David Vann - A Mile Down - The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

I continued to have problems with the boat, too. In Kas, I woke in the morning to Ercan and Muhsin knocking at my door.

“There is a problem,” Muhsin said. “You need to see.”

They led me onto the deck, then forward to the port bow and asked me to look over the side.

I hesitated for a moment, wondering what good fortune this town had brought me now. When I bent over and looked down at the waterline, I could see a piece of the paint hanging loose. This was difficult to believe. The paint and the thick epoxy beneath it are supposed to stick to the hull, of course. The paint job had taken months.

I called Seref on Ercan’s cell phone, up on the bow, away from my guests. Charlie and Rush had gotten up early, though, and they knew. Charlie gave me a look of pity. I think he understood all the troubles I had gone through to try to make these charters happen.

“The paint’s falling off the hull,” I told Seref, who went through his usual expressions of disbelief: how can this be true, this can’t happen, this isn’t possible, etc. “It’s true,” I said. “I’m looking at a large piece of paint and epoxy just hanging at the waterline. And I need to move the boat now, to sail to the next port, which means some of the paint is about to be stripped off of the boat. You have to fix this.”

“But how? How can this be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we might have to sail to Bodrum after this charter and haul out for a quick paint job, maybe ten days. You’ll have to rent another boat to run the next charter, which has only four people, and then, after the painting, we’ll motor the 220 miles again from Bodrum to Antalya to pick up the last charter. I can’t think of anything else. I shouldn’t have to be dealing with this. When you build a boat, you should build it to last more than a couple of weeks. You’re going to redo the deck seams, too, and take out that laminate crap on the floors in the staterooms. It’s all buckled now, so that some of the doors don’t even close. Please arrange all of this today.”

I tried to tell my guests in light, funny tones that our paint was falling off, as if it were somehow amusing, and then we pulled out of the harbor and headed up the coast.

It was a lovely day, with calm water and blue skies, and all of us, guests and crew, took turns leaning over the side to watch large patches of white paint and paste flex and shiver then fall off, sometimes in sections as big as four or five feet long by three feet high. It was all coming off, one whole side of the boat. There was nothing I could do but keep to the schedule and come to grips with the fact that we now looked like a military vessel, stripped down to our gray primer over steel, all the welding ribs showing. I felt terrible about polluting the water, but it just wasn’t realistic to try to recover each of the fifty pieces as they ripped off, especially since they sank quickly. And I couldn’t have just stayed in Kas. That’s the main rule in charter. Unless you’re held hostage by terrorists or government authorities, you stick to the itinerary and give the guests their vacation, no matter what’s happening to the boat or the crew.

The rest of that charter, I was making arrangements. By the time we arrived in Gocek, there was another, smaller charter boat waiting at the dock for my next guests. Seref and I had fought over who would pay for this, and I had lost. He would pay for the emergency haul in Bodrum, and the labor to recaulk the deck. He would also redo the floors, and repaint the boat, but the paint company would have to pay for the new paint, and I would have to pay for the difference in cost between the two kinds of deck caulking, the new wood for the floors, and this smaller charter boat for my guests.

Out of the water, the boat looked like a yacht on one side and a battleship on the other. Seref’s cousin and Mustafa, the owner of the yard that had built my hull, came down to look at it. Seref’s cousin rich as ever, a handsome, tall, European-looking man with possible mafia connections wearing thousands of dollars of the finest clothing. Mustafa, shorter and homely, smoking his pipe as always. Then the insurance man arrived, then the representative from the paint company, and everyone examined my boat before driving to Mustafa’s yard to look at a boat under construction. The hull had been fared with epoxy paste, and small circles were drawn all over its surface to show bubbles forming under the paste, sections that were pulling away from the hull. Seref’s cousin’s boat had already been launched. Like my boat, large strips of its paint had fallen off. Finally we gathered in Mustafa’s office to discuss the problem.

This discussion took some time. In the end, we agreed the company would provide two coats of quick-drying epoxy, two top coats, and two coats of bottom paint. The meeting had been frustrating and long, but now we could move forward quickly.

This turned out not to be the case, however. I had to leave for a day and a half to meet my charter guests and their professor down the coast, and when I returned, I was disappointed. I told Seref we weren’t going to make it at this pace, but he ignored me until it was too late. Probably this was intentional. He forced me into a compromise. The floors in the staterooms would not get done until the end of September, just before I sailed for Mexico.

Seref and I were not getting along. I told him directly, as we stood in the hot sun in the dust: “You promise things, but then you don’t deliver. You’re too slow. You should have had ten guys working on this immediately, but you didn’t listen to me, and now you’re not going to be able to do it on time. Which means, to me, that you’re doing this on purpose, because I know you’re a smart man.”

“David, we will do this job. Really, you must not talk like this.”

“How are you going to do it, Seref? You’re already too late.”

These conversations usually ended in silence, filled with what I believed to be mutual regret. Too many things had gone wrong, the boat an enormous weight dragging both of us down. We took turns making excuses. Seref made excuses about botched and late construction; I made excuses about late payments. The war in Kosovo was killing both of our businesses. He was doing less than forty percent of his usual business, even with the Brits, who tend not to be deterred much by war or terrorism, and he was suffering especially from his new rental cars. I suspected he had bought some of these cars in the winter using my money. I suspected that a month or two of construction in the winter had not actually happened. But I couldn’t know for sure, and there was no possibility of recourse in the Turkish courts, anyway.

I spent every day at the boat, trying to hurry the job along. I also tried to encourage the use of safety harnesses, since the men with the sanders were up on scaffolding. They laughed at me, the silly American trying to hand out his safety equipment, but one day, after I made Baresh and Ercan put on sailing harnesses with tethers leading up to stanchions, Baresh slipped and fell off the scaffolding. His sander and the board he was standing on fell twenty feet to the ground, but he was left dangling in the air, held by his tether. Several men pulled him up on deck, and after that I was teased less. Ercan, however, blamed the fall on the harness and tether. “If he not have this equipment, he never fall.”

I’d had other impossible arguments with Ercan that summer. On one of the earlier charters, for instance, I had asked him to install siphon breaks for the bilge pump discharges, but he refused. “This not my job,” he said. “This things not necessary. This not my job.”

I didn’t like arguing with him, so instead I tried to show him. We had some water in the bilge, so I had him watch the water level as I turned the pump on and off. Each time I turned it on, the water level went down. Each time I turned it off, the water level went up and kept rising until I turned it on again. “You see?” I asked. “The discharge has formed a siphon. This is what happened to the engines, too. The water coming in from the bilge pump could actually sink us. Which is why we have to use either a one-way valve or a siphon break.”