of exactly how endangered the vessel was, what type of paperwork a rescuee has signed and under which conditions, and other subtle distinctions that are well known only to marine salvagers. Inevitably, the average recreational boater is shocked when the person he’s hired to rescue his boat turns around and, rather than producing the maritime version of a towing bill, demands an ownership stake. And inevitably these disputes end up in court. But the laws are clear, if seemingly piratical: Whoever first set foot on Just Imagine would be able to lay some sort of claim to it. Power and Motor Yacht magazine summed up the salvage philosophy in a quick sentence: “Face it, the guy has you over a barrel.”
Alternately, someone who didn’t care to spend months in litigation, someone who might have just been minding his own business in the middle of the ocean and happened upon an empty sixty-foot steel-hulled yacht, could simply board, and take everything. Drifting boats had been found with their roofs sawn off, their furniture ripped out, the electrical equipment long gone—stripped to the hull. And these weren’t always happenstance meetings: Certain people listened to emergency broadcasts like the one we’d just made, and then set out after the runaway boats. In our case, they would also be receiving an impressive selection of women’s size-small Capilene long underwear, a handcrafted Ouija board, and several decent vintages of Italian wine. Then again, Just Imagine’s topside smell would probably scare off any potential looters.
As the emergency marine operator was signing off, his hands washed of us in less than five minutes, he actually said to Peter, “Have a good day!”
Scot stared at the radio in disbelief: “Did he really just say, ‘Have a good day? ’”
“I can’t quite believe it,” I said. “Bu
t I think he did.”
Peter turned off the radio and hung up. It would be better, he said, to interview marine salvagers over the radiophone in the house. Less static; less likelihood of eavesdropping across the airwaves. We stepped out of the building’s shelter into the freight-train wind and fought our way up the cart path. On the front steps, Elias was crouched behind a scope, taking compass readings on the sailboat as it slipped away in the darkness. We moved into the living room, and Scot scanned the numbers.
“It’s heading due south,” he announced. “Downwind. And the wind’s offshore.”
“I think it’ll be okay,” Peter said. He paused. “For tonight.”
Kristie made tea while the three of us huddled into the closet-sized room off the kitchen where the radiophone sat on a desk. Peter dialed. The process was excruciating: Over the start-stop radio connection we had to wake someone up, explain the whole deranged scenario, clarify where the Farallon Islands were, and repeat several times that there was no one aboard the outlaw yacht. The first salvager we called turned us down cold, citing weather, and expressed some doubt that anyone would venture out in this storm. Perhaps, he suggested, we should just sit tight and wait until someone reported a sighting to the coast guard. I tried to imagine us calling Tom the next morning and, when asked what we’d done in the face of the emergency, replying, “Oh, nothing.” Somehow, it didn’t seem like nothing was the thing to do here.
The salvager offered to call another outfit on our behalf, a guy with a bigger boat who might be less intimidated by the monster swells. If the more intrepid yacht wrangler, let’s call him Blackbeard, was willing to help us out, we’d hear from him directly. Before the salvager signed off, though, he asked what the sailboat was doing out here in the first place. “It was a research platform for work on great white sharks,” Peter replied.
