No hiding an extra person if the extra is a dummy to look like one of the passengers .... If I were writing the novel
Somebody might find a dummy though, or it could get beaten up by the waves. I don’t know; maybe they had both. Maybe there was one extra woman AND a dummy. Maybe the extra person was supposed to put the dummy in place. But if so, she wasn’t very smart about it because the reports said that Fuddy drifted farther out to sea. If the drift was going to take people closer to shore, it wouldn’t have been so hard for Puentes and Holstein to get as far as they did. Maybe the extra person was to make confusion in the reports so nobody could know who went where.
I don’t know exactly, but I do know from the video footage that there was at least one extra live woman that was hidden by everybody, and there was either a live person or a dummy that was closer to shore than Puentes.
If I were writing the novel, I’d have someone slipping Ms F a “Mickey” so it would make her look unresponsive and then do the switcheroo @ the church