Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog by Emma Pearse Page B

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 upalongside, 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 intenselypainful 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