(9)

Discovery of the water both cheered the three and eased the crackling tension between Bob and Jim. That the master of the Triton found the containers proved, at least to him, the validity of his communication line with God and fulfillment of his belief that his God would provide. And Bob cared little who received credit for the water, as long as it had been found. He did thank Jim, praising his courage for staying under the sea so long to find and bring up the containers.

All celebrated with a greedy, lip-smacking cupful. Then Bob set about concocting a drink for Linda—water, powdered milk, a raw egg, vanilla extract, and a drop of peppermint. Mixing it all together in a plastic juice container, he presented her his “milk shake extraordinaire” with all the panache of a sommelier offering a vintage wine. He watched encouragingly as Linda got a few swallows down. Within an hour, she had taken the whole cup and there was new vibrancy in her voice and color in her cheeks. “Hey, you guys, you know what?” she said. “I feel much better.”

After dinner, which consisted for the men of a few teaspoons of chop suey mix, Bob picked up a piece of plywood and began to paint another message, which he would throw into the sea the next morning. As he painted the date, “July 19, 1973,” he lifted his brush and paused. The light was almost gone from the long summer day and the white letters gleamed in encroaching dusk. “Nine days,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. But Linda heard him.

“They haven’t given up on us, have they?” she whispered. Jim was topside using the last light to read from his Adventist book, and Linda did not want to rouse him and cause another eruption.

Bob reassured her quickly. “By now they’ve got an alert to the Coast Guard and the civilian fleet and every airplane owner who flies anywhere in the vicinity.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure. They’ll find us. Just think what tales you’ll be able to tell the first-grade kiddies this fall. Yours will be the all-time classic ‘What I Did Last Summer.’”

Bob put his arms about her lightly, careful to avoid her painful sores. Before dinner he had bathed her thighs and legs in the cool fresh water, then put a new application of penicillin salve on the sores. He hoped the sea would remain calm, so that waves would not kick up inside their quarters and splash salt water onto her bed and irritate her further. But something else was also troubling him.

“Honey,” he said, “you don’t believe I’m responsible for what’s happened to us, do you?”

Linda shook her head. “I wanted to come. We each made our decisions. You didn’t force me.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean the capsizing and our not being rescued yet. You don’t … you don’t believe what Jim’s been praying, do you?”

She smiled and touched his face. “Of course not. I’m not in the same league with you fellows when it comes to theology. The best I can do is ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ and ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.’”

“Then use them, if they make you feel better. I just don’t want Jim to upset you with those weird prayers of his.”

“He doesn’t,” she said, “because I don’t let him. Don’t be so defensive with Jim. If he gets on your nerves, don’t say anything. Jim can’t help it. He’s concerned, he’s nervous, he’s alone, really—except for his beliefs. They help him, just like you help me.”

In the near darkness, Bob smiled to himself. Linda should have been a diplomat. “I’m not trying to change him,” he said. “I just want to keep things as peaceful as possible between us until we’re rescued. If he and I are at each other’s throats all the time, we’ll be too tired to wave at a plane when it comes.”

Above them, Jim watched the last drops of the sunlight meld with the blue-black sea, and he reluctantly closed his book. For a time he sat in the darkness, listening to the waves. Then he descended through the hole and dropped onto his bed. This was the hour when their spirits ebbed; they dreaded the darkness. The hours of midnight endured longer than the Montana winter. Bob tried not to look at his watch during the night, for it was maddening to wake up and feel dawn to be near, only to discover that but five minutes had passed since his last look at the hour.

“I tied the water jug here,” said Jim, his voice breaking the quiet. Twice already this day he had showed the others where the container was lashed by ropes to a place between their beds. But he seemed anxious that each realize where the water supply was kept. It had been agreed that, starting immediately, the daily ration of water would be one cupful per person. This was Bob’s idea, and although Jim grumbled that he felt it unnecessary to ration God’s generosity, he went along.

It was further agreed that the water jug should be in full view at all times and that no one would take even the slightest sip without informing the others. If one woke up desperate for water during the night, he or she was expected to reveal the consumption at morning. The water level in the jug would become as familiar to each as their profiles.

Denial is an all too human characteristic, one both harmful and useful, whether employed by a man condemned to terminal disease who reassures himself that it simply cannot happen to him, or seized by the families of three people missing at sea who reassure themselves that the worst has not occurred. Because it is always easier to seek alternatives to the truth, more than a week went by after the Triton capsized in the violent storm before someone on land grew worried enough to sound an alarm.

While the Triton’s three passengers scratched out each day and night in the belief that rescue was imminent, the astonishing truth was that no one even began to look for them until July 22, the twelfth day of their ordeal. The zigzagging plane and its companion ship, it would turn out, were not in search of the trimaran, despite what Bob and Linda and Jim believed. The pair was engaged only in summer naval maneuvers. Nor had a plane been dispatched the morning of July 11 in the hours after the capsizing. Either Jim had misunderstood the Coast Guard in his weak and static-filled radiophone patch, or, in his state of shock and fear, he had imagined the whole thing.

Certainly one of the first people to have become worried should have been Wes Parker, the radio liaison in Auburn, who had helped Jim plan the Triton’s voyage and to whom Jim spoke in Morse code each day up to and including the morning of the capsizing. Three days went by after July 11 with nothing on his radio but silence during the hour when Jim normally contacted him, and Parker did not notify the Coast Guard. Nor did he grow concerned, or at least own up to any concern. Instead, he rang up Wilma Fisher, Jim’s wife, and mentioned rather casually that the Triton was out of contact. What did that mean? asked Wilma. Not much, suggested Parker. He offered a string of “perhapses.” Perhaps the radio had broken down. Perhaps Jim, whom Parker described as a “rank novice” at communications, was unable to tune the set properly to reach him anymore. Or, most likely of the perhapses, the winds were probably blowing so fairly in their sails that the Triton was bent on making record progress to Los Angeles, with no time allowed for radio reports.

Wilma accepted this. Her faith in God was as unshakable as her husband’s, and she believed that a divine hand was sharing the wheel with Jim and Bob. Moreover, she believed in the strength of her husband’s craftsmanship and her brother Bob’s sailing ability. It was irksome not to hear from the boys, but she never thought of calling the Coast Guard to say that her husband and his two passengers were suddenly mute somewhere on the high seas.

Because most members of Bob and Jim’s respective families were Seventh Day Adventists, their faith was like Wilma’s. God would get the Triton to Costa Rica because it was His design.

Linda’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, were on vacation during this week and when they returned on July 15, no one seemed to know anything about their daughter and her sailing mates. By the schedule that Linda had left for her mother to follow, the boat should have been docked in Los Angeles by now. But the telephone had not rung with Linda’s cheerful voice. Nor did any of Bob’s people know anything. The Elliotts’ other daughter, Judy, was not overly concerned at the silence. Perhaps, she suggested, the weather had been so calm and windless that it was taking longer than expected to reach Los Angeles.

“I’m very worried,” fretted Mrs. Elliott. “Can’t we do something?” Her husband, a veteran navy man, counseled his wife not to get upset. She was often too emotional over imagined matters. Their daughter and son-in-law were young, adventurous, and healthy. They were on holiday. But Joe Elliott found himself lying awake at night in the darkness, waiting for the telephone to ring.

Finally, in Los Angeles, someone did something besides concoct mental palliatives. Bob’s sister, Carol Lilley, wife of a radiologist, grew concerned when the Triton did not dock at Marina Del Rey. The boat was scheduled to arrive about July 14, give or take a day or two, and Bob had promised to call the moment they dropped anchor. The plan was that the Lilleys would drive immediately to the marina and welcome the voyagers. If they were weary and wanted to rest a day, the Lilleys were ready to put them up in their new and spacious Pasadena home before the Triton set sail again on its second leg, from Los Angeles to Mexico. The Lilleys, a young and athletic couple, were anxious to hear the tales of the sea.

When the Triton worrisomely was late, Carol Lilley made several calls to the harbor master at Marina Del Rey and, getting increasingly brusque responses to her inquiries, finally telephoned the Coast Guard in Long Beach at 5:40 in the afternoon on July 18. The Triton was long overdue, she said. Had the boat been heard from? Had it encountered any difficulties? Could the Coast Guard find out if, perhaps, she had put into harbor somewhere along the coast for repair?

The major Coast Guard stations in the port cities of America are accustomed to such calls from an affluent society enchanted with boats, able to afford them, but not overly skilled in maneuvering them. Every Sunday night of the year, Coast Guard telephones start ringing with worried wives concerned about overdue husbands. More often than not, the missing craft is at that very moment sitting lost in a fog bank not far from shore, or run embarrassingly aground on a lonely stretch of beach or reef. By noon most Mondays, the missing are normally found and sent home with a mild lecture from the Coast Guard about the need to take a refresher course in boating and safety.

The Long Beach office bucked the Triton request up to San Francisco, where that district’s Search and Rescue Unit routinely began a long-established drill. First, Wilma Fisher was located at a relative’s home and interrogated to determine the boat’s exact size, coloring, navigational equipment, and course. With that information, each harbor from Cape Mendocino in northern California all the way down to Los Angeles was contacted by telephone—hundreds of them, from the great marinas choked with yachts to remote restaurants with room for one or two speedboats to tie alongside. In the majority of cases, the Coast Guard has come to learn, missing boats are found at an unscheduled harbor.

At the same time, attempts were made to raise the Triton by radio. A distress report was broadcast up and down the California coast to all boats possessing marine radios, telling each to be on the lookout for the Triton, or, if it were seen, to notify the Coast Guard. The public information office released a brief news story saying that a search was under way. All of this took three days, and not until July 22 did a Coast Guard unit actually set out on the ocean to look.

As usually happens when a government agency asks its citizenry to be on the lookout for something, numerous leads and false reports were turned in. One woman insisted that the Triton had run aground near Santa Barbara and its crew was sunbathing on the beach. Another well-meaning sharp eye claimed to have seen the Triton tied up to a luxurious restaurant in Sausalito, where its owner was reported to be buying gin and tonics for the bar crowd and telling of his exploits. All such nonsense had to be checked out.

On the evening of July 21, all of the available information was assembled by the Search and Rescue Unit in its skyscraper office on the ninth floor of a building in the financial district of San Francisco. A computer in Washington had digested the Triton’s description, her last known position, and weather reports, and had coughed up its mechanical notion of where the boat could be found. For several hours, the Coast Guard men studied the charts, reports, and computer readouts, and examined the room-sized map of the Pacific Ocean that dominates their command central.

The decision was to launch a major search at dawn the next morning.

A C-130 four-engine propeller plane took off from San Francisco at sunrise and spent all the daylight hours flying low over a circle of sea with a thirty-mile radius near where Jim had last reported the Triton just before it capsized. That it was now twelve days after that radiotelephone patch made it seem unlikely that the craft would be in the same area—unless it had sunk and left debris on the surface.

When the plane returned with a negative report, the search was widened. Another C-130 went up as well—now there were two planes equipped with ten men trained to scan the ocean with the naked eye, not trusting binoculars. The searchers work only fifteen-minute shifts before relief, because the eye grows weary when it focuses on nothing but the monotonous sea. The Air Force contributed two more planes, which joined three Coast Guard helicopters and the cutters Resolute and Comanche. More than six hundred men in six ships and thirty-four aircraft spent the next three days searching for the Triton in an ever-widening swath, growing from the original thirty miles to more than 200,000 square miles, extending from the Oregon border to Punio San Antonio, Mexico, 180 miles south of the border. The water was scanned from the shore to four hundred miles out. At a cost of $208,000, the search was one of the Coast Guard’s most massive of the year. Not more than six or eight times a year does it employ this many men and craft, and their record for finding the lost is excellent.

On the peak days of the search, July 24, 25, and 26, the capsized trimaran was drifting almost due west in a straight line from San Francisco, between 100 and 150 miles from shore. But the inhabitants of the Triton saw no planes or ships during these days, nor did any planes or ships see them. Riding only eighteen inches above the waves, she easily eluded the hundreds of eyes tracking her from the sea and sky.

On the evening of July 27, convinced that the territory had been checked and rechecked, that no further expense was warranted, the Coast Guard’s public relations office issued a terse statement to the media which had paid the story but slight attention anyway in a summer crowded with Watergate and attendant scandal.

SAN FRANCISCO, JULY 27, 1973

An extensive four-day search for the missing sailboat Triton, from Tacoma, was suspended today at dark. The search, which covered approximately 200,000 square miles, was a combined effort by the U.S. Coast Guard, Air Force, and Navy.

Last contact with the missing vessel and its crew of James Fisher, owner and operator from Auburn, Wash., and Robert and Linda Tininenko, of Longview, Wash., was made on July 11. This contact was by Citizen Band Radio with Carol Lilley of Los Angeles and indicated that the vessel was 60–80 miles off Point Arena, Calif. and in no distress or need of assistance.

The release contained two major errors of fact and one omission that, much later on, would become enmeshed in contradictions, excuses, and backpedaling. The Triton’s last radio contact was made not to Carol Lilley in Los Angeles, but to the Coast Guard itself, via the telephone patch by the San Carlos ham operator, N. C. DeWolfe. And the Triton’s last position, as radioed by Jim on the fateful morning, was seventy-five miles southwest of Cape Mendocino, not Point Arena, which is thirty miles farther down the California coast.

Most curious of all, the Coast Guard did not mention, either in its news release or in its numerous conversations with family members of the missing three young people, that Jim had reported on the morning of July 11 that his ship had been in a storm. Perhaps it was a case of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing. Perhaps there are so many hundreds of radio messages received by the Coast Guard from ships at sea that nobody remembered this one. Or, most probably, the Coast Guard assumed that the storm was not a factor in the boat’s disappearance, since Jim, after all, had used the phrase “We are becalmed.” Whatever, the families of Jim and Bob and Linda would not learn that there had been a storm until several weeks later. And then they would grow angry at the Coast Guard and contend, in retrospect, that if they had just been given this information, on the morning it was received, then they would have insisted a search begin immediately—not a dozen days later. But hindsight is as cheap as denial and neither has much value.

A Coast Guard officer telephoned Wilma Fisher and informed her courteously that the official search was over.

“What does that mean?” she asked a little fearfully.

It means, said the man from the Coast Guard, that the government could no longer afford to keep 620 men, thirty-four airplanes, three helicopters, and six ships at sea looking for three people in a sailboat. But rest assured, he said, everyone would keep an eye peeled as they worked the ocean on other missions. And the civilian fleet would be reminded from time to time to keep a casual lookout.

“What do you think?” Wilma asked then.

“It means that we are unable to find them,” he said. “It means they are …”

Wilma thanked him and hung up. She could fill in the blank. It means they are lost, and presumed dead.