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    Going Down With the Ship
    Going Down With the Ship
    Going Down With the Ship
    Ebook84 pages1 hour

    Going Down With the Ship

    By Eric Douglas

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    About this ebook

    The USS Beauregard is slated to become the Florida Keys’ latest diving shipwreck to attract tourists to Withrow Key. But something else is going on with the wreck and environmentalist Andrea Perez is trying to find someone who will listen to her. She knows something isn’t quite right with the ship but can’t figure out exactly what, until she is kidnapped. It is up to Jackson Pauley to get to the bottom of the plot before going to the bottom with the wreck himself–permanently.

    Set on a bypassed key in the Florida Keys, life moves a little slower and a little weirder. Each Withrow Key thriller short story features scuba diving, adventure, boats, the ocean and mystery along with beautiful locations and scenery.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEric Douglas
    Release dateSep 23, 2015
    ISBN9781310684296
    Going Down With the Ship
    Author

    Eric Douglas

    Life is an adventure for Eric Douglas, above and below the water and wherever in the world he ends up. Eric received a degree in Journalism from Marshall University. After working in local newspapers, honing his skills as a story teller, and following a stint as a freelance journalist in the former Soviet Union, he became a dive instructor. The ocean and diving have factored into all of his fiction works since then.As a documentarian, Eric has worked in Russia, Honduras and most recently in his home state of West Virginia, featuring the oral histories of West Virginia war veterans in the documentary West Virginia Voices of War and the companion book Common Valor.Visit his website at: www.booksbyeric.com.Eric talks about adventure and taking time to be creative, along with diving and writing, on his blog at www.booksbyeric.com. He would love it if you dropped by to say hello.You can also follow him on Twitter, get in touch on Facebook or through Google+. Lastly, you can always send him an email: eric@booksbyeric.com

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      Book preview

      Going Down With the Ship - Eric Douglas

      Going Down With the Ship

      A Withrow Key

      Thriller Short Story

      By Eric Douglas

      Going Down With the Ship

      By Eric Douglas

      Copyright by Eric Douglas at Smashwords

      Third Edition 2015. Second Edition 2013. First Edition 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of Visibility Press, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

      This is a Visibility Press original.

      Copyright © 2015 Eric Douglas

      All rights reserved.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Epilogue

      About the Author

      Chapter 1

      The conch made its way slowly across the sand – journeying from one reef outcropping to the next. The separation was no more than 20 feet, but it had probably taken the poor creature hours to make it the 15 feet it had traveled so far. Tiny marks – footprints, really – in the white sand showed his progress and the determination it had taken.

      The reef itself was spectacular and the warm water was perfectly clear. The divers could see more than 80 feet in any direction as they hovered weightless five feet above the sand and reef bottom and 40 feet from the surface. The reef was alive with fish life and color. The coral itself looked healthy on this particular spot, something Jackson Pauley was glad to see. Not all of the dive sites on the United States’ only living coral reef were in as good of shape – storm water runoff with pollutants and fertilizer drainage from farms had seen to that.

      The conch still had five feet to go. It would no doubt take it another several hours to make it to the relative safety of the reef structure. What had caused it to decide to move from one to the other was anybody’s guess. A predator itself, the conch was probably looking for fresh prey, but it was taking a risk crossing the open sand. Fortunately, for the conch, its large and ornately-decorated shell provided some degree of protection against larger predators, but not from the most dangerous creature in the ocean. It had nothing to protect it from that.

      Jackson was leading a group of divers from the Midwest along the reef. Some of them were pretty good in the water. He could tell they took their diving seriously and were conscious of their motion and breathing. A couple of the divers in the group weren’t really paying attention, however. Jackson saw them brush against the reef and one had actually sat down on a brain coral as he adjusted his fin. Sometimes there was no getting through to people.

      A diver spotted the slow moving conch and descended to the sand to get a closer look. At first, she kept a respectful distance. Then she moved closer. The little mollusk didn’t stand a chance. It attempted to retreat inside its shell, but the diver picked it up to look. Jackson guessed she wanted to see where it had gone. Not seeing anything, the diver simply dropped the shell back on the sand. It landed upside down. She swam away.

      Nature and natural selection would probably have allowed the critter to survive, although it would have taken a while for the animal to work its way out of the shell and turn everything right side up again. In that time, it could have fall prey to just about anything with teeth under the water.

      As soon as the divers moved on, Jackson swam over and righted the animal. He also moved it a couple feet closer to its original objective. For your trouble, he thought as he followed along with the divers.

      Back on the boat, Jackson checked everyone in to make sure the entire group had made it back onboard. This was the second dive of the day on a two-tank trip and that was it. Once all the divers were accounted for, the boat crew would head the boat back to the dock – just in time to turn it around and do it again. On good days, they could offer two trips a day and a third trip for a night dive, a couple times a week.

      Such was the life of a divemaster in the Florida Keys. Jackson was actually a dive instructor, but he spent most of his time working with vacationing divers, leading dives and making sure everyone enjoyed their dive experience. Many novice divers and non-divers confuse the role of a divemaster compared to that of the instructor, believing divemasters to be superior. Divemasters are the first level of dive professional, serving as dive leaders and tasked with the safety of divers in their care. They cannot, however, teach people to dive. And that was why Jackson thought of himself as a divemaster, rather than an instructor. He rarely got the opportunity to teach. It wasn’t all that bad, he reasoned, very few people he knew had an office with this nice of a view.

      Jackson signaled the boat captain that everyone was on board and a deckhand raised the anchor. The captain turned the boat toward the beach and began bringing the engines up to cruising speed. The divers were busy packing away their gear and gathering up their

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