Dark Light by Randy Wayne White

Author:Randy Wayne White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2006-07-14T12:00:00+00:00

26

Jeth is not quick to use profanity—it’s risky with his stutter—but he used profanity now. “Sonuvabitch. We got company. And guess who?”

I was so busy going over our scuba gear, double-checking gauges, regulators, flashlights, strobe lights, and safety lines, that I hadn’t noticed the forty-three-foot Viking sportfisherman dolphining over the horizon toward us.

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.

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