Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (12 page)

How she had gone overboard was another question. She might have been flung over the railing as
Honey May
rocked through the passage and hit a swell. Then again, while it was choppy and the boat was certainly not just cruising lightly, Sophie had travelled through this passage many times before without problems. She'd travelled through here just weeks ago on that amazing fishing trip. She had never gone near the sides and they'd never had anything close to an accident with her. She was almost always trailing right alongside one of the family or was down below, lying in the doorway of the kitchen when the sun was getting too much for her or when Dave had decided that there was just too much activity and commanded Sophie to get out of the way.

Jan and Dave only really had one explanation for themselves: Sophie had tried to get up the ladder to the flybridge. They'd left her alone and she'd panicked and tried to get up to them. After all, she'd been up there before. In her urgency, she may have forgotten her consistent reluctance to mount the ladder on her own. Perhaps she'd attempted the climb, slipped and toppled
overboard. Or perhaps she'd come around to the side and tried to leap, hit the side and been flung into the ocean. Jan and Dave imagined that she'd made some sort of attempt to get back on the boat, but must have been swept away before they noticed she had fallen. The more they tried to piece together the sequence of events, the more they were forced back to the one indisputable fact: Sophie was gone. She had been a constant companion. She was their buddy and their family. What would they do without her?

It took them less than an hour to get to Scawfell after abandoning the search, by which time it was early afternoon and the sun had come back out. The island was looking as dreamlike as ever, the turquoise water of the bay welcoming the Griffiths to yet another pocket of tropical paradise, the granite rock-bed of the island red and dramatic against the ocean. But Jan and Dave weren't in paradise, they were numb. Neither was talking to the other as Dave moored, unleashing the anchor and throwing ropes overboard in dazed silence.

Ordinarily, mooring was an energetic and bustling affair, with Dave calling out to Jan to unwind this rope and throw that rope precisely “now.” On that evening, as leisure boats pulled up around them, Jan and Dave were doing all they could not to break down completely. For Dave, this meant focusing on securing the boat and getting on with the night. He worked alone, while Jan, biting her lips and struggling to breathe calmly, opened and shut cupboards in the kitchen trying to prepare
something.
But what? Nibbles? Wine? Dinner? How could they eat?
Jan could barely function. She was hoping that their friends would show up and distract them, but she also wanted to crawl into a dark space and go to sleep.

“Eating dinner that night was like chewing on razor blades,” Jan says. The only saving grace was that Ian and Denise did turn up with another couple of friends. The three couples gathered on one of the boats and sat around eating and drinking. Denise and Ian were glowing from their day participating in a Mackay Game Fishing Club competition in which the two of them took a whole lot of wins, including Champion Boat. Denise talked modestly of not only winning the individual competition but of beating Ian—apparently her fiercest competitor—by one Spanish mackerel.

Jan and Dave were doing everything in their power to avoid facing what they were both now thinking was inevitable: that they had lost Sophie and it was their fault. Whether she was out there swimming, which they couldnt quite allow themselves to give up on, or she had drowned instantly, they had let her down and the shock of it all was too much. And they just couldn't bring themselves to tell their friends. Jan feared that if she mentioned Sophie at all, she'd break down completely. She didn't want to do that to them and she couldn't face the grief herself. Jan and Dave did not want to admit what had happened. It was too awful. “We just felt so bad that we'd let her down. She trusted us so deeply. How could we have been so stupid?” says Jan
now, a quiver still lacing her words. Even now, recalling the day they lost Sophie can be too much, causing Jan to close her eyes or simply change the subject.

So Jan and Dave sat there and tried to participate in the socializing. Boats anchored, deck chairs unfolded, the couples fired up a barbecue and opened bottles of wine, and talk of the day was accompanied by the sound of fish sizzling.

At some point, not long after they'd got settled and as the sun was going down, a boat moored close to them. Jan was staring out to the island, unable to stop scanning the shoreline for signs of Sophie. She noticed that these people had dogs and began to watch with interest as they piled into their dinghy at the back of the boat to motor into Scawfell.

“One was a blue cattle dog,” Jan says. She went to stand up from her folding chair but stopped herself. She looked over at Dave who was leaning on the rail, trying to show interest in the conversation around him. Jan put her arm out and nudged Dave on the shoulder, then nodded her head to the family in the tender. She didn't say anything but Dave knew what his wife was thinking.
Someone could have picked her up!

“I was being silly but I started to become quite convinced that these people had rescued her,” says Jan. “I figured they were never going to ‘fess up.' If anyone did find her, they were going to want to keep such a lovely dog.”

The dog wasn't Sophie. It wasn't looking around for Jan and Dave and it wasn't showing any sign of anxiety
or exhaustion. There's no way Sophie would have been so calmly hanging with another family, whether she'd just fallen overboard or not. Sophie didn't run away or befriend other people—she was a sociable dog as long as her family was in sight.

Jan watched the family pull their dinghy up on shore and her heart ached.

She sat, quietly nodding at her friends' stories, faking a half smile and barely able to contribute in her usual animated manner. It was an idyllic scene—three couples relaxing over wine and seafood amid the hoop pine trees and azure waters of tropical Queensland, with few worries but what time they might make their way home the next day. But underneath the small talk, there was dread, and by the time everyone else was tucked in for a good night's sleep, Jan and Dave knew their sleepless nights were just beginning.

On the Sunday morning after Sophie disappeared, with the sunrise over Scawfell Island marking almost a day since Sophie had vanished from the Griffiths' lives, Jan and Dave, sleep deprived and in shock, began the long journey back to Mackay. It was ten in the morning and they well knew that this would be the longest twenty-five nautical miles of their boating lives. What had begun as a social and leisurely weekend cruise, the sort that young couples give up busy, urban lives to move to the Queensland tropics for, had already become a sickening memory.

They decided they would follow what they ordinarily referred to as the scenic route back to Mackay, circle Hesket Rock and Aspatria then head towards St. Bees and take the Egremont Passage, and hope for any chance, miraculous as it had to be, of spotting Sophie. The mood between husband and wife was fragile. Neither of them spoke much but to plan the day, and to avoid the obvious trauma, Sophie's name was not uttered. When Dave spoke, it was to convey distances and directions. They considered the proximity of St. Bees Island to where they had lost her, and Dave realized that if they were to keep any hope up, they had to see if she might have made it ashore one of those islands.

He was more than skeptical. His heart was broken, and he thought there was no way Sophie could be out there. This route was, more than anything, to gain some sense of control over a situation that threatened to pull him to pieces.

Jan responded to his suggestions by nodding and managing a quarter smile. Her breathing was strained, her hands shaky. Both of them tried to muster a flicker of optimism—
could this really still be put right?
—and they did their best to put on a brave face for each other.

“I was just trying to get the picture of her being hit by the wake of the boat out of my head,” says Jan. “I had this horrifying image of her beautiful blue coat floating in the water.”

Dave drove the boat while Jan sat beside him, binoculars in hand. Dave, with one hand on his right thigh and
the other on the steering wheel in a gesture that made him look far calmer than he actually was, squinted through his prescription sunglasses, hoping for any sign of their girl bobbing out there on the water. It was, no question, a long shot, especially after their effort yesterday. If they hadn't been able to see her just minutes after she'd disappeared, what hope was there after a day and a night of tides? But she was a strong dog, she'd been swimming in the ocean all of her young life, and she was a cattle dog with energy to burn. Jan and Dave wanted to imagine that Sophie had swum through the night and would be out there waiting to be picked up.

It would have been terrifying for even the strongest human swimmer, let alone their pampered, adoring Sophie. The idea of her out there alone was so painful. As the day passed, she must have given up on the hope of Jan and Dave coming to rescue her. She would have had to keep moving or she would have sunk. They imagined their treasured dog, only her head poking above the water, jaws clamped, swimming and swimming, moving her legs but not knowing where she was going. Even if she had managed to keep moving, they were horrified by the thought of how scared she'd have been when all the familiar noises of the day—the whirr of boats in the distance, planes and helicopters overhead—gave way to the quiet of the ocean and the sounds of the night. They could only imagine what it must have been like, with the chill of the world going to sleep around her.

They headed towards Aspatria. The expanse of sea separating it from Scawfell looked a little smaller today and Aspatria was a pimple in proportion to Scawfell. Dark rock, thick trees and lots of prickly scrub were all that was visible through binoculars. Dave drove
Honey May
back through the choppy channel that on that day was so much calmer and clearer. Jan wondered,
Had yesterday's conditions been like today's, would they still have their girl? Would their world still be intact?

There was barely a cloud above them and the water was friendly. The couple took turns on the binoculars, focusing in on Hesket Rock and over to the shore of Aspatria.
Could Sophie have washed up on the island?
Both of them knew it was doubtful but they had to believe enough to try to find her. The sun, however, was powerful, and obscured much of what they might have been able to see. There were glassy reflections on the ocean where yesterday there were white caps. They could see the rocky shore of Aspatria, boulders covered in oyster shells jutting out over small patches of sand. They could see all sorts of sharp debris such as thorny ferns and grasses blown across the shore—and that there was barely a ripple lapping the water up onto the shore, gentle as the day was. All Dave knew was that there was no sign of a tired puppy anywhere out there. There was no Sophie flopped out and waiting for them on Hesket Rock or treading water just off the Aspatria shoreline.

“It was just awful,” recalls Jan. “I couldn't stop hating
myself for letting her down. I was struggling terribly with the fact that we were going home without her.”

They moved around St. Bees and down the Egremont passage. At some point, as
Honey May
veered south, leaving in her wake St. Bees and Keswick and moving back towards the coal ships that were lined like soldiers off the shoreline of Mackay, Dave, who was standing on the flybridge, picked up his cell phone and dialed Luke. Jan was down on the main deck, clutching on to the rail at the bow of the boat, staring in a daze out towards the Mackay Marina that she just did not want to reach. The closer they got the more real it all became. Were they to reach Mackay with no Sophie, they could no longer deny that she was gone. If she hadn't known it was fruitless, Jan might have insisted that they just keep circling around, visiting every island within a sixty-mile radius until they had rescued their girl.

Back in Mackay, Luke was at the annual cultural festival, the Mackay Eisteddfod, watching his girlfriend Heather who was doing Scottish dancing. His phone buzzed in his pocket and Luke saw that his dad was calling. He stepped out of the crowd.

“I need you to go to the house,” Dave started the conversation.

Luke put his hand over his left ear to block out the music and said, “What's going on?”

“Mate, there's been an accident,” said Dave.

Luke's mouth went dry.

“I thought,
Mom
'
s fallen over
. When a parent says something like that to you, you think the worst!”

“Sophie's gone. She fell overboard. We can't understand how, but she did,” Dave said.

Luke's stomach knotted. His ordinarily stoic father was having trouble getting his words out. This had to be bad.

Dave explained as best he could, matter-of-fact but tripping midsentence, that they'd lost Sophie and he did not want to talk too much about it—she was gone, they'd looked for her, they were looking again now but were running out of any last remaining hope.

“Can you clean up all of Sophie's stuff so that your mother—so that we—don't have to see it when we get home?” Dave asked Luke.

Dave asked Luke to remove Sophie's water bowl, her food, her lead. He asked Luke to scout around for all her tennis balls and put them in a place where they did not have to see them when they came through the gate, with no weary Sophie riding along in the car with them, no Sophie wagging her tail in delight at being back home.