Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (15 page)

So when this elusive dog showed itself to Brian in early December it became the talk of the island, as Keswick residents realized that there were now too many sightings for it to be an accidental temporary visitor. Karen Cooke's memory was jogged back to a few weeks before Mike Barnett spotted the dog near the
roundabout, when she saw an animal dropping on the Connie Bay walking track, a steep dirt climb that runs approximately 2 miles, from the residential side of Keswick to the shore.

Karen, being a typically vigilant island inhabitant, noticed that the dropping was not like any she had seen from the wildlife on the island, and when she investigated the surrounding bush, she noticed an area of flattened grass. At the time she couldn't imagine what it might have been, but when the dog was sighted first by Mike and then Brian, it seemed likely that she'd seen evidence of a dog camping out.

At nightly gatherings, residents swapped stories and theories about where the dog had come from, where it was now, and how on earth it was surviving. They worried about how it could possibly be finding enough to drink, as it hadn't rained in months. A few of the residents' tanks were even getting low. It was also hotter than the usual low eighties perfect summer temperatures. “We were all beginning to feel really uneasy. There was no water anywhere and unless the dog was skulking around very quietly, sucking water from pot plants, it must have been suffering terribly,” says Lyn Kinderman.

Beyond water to drink, what was the dog actually eating? No one was noticing that any food was going missing from kitchens or garbage bins. There were birds and lizards out there but enough for a dog to live off? It could have been having a go at the ground-dwelling coucal pheasants or the notoriously dopey curlews, and
there were non-poisonous tree snakes that could perhaps provide a meal if the dog was clever enough. It could definitely be fishing along the shoreline but it would want to be careful not to get sliced by coral. Mostly there was not much out there for a lone dog to survive off, and an awful lot of dangerous stuff for it to be wary of.

Resident Eva Browne-Paterson swore she heard barking over several nights, that woke her up feeling distressed and protective. Mike Barnett, who was in charge of keeping an eye on the security of the island, was making an effort to find the dog when he went out on his daily rounds in Keswick's only four-wheel-drive vehicle. He had not seen the dog since his first sighting early in the morning outside their house, but he and his wife Lyn did spot paw prints. They would walk the 2 mile track to Arthur Bay and on several occasions over the course of a week or two, they noticed a trail of paw prints that came out of the rainforest towards the shoreline and then back again. Mike and Lyn, an avid animal lover who would rescue a caterpillar or an ant from her balcony and take it to the garden, went up close to inspect the trail, recognizing them as dog prints. They figured the dog must be coming on to the beach for a swim or maybe to fish.

Despite the huge temptation to be pet owners again, Mike and Lyn knew that even if they'd been able to trap it, the dog would have to go. “We wouldn't have been able to keep it but we would have tried to find someone
in Mackay to take it,” says Mike. Calling the pound or the rangers was not an option. “They would have destroyed the dog if they couldn't catch it. And it did not seem to want to be caught. They would have had no choice; it's their job.”

All the Keswick residents were looking out for the dog as they went about their daily business. They knew that with every day that passed, the dog's odds were getting worse. If it wasn't dehydration or starvation, it could be the rangers that got to it. Keswick simply wasn't a friendly place for a domestic animal to be.

The only words that are really adequate to describe Sophie's long, lonely sea swim are “miraculous” and “unprecedented.” When you get out to the middle of the ocean and look out across the vast distances of treacherous turbulent water she must have covered, it is almost impossible to believe that she made it. But at some point after the morning of October 25th when she went overboard, whether it was twelve hours or twelve days, Sophie scrambled onto the shore of Keswick, which was about five nautical miles from where Dave and Jan hit the man-overboard button on
Honey May.
She was no doubt caked in salt, exhausted and traumatized. Her fur would have been bladed and sticking to her skin, and it's difficult to imagine the extent to which her shoulder and hip joints throbbed from all the swimming she'd done.

She must have been in terrible shock from the
moment she went into the water but her survival instincts compelled her to keep moving—this is the only explanation that vets and dog experts can come up with for how she managed to make it as far as she did. For a dog to spend more than thirty minutes or so in a swimming pool or a lake, even a dog with the greatest affinity for water, would be a muscle-cramping feat. Put the dog in the middle of the ocean, swimming five, six, possibly ten or more nautical miles, competing with tides, currents and the massive influence of the islands and reefs that the ocean bullies its way around—the feat is even more amazing.

“It would take a dog as tough as a cattle dog to do that,” says Australian vet Rob McMahon. “They are amazingly resilient, bred to work probably one of the toughest jobs a dog can do.”

“I reckon it was virtually physically impossible for the dog to swim to land when you take the adversity of the currents into account,” says Warren Hill, the Griffiths' mate and an experienced seaman. “There's no way she would have managed it without a lot of help from Mother Nature, in terms of getting lucky with the tides.”

Dogs can be great swimmers. In the droving days, working dogs swam the rivers to herd sheep and cattle. Treading water, however, is a different concept. When dogs swim, they don't let their head go under water and they need to paddle to stay afloat. They are either moving or they're floundering. They also tend to have poor reflex coordination, as Jenko noted to Jan after that terrible
October day, to fend off all the water splashing into their mouths. There are stories of robust working dogs drowning in shallow creeks because they swallow too much water, or being drowned by kangaroos holding their heads down in what could barely be called puddles. So for a dog to survive a long swim in choppy seas, something that would of course tax most humans, really is freakishly unlikely. The strain of keeping from swallowing seawater would have been immense.

The tides were still high but had started going out two hours before the approximate time Sophie went overboard, so they were picking up speed. Tides turn every six hours and twenty-five minutes and are at their fastest three hours after turning, so Sophie went in the water just as the speed was gearing up to its strongest. It would have been moving north away from Mackay, out into the Coral Sea. Unless she was caught up in eddies created by the islands, which might have worked in Sophie's favor and swept her to Aspatria before she was once again caught in the outgoing tide, Sophie would have had no choice but to go with the north-flowing water until the tide slowed down for its change. Only exceptionally strong swimmers can swim against a current, and of course it's impossible to swim against the tide. The best guess is that she'd probably have been out there for at least twelve hours. She had never previously swum for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time on the Mackay beaches. Her little dog legs must have been unbearably tired.

Jero is a long-time windsurfing practitioner and instructor who paddles on his wave ski around Keswick and St. Bees several times a week and finds it mind-blowing that a dog survived to swim the distance that Sophie did. “I believe that if I fell off my wave ski out there, after half an hour I wouldn't be able to swim any more and would just go where the wind and tide wanted to take me,” he says.

Swimming at night, her visibility would have been seriously challenged. The night of October 25th was close to a new moon, meaning that there would have been virtually no light for her to see the land in front of her, let alone scramble onto shore over all manner of tropical reef hazards. “If it's night time it's even harder,” says Warren Hill. “The dog's a land cruiser; how's she going to know which way to go?”

Sophie's heart was in excellent condition from all her beach and next-door-block running, but as fit as she was, she may as well have been a flea in the face of the elements out there. “Luck,” says Warren. “She would have had no say in the matter of where she went. She got incredibly lucky.”

Given the likelihood that the wind was southeasterly, it's probable that Sophie drifted north to northwest with the outgoing tide until the next change, around four hours later, when she would have been dragged back south towards St. Bees and Keswick. Warren believes that she must have been just smack in the middle of the Egremont Passage when the tides changed, miraculously
at just the right spot to be sucked south by the funnel effect of the Passage as it rushes between Keswick and St. Bees. Had she been too far from its “suck factor,” she may never have made it to land. And once she was pulled into the Passage, it was something close to divine intervention that took her to shore. “The current travels northwards all the time and carries the sand and everything else right up to Papua New Guinea,” he says. “If that dog had missed getting onto one of those islands, it would have died for sure because it would have been swept out into the ocean.”

Seamen can speculate about what happened to Sophie that night but with all the factors at work, only Sophie will ever know. From the spot that Jan and Dave hit the man-overboard button, past Hesket Rock to Keswick, depending on which way around St. Bees the tides and currents swept her, the distance is five to seven nautical miles. If she was swept there the night after she went missing, rather than hitting elsewhere first, she'd likely have been swimming for a whole day or possibly longer.

She'd have been able to detect Aspatria, then St. Bees, then Keswick as she swam. They might have looked like foreboding blobs to her but they were also carrying the smells of life, and that must have driven her to direct herself, as far as she was able, towards one of them.

It's also possible that she hit Aspatria first, then, realizing that she was entirely alone out there and without a drop of fresh water, decided to swim again towards the
outline of land that she could see in the distance. She would have been picking up human smells that spurred her on. Perhaps she forced herself to keep going and tackle the half-mile between Aspatria and St. Bees. If so, she would have been rewarded with fresh water from one of the island's sixteen natural springs. She might have hit its east coast and traipsed her way through its dense hills or around its treacherous shores to the west coast, facing Keswick.

Why she would have decided to swim again, nobody knows, but swim she did. To reach Keswick, where Mike and then Brian saw her, she would have had to navigate the Egremont Passage, a feat no Keswick resident would attempt, themselves, as the water roars through it with currents as high as five to eight knots and teems with vigorous marine life including sharks. Sophie had somehow survived all the stinging and biting threats out there in the ocean, creatures who needed to take but one nip, swipe or even a brush to destroy her.

Whatever her exact route, it seems that Keswick was the first place that she decided to stay. Karen Cooke's memory is that she saw the dog poo on the path around Connie Bay in the first half of November, so it seems that Sophie hit Keswick early in her ordeal. Perhaps she came ashore on Connie Bay, around two miles uphill from the residential development.

The three-year-old pup had survived the almost unsurviveable, achieved a feat that would prove too much for any but the most champion human swimmer.
She was in shock, exhausted, alone. She'd lost her family, to whom she was utterly and single-mindedly devoted, but had somehow made it to this unfamiliar place. Now she had a whole new set of problems.

How could she not have been famished? Even if she had come across a coral trout or a queen fish, the leg of a turtle or some other sort of marine food along the way, and had managed to snap at it while swimming, she would still have been ravenously hungry, nose sniffing for the scent of anything that might sustain her.

She'd have shaken herself off, as dogs do when they've been swimming. This was no fun paddle she'd been for, though, and Sophie's fur and skin must have been marinated in salt. She must also have been numb with cold. The island's hot spell was fortunate in this sense, even if it meant she was facing a struggle to find drinking water. Sophie could dry herself out as she absorbed her new solitary reality.

She might have barked and wondered,
Could Jan and Dave hear her?
When she looked up from the shore, she'd have seen boulders and cliffs paths leading every which way into the island center, thick with trees and all sorts of grass and shrubs and foliage. But this terrain that would have had Sophie twitching with excitement had she been accompanied by her family, would now have been terrifying.

Never had she spent more than an evening without Jan and Dave or one of the Griffiths to look after her. She hadn't ever had to think about dinner for herself
and she'd never even had to let herself out of the house in the morning to pee. Sophie was alone, a dog who had gone from pet store window to family life, and all the meaty and air-conditioned treats that came with it. Had Jan and Dave allowed themselves to think about it, they would have wanted to believe that, in the unlikely event that she had made it to land, she would have switched instantly into wild dog mode, surging off into the bush, teeth bared, like a hunter dog. She might have been a pampered pet but the Griffiths had always encouraged her to follow her dog instincts as well. Dogs aren't babies, as Jan would say.