Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (11 page)

Dave gave Jan a rub on the shoulder, saying, “You all right?” Jan nodded her head in the affirmative. After a few minutes spent making sure Jan was comfortable, Dave went back down the steps to the ever-waiting
Sophie. She wasn't directly at the bottom of the ladder where he'd told her to stay. As Dave climbed down, he wondered why she hadn't trotted over to greet him.

“Tuck. Tucker,” he called when he still didn't see her. He waited a minute.

“Tuck. Sophie.” His heart quickened. When no happy pup came bounding, Dave swore. There were not many places to hide on the boat and it wasn't Sophie's way to be difficult. He ran downstairs into the bedroom. He made his way along the side rails to the front deck where Sophie had spent so much time with Jan and Bridget. He saw that she wasn't there either.

In that instant, with a terrible sick certainty, he knew that she was gone. Time stood still.

But not for long.

“Jan! Hit the man-overboard button!” he yelled. “What? What's happened?” Jan yelled, scrambling for the button.

Dave knew that those first few seconds would be vital if they were to stand any chance of spotting Sophie. Fighting his rising panic, he kept it together as he leaned over the rails, making his way all over to see if she was just over the edge. “Sophie's gone. She's gotta be around though,” Dave yelled out. The boat came to an eerie stop as Jan and Dave began to scream her name. Jan could feel her heart pound.
Was this really happening?

Fighting his rising panic, Dave raced inside for the
binoculars. It wasn't even mid-morning but the day had become really overcast and the sky was now closer to the gray of Sophie's fur than it was to the sparkly, sultry days Queensland is famous for.

Dave scanned the water and Jan scrambled downstairs. She was telling herself that all the time Sophie had spent in the water with the family would mean she'd be able to swim. She'd be OK. But the weather was turning against them. “It was gray, it had become not a nice day and so even if she'd been close, we couldn't have seen her little head,” Jan explains.

Jan took the binoculars from Dave, who hurried up to the flybridge. They decided he would drive the boat back and forth and survey from up there, and Jan would scan from down on the deck.

When their binoculars and yelling yielded no swimming pup, Jan's panic really set in.
How could she have disappeared so quickly? What if Sophie had hit the side of the boat? She could have hit the foam and swallowed a mouthful and drowned. The tides could slam her into rocks, knocking her unconscious or worse. Another boat could easily miss her, running her over. Worse yet, the
Honey May
could miss her and run her over.

The Griffiths drove around, zigzagging and retracing the path back towards Hesket and Aspatria. Maybe Sophie was treading water in the spot she went overboard. The sky darkened even more and the day cooled as they called Sophie's name. The water was so sloppy that it was hard for Jan to keep her balance and focus
the binoculars. She began to see things—every white cap became Sophie; every jumping fish or wrinkle in the horizon her sweet dog. She was desperate to catch just a glimpse of those perky blue-gray ears. But with every minute that passed, Jan knew the odds they were playing against were worsening. If Sophie was alive, if she was out there swimming, there were so many natural forces to contend with.
What if she really had hit her head but was still alive, thrashing about out in there? What must she be feeling? Terror. She must be so confused. She would be expecting them to come and scoop her up and wondering why on earth she was out there alone. Could she see
Honey May
and see Jan and Dave yelling over the sides? What if she was watching them, trying to call out but unable to bark. Was she keeping her head above the water?

Dave was peering across the ocean and imagining Sophie all alone out there.
How could the girl possibly survive? It was water forever.
He had looked out to sea so many times, from his board as a surfer and from
Honey May
as a boat owner, and felt such a sense of fulfillment and peace. He loved the vastness and the energy. But he knew the potential for disaster and since learning more about boating, he was even more aware of it. The idea of Bridget or Ellen swimming out there on their own, injured and terrified, was too much for him to handle; and Sophie was so much more vulnerable. She had no concept of tides or sharks. She had no concept of being alone in the world. And it was he who was responsible.

The guilt set in instantly for both of them. Jan was
loathing herself.
Why had she called Dave up to the flybridge? Why had they left Sophie alone? They never did, ever ever, and now she was out there somewhere. She hated to be away from them. How could they have been so stupid?

Jan and Dave were thinking all of this and yet saying none of it. They were in emergency mode and their mission was to find Sophie. Their silence was imperative: speak and all their fears would become real.

Dave was alternating between searching and driving, rushing up the ladder to drive
Honey May
forward and anchor her again so they could stop and thoroughly search the area without the noise of the engine interfering with a chance bark or howl. They stopped for ten-minute intervals, edging their way around the north side of Aspatria, then getting as close to Hesket Rock as they safely could. They stopped and again yelled Sophie's name over and over.

“Sophie! Sophie Tucker! Here girl! Tuck! Where are you Sophie? Tucker!” They listened and they squinted and they hung themselves over
Honey May
's railings. They knew every minute that passed was likely to sweep Sophie further from them. They didn't know where she went overboard, exactly, but they'd let her out of their sight for fewer than ten minutes, which in boating talk is equal to far longer. The tide had been high at around half past eight, about ninety minutes before they lost Sophie. This meant that it was gearing up for its peak speed in the next hour and a half. The tide was sweeping north past Scawfell and beyond all the islands.

Why couldn't they see her? How long could she swim out there and why was she not swimming right alongside
Honey May,
looking up at them with those gorgeous, trusting eyes, just ready to leap back onboard the tender? She was a strong swimmer but how could she possibly cope with the tides out there that were fierce enough to make
Honey May
rock and to make Jan throw up? Or what if she was swept over coral and sliced like a razor blade? What if she was bleeding? There were sharks that could take one chunk out of her and she'd be a goner—even if there were no sharks to find her, she could bleed to death very quickly. Oh, why couldn't they see her? Why couldn't they see her?

As the Griffiths searched and motored, anchored and searched and hollered, their energy went from methodical to frenzied and back to matter-of-fact. Dave was going through all the tide information in his head as he yelled, “Tuck!” and ran back and forth to the GPS system to track as accurate a path as they could. They tried to stay focused as they drove around; they would not give up.

Jan focused her binoculars over to Aspatria, which was about three nautical miles away. She could just see the shoreline, the ripples of waves lapping up and off it. In the now overcast tone of the day, the island looked threatening. It did not look like a place of tropical refuge but a rocky, remote landmass amid a terrible ocean that was so far from their family home and so far from where Sophie had always been safe. Jan looked out into the water and felt ill. This ocean that she had grown up
alongside, that had represented so much of the good life that they had worked towards, now seemed to have claimed an irreplaceable part of their lives. Jan couldn't imagine seeing a pup on shore and as the time passed, she could not and did not want to imagine Sophie swimming alone in the water. She was so little and the ocean so eternal.

Experienced seamen will tell anyone chartering a boat that if someone goes overboard, you never take your eyes off them or you'll never find them. “You've got no hope,” says a friend of the Griffiths', Warren Hill, a skipper, diver and all round seaman who has been making his living from the ocean since 1973. “If your dog goes overboard, you're not going to hear them bark, are you? Unless you see it happen, they're gone.”

The longer they looked, the more they'd boated miles off course, out into the Coral Sea where the islands disappeared and there was only deep blue and sky all the way to the horizon. When they were hoarse from shouting Sophie's name, the Griffiths had to accept that they'd done as much as they could.

Jan and Dave couldn't look at each other. They'd been circling for two hours, looking and shouting for Sophie. They wanted to give her every chance. But they were also in shock and could think nothing but the worst: no matter how long they looked, Sophie was not going to survive out there. They couldn't admit it to each other but they knew what the other was thinking. It was time to keep moving. The decision was intensely
painful but they were too upset to achieve anything further if they kept looking.

Dave's instinct was to go home. How were they going to moor out at Scawfell and mingle in paradise with their friends, knowing that their darling Sophie was lost? “I just didn't see that there was any hope: she was gone,” Dave recalls. They had circled the area and called out her name. But she was a dog and had gone overboard and there was no sign of her. This was the ocean, and about as far and deep out into it as they could have taken her.

Jan's instinct was the opposite: how could they go home with no dog? Jan's rationale won out. They continued on their planned course. Jan had one bit of hope left:
Maybe, just maybe, we'll come across Sophie along the way or tomorrow when we're on our way home. Maybe she'll somehow know where we're headed—she's been with us to Scawfell, and make her way there. Or maybe, by some miracle, she'll have made it to Aspatria, not so far from where we lost her
. Jan wasn't ready to accept defeat. It just didn't feel right or real; it was only that morning that Sophie was sniffing and trotting about behind first her, and then Dave, the three of them on a leisurely weekend away. Now, Sophie was gone, just like that, it seemed, and they were helpless to find her.
How could she just disappear?
She had to be out there. Jan's maternal instinct was keeping her hope alive even though her heart was aching. It was very likely that Sophie was dead.

The assumption was so strong, the shame so stunning, that Jan and Dave did not discuss the possibility of alerting the authorities. Search parties would have been in place were Sophie a person. It would generally take three to five days for rescue workers to conclude that someone was unlikely to be found alive, and a week for them to call off searches altogether. It took Jan and Dave several hours of very quickly dwindling hope to decide that their 45-pound dog, so much smaller and more vulnerable than a person, was most likely gone. Drowned. Aspatria was over three nautical miles away, St. Bees another half a mile. The tides were turning rapidly and Dave knew from his research that the highest tides on the east coast of Australia were near Mackay. The best thought Jan had was that she had taken a gulp of water and quickly passed out—that she was barely aware. There were too many worst-case scenarios for the two of them to bear.

In the predator-infested waters of the Great Barrier Reef, Jan and Dave knew there were many fates worse than drowning. It was in these waters that famed crocodile hunter Steve Irwin met his end in 2006, pierced in the heart by a ray he'd come too close to. If stingrays could kill a burly man who handled crocodiles for a living, imagine the damage to Sophie. It would only take a scratch or a bite from any number of marine creatures to weaken her and to send the scent of her blood leaking out through the reef.

There were also lethal sea snakes, giant manta rays,
sponges encased in glass crystals that could cause poisonous lesions, fire hydroids that looked like plants and stung like wasps, and so many types of jellyfish, including the box jellyfish that could kill a human in minutes. Not to mention the sharks. Although there were nets and drumlines—baited drums that were less risky than nets to marine life and were attached by one line to the seafloor, another line to a shark hook—all through the reef in an effort to keep beaches more people- than shark-friendly, there were many sharks enjoying life in the reef. Whale sharks preferred plankton to flesh, but one nip from any sort of shark tooth was enough to have a dramatic impact on a 45-pound pup. Hammerhead and tiger sharks, one, two, even three yards long, had been known to take a bite out of anything fleshy they encountered, whether they were going in for the kill or a quick chew.

The thought of Sophie's little legs and her cuddly body dangling under the water for every curious or hungry shark or fish was too grisly for Jan and Dave to contemplate.

In fact, there was much that Jan and Dave were not able to contemplate. They had switched into action mode the minute they discovered Sophie missing, but now they were being overtaken by shock. They had conflicting instincts—conflicting between each other as well as within themselves. Neither of them could quite believe Sophie had gone overboard and neither could imagine exactly how she disappeared so instantly. The
reality that she was gone was far from sunken in, but it also seemed preposterous for them to imagine that she was anything but gone. Already, her absence was palpable because ordinarily, she was always around. She should have been there as they eventually continued to Scawfell. She should have been following them, looking up at them, asking with her eyes,
What now? What's happening? Where are we going?