Bobby Guthrie had the coordinates on the sunken pleasure boat. She lay a half mile southwest of Looe Key. She’d been down there for two months. She was the `Bama Gal, owned by a Tampa hotelman, about ninety thousand dollars’ worth of cabin cruiser, only six months old. Forty-six feet, fiber glass hull, twin diesels. The ho-telman and his wife and another couple had been out fish-ing and the hotelman had keeled over with a heart attack while fighting a billfish. Nobody else aboard knew how to run the ship-to-shore radio. They barely knew how to run the boat. There was a tug with a tow of three barges about a half mile farther out, so they figured that the tug would have a radio they could use to call a Coast Guard helicopter and get the man to a hospital. The guest ran the boat over toward the tug and cut the engines and they all started waving their arms. Maybe they thought that tugs and barges have some kind of braking system. The tug captain tried evasive tactics, but mass and momentum were too much. The forward port corner of the lead barge put a big ugly hole in the cruiser, but the crew launched a skiff and got the people off in good order be-fore she went down. By the tune the Coast Guard ar-rived, the owner was as dead as the other fish they had caught, which had gone down with the cruiser.
The insurance company had paid off on the cruiser, and Meyer had gotten a release from them, so any recovery was going to be profit-if we could bring it up, tow it in, and find something worth money.
So on that Sunday I worked the Flush into the most protected water that Looe provides. It is shaped like a backward “J” that has fallen onto its back, and I put the hooks out in shoal water, as close as I could get without risking being hard aground at low tide. We took the Mu¤equita out and located the `Bama Gal after about forty minutes of skin diving and looking. We made a bright red buoy fast to her, and then I ran the Mu¤equita up-current, put the anchor down in about seventy feet, and let her come back to the buoy before snubbing her down, almost at the end of my four hundred feet of an-chor line. Not enough scope to be sure of holding.
We had just the two sets of tanks aboard the Mu¤equita, so I went down with Joe Palacio to get a good look at what condition she was in. She lay on a little slope, bow higher than the stern, and she was on about a fifteen-degree list to port, making the hole in the star-board side, a little aft of amidships, easy to see. She was picking up new grass and weed and green slime, but it wasn’t too bad yet. We had expected to find her picked clean of everything the skin-diver kids could lift, but by some freak of chance they hadn’t found her. The big rods with their Finor reels were still in the rod holders. Binoc-ulars, booze, cameras, tackle boxes, rifle, sunglasses-all the toys and gear and gadgets that people take to sea were either stowed or lay on the cockpit, cabin, or fly-bridge decking. While Joe busied himself with studying the hatches and the interior layout, and measuring inte-rior spaces, I kept assembling bundles of goodies and, with a couple of pulls on the dangling line, sending them up into the sunlight.
When we went up, I found that all the stuff had looked better down in the depths, green and shadowy, than up on the deck of my runabout, all sodden, leaking, and cor-roded.
Monday we took the Flush out and anchored her over the wreck and worked all day, in shifts, beefing up those places where Palacio thought the floatation might come busting out, and also cutting through some interior bulkheads to make a free flow of water through all the belowdecks areas, and fastening some plywood against the inside of the hull where the big hole was. Whenever we came across anything we could tie a line to and lift to the surface, we did so.