Once again, Amelia had demonstrated her strength by risking offense when she tapped Michael on the shoulder and said, “Are you sure Grace is up to this? Maybe she should stay on the boat and just the three of us dive.” But Grace interceded immediately, saying, “I’m not staying up here on the boat alone. No way, sister! Big wave could come along and suck me right outta there!” And Michael had agreed, laughing, saying, “You think I’m going to let anything happen to the Princess? Where I go, she goes.” Waiting while Grace rinsed her face mask and pulled it on, Michael had shouted, “We’re a team, right, Gracie?”
Once again, Janet and Amelia communicated via eye contact only: No way was Grace going to complete this dive.
They were right. Pulling themselves in single file down the anchor line, into the green dusk below, Grace had stopped at about thirty feet. She knew the hand signs from her classes: Her ears wouldn’t clear. She’d have to go back up. She wanted to go back up.
Michael returned to the boat with her, of course. On the buddy system, buddies stick together.
The two of them were still together when Amelia and Janet surfaced nineteen minutes later to find the Seminole Wind upside-down, floating bow-high on its taut anchor line, wind sharpening out of an afternoon sky with a horizon the color of winter clouds, like moonlight on ice.
During hurricane season in that year, July through November, there was less activity than usual in the southern meridians. There were seven tropical storms but only two became hurricanes, which is significantly below the average of ten tropical storms and six hurricanes during that five-month window. Also, there were no major hurricanes (category three or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale, meaning winds greater than 110 mph), which is also unusual-though one storm did approach that strength, Hurricane Gordon.
On an average, there are two major hurricanes in a season that make hard landfall somewhere in the tropics. There are death tolls. There are estimates of property damage. There are coordinated relief efforts that include many agencies, sometimes many countries. The year that Janet and her friends disappeared was an exception.
As far as tropical weather, it was a rare, peaceful season-with the exclusion of one short period, the first week of November, the week that the Seminole Wind sank. It was during the last week of October and the first seven days of November that the season’s only two hurricanes formed, and they formed almost simultaneously.
Hurricane Florence began to take shape on November 2 as a subtropical depression at latitude 23.20 and longitude 47.70, which is on a line with Cuba and west of Florida Channel, that tight water exit between Key West and Havana.
At the same time, above the Isthmus of Panama and east of the Miskito Reefs of Nicaragua, Hurricane Gordon began to gather heat and convective energy, the slow formation of its tropospheric circulation visible to Tropical Satellite Analysis and Forecast (TSAF) weather monitors along its track. Gordon followed an unusual, erratic path over Nicaragua, the western Caribbean Sea, then drifted toward the Gulf of Mexico’s second constricted water space, the Yucatan Channel.
By November 4, the day that Janet, Michael, and Grace were set adrift, both narrow entrances into the Gulf of Mexico were dominated by these two massive and conflicting low-pressure systems, though the effects on the Gulf were not obvious in terms of wind and rain. Between November 1 and 3, Florida residents from Sarasota to Marco Island awoke to read similar, repetitive weather forecasts in their daily papers: partly cloudy, chance of showers. Highs in the upper eighties, lows in the upper sixties. Winds east to southeast, fifteen knots, seas one to two feet, bay and inland waters a moderate chop.
It was good boating weather, nothing obvious out there to fear.
On Friday, November 4, the weather grew more brisk, although newspapers still predicted winds only to fifteen knots. The forecast that Michael Sanford and the others heard that morning on the VHF radio as they left Marco Island was slightly more severe, and more accurate. A recorded voice for NOAA Weather Radio repeated several times each hour: “From Cape Sable to Tarpon Springs, and fifty miles offshore, small craft should exercise caution. Winds will be out of the east fifteen to twenty knots, seas four to six feet, with bay and inland waters choppy.”
It wasn’t ideal weather, but it wasn’t terrible, either. In his custom twenty-five-foot boat powered with twin 225-horse-power Evinrudes, Sanford could still blast through waves at thirty-five miles per hour or faster, which put the wreck of the Baja California less than two hours or so from the light buoy off Big Marco Pass.
Something else that Sanford may have considered is that weather forecasts for the Gulf Coast of Florida are notoriously unreliable. Fishing guides often joke about them with a bitterness born from losing family income because, each season, clients cancel trips after listening to erroneous forecasts predicting foul weather. It’s not because the Gulf region lacks excellent meteorologists. Weather here is difficult to predict because the Gulf of Mexico is a complicated body of water, sensitive as a barometer, and influenced by changes in global weather, both subtle and strong.
The influence of the two gathering hurricanes on the Gulf was invisible but indisputable. The erratic, swirling currents and gyres of the Gulf are driven by diverse factors that include wind, heat, and oceanic currents. During a normal week, the great trade wind currents of the Caribbean push through the Yucatan Channel, into the Gulf, rivering along at speeds that can exceed three nautical miles per hour during the fall and winter. When Hurricane Gordon began its slow counterclockwise lumbering, however, the trade wind streams began to pile water massively off Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula, pressuring it through the Yucatan Straits at more than twice the speed of normal flow-in excess of six knots, or more than seven miles an hour, which is twice as fast as an Olympian can swim.
Off the Florida Straits, the effect of soon-to-be Hurricane Florence was proportional, but in reverse. As the Gulf of Mexico’s great loop current flows eastward along the Florida panhandle, then southward along the Florida peninsula, it rejoins a smaller but more powerful current loop off the northern coast of Cuba. These two saltwater rivers combine to form an inexorable surging of water called the Florida Current. This is the beginning of the Gulf Stream, which Juan Ponce de Leon described in his ship’s log as “the current more powerful than the wind.” The Gulf Stream transports 80 million tons of water per second along the coast of the United States, then east toward Europe, its warm waters profoundly affecting the weather of the British Isles and Europe.
Because the Florida Current is severely constricted by the Florida Keys and Cuba as it exits the Gulf, it flows hard even in normal weather, sometimes nearly four nautical miles per hour. However, with Florence hanging off the stricture, sucking in heat, wind, and water, both the velocity and mass of the Florida Current were amplified.
Hurricane Gordon was pushing water from the west; Tropical Storm Florence was pulling water from the east. The swirling, mobile, and complicate gyres whirlpooling within the Gulf were energized proportionally, gathering speeds of up to five, six, perhaps even seven knots, though no one knows for certain.
As the velocity of the currents and gyres increased and conflicted with wind flow, seas became heavier, more volatile, with occasional rogue waves large and out of keeping with normal seas abraded by twenty-knot winds. Even during calm weather, boat traffic is never heavy offshore of Florida’s Gulf barrier islands. There are more fish and more fun to be had gunk-holing around the bays. When the weather turns sloppy, though, boat traffic is almost nonexistent, and the Gulf becomes an uninhabited desert of gray.