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

Ercan smiled. “It doesn’t do this before.”

“That’s because we just filled our water tank and partially filled diesel,” I said. “It will happen every time we’re heavy. Ecrem should have cut the discharge holes higher, but he didn’t.”

“Other boats don’t need this,” Ercan said. “I see many other boats. This is not necessary.”

I lost it at this point. I had just showed him clearly, beyond any doubt, how it could sink the boat. “You’ll sink,” I said. “Someday, on some other Turkish piece of shit, you’ll sink. I promise you. And it will be exactly what you deserve.”

In fact, the day after Baresh slipped and was saved by his harness, Seref was called away suddenly because his own boat was sinking, right in Bodrum harbor. This was the boat he had admonished me with one day when I insulted his construction prowess, ‘the first real sailboat in Bodrum’. He was cagey about it afterward, and he never did tell me exactly what happened, but he admitted that the boat sank from siphoning. By that point in the summer I had lost all respect for Seref or anyone I had met in Turkey as sailors or engineers or honest businessmen. I know that sounds uncharitable, but I base it solely on the facts of my experience. I had not arrived with a bad attitude. If anything, I was their dream of a naïve and trusting American. I trusted them and managed to convince seventeen private lenders to trust them. I had been an enormous fool, and now it was too late.

By day we worked on the hull, by night on the deck. Seref wouldn’t hire enough men to do both jobs at once. I refused to pay more for the job, and I didn’t have the money anyway, and I couldn’t figure out how to force Seref to do more than he was doing. I was already withholding the last money that was due. I had already threatened an end to future business. I had tried to shame him. And of course I had asked nicely. I didn’t know what else to do. Not having a solid court system really limits one’s options.

The hull and deck were grueling jobs. Some of the epoxy on the hull was holding, which made grinding difficult. The two coats of faring we applied were thin, not hiding the weld ribs, and we had to use a less glossy top paint to hide the flaws.

The deck seams were cleaned out inch by inch with small tools, then caulked with an air-powered gun, Ercan and his brother and I taking turns late into the night, the black caulking getting all over us. I was frantic to finish and get back in the water for the next charter.

When we did finally launch, the paint job wasn’t quite done. We motored around to Bodrum, and the painter put on the last coat right there in the middle of the harbor, using my dinghy, which became completely spattered with white paint. The job looked like crap, far inferior to the original paint. I would need a new paint job as soon as I could afford it. Until then the boat would look like a ferry or a tug rather than a yacht.

We set off that evening for Antalya, hoping to arrive the next day before dark. We still didn’t have a compass, and the crew were frustrated and spun in circles occasionally, but we did make it.

THE MORNING WAS hectic with provisioning and cleaning, then the guests arrived. I was happy to see Rand and Lee, two of my lenders. Rand had sailed with me in the British Virgin Islands and the Sea of Cortez and had been the one to originally encourage me to get a bigger boat. Lee, his wife, was a vice president at Sun Microsystems. After this twelve-day charter, they would be staying for the trip through the Med to Gibraltar and the Canary Islands. Another lender, Elizabeth, the former wife of a bigwig CEO, had invited half a dozen of her friends, so no one on this charter was a paying guest. It wasn’t just the war in Kosovo that was killing my business. I had also been too generous with the terms of the loans, offering free charter as well as principle and interest. I should have made the lenders pay at least the expenses of a charter, including diesel, crew, slip fees, customs fees, and food. Instead I was picking up the tab. Further proof of my foolishness. Self-reflection was becoming an increasingly unpleasant activity.

I spent as much of this trip as possible with Rand and Lee and Nancy. We strolled the ancient marble streets of cities such as Phaselis, with its lovely coves on either side, a city that had attracted Alexander, Rhodes pirates, and whoever else was big at any particular time. And one afternoon — in Kas, of all places — as we sat outside a small café and had ice cream, Rand and Lee expressed interest in becoming something more like partners in the boat. Lee was retiring in a year or so, and they loved the boat and the trips I ran, and they also could see the financial strain I was under, so they wanted to help out.

This came as a tremendous relief. AmEx had shut down all four cards. They wanted everything paid in full. I was out of cash and at the end of other credit and I would have expenses for the crossing to Mexico.

By the end of the charter, Rand and Lee, though they had already loaned me $100,000 in various stages, agreed to lend $150,000 more, interest free. I remember whispering about it at night in bed with Nancy. Rand and Lee were in the next stateroom, so I had to be quiet. But I was so excited. I was going to make it. Everything was going to work out. With this loan and then John’s loan I could clear all the cards, make my first interest payments in December to the lenders, and have enough cash to get through the winter in Mexico. Then I would need to have some better charter seasons, of course. But I felt like a free man again.

The more I thought about this new loan the more stunned I was by the generosity of it. Rand and Lee were loaning me a total of $250,000, sixty percent of it without interest, and they were even giving me ten years to repay the principal, instead of the usual three. This was the time of “angel” investors in Silicon Valley, but those “angels” usually tried to take most of the equity of any company they invested in. Rand and Lee were not taking any equity at all. They were the real thing.

Rand and Lee left on a four-day tour by car as Nancy and the crew and I motored back to Bodrum. We’d have a few days to take on diesel and provisions and do last-minute work on the boat before sailing for Mexico. And we’d be switching from Turkish crew to American crew, to avoid hassles with customs and immigration in various countries.

These days were busy but also much easier than the rest of the summer, because the financial crush had been lifted. Amber was happy to hear about the money coming in, after having to juggle bills all summer, and reassured me that she had just spoken with John, whose loan would arrive in about three weeks.

Not everything went smoothly, though. Now that the new seams had cured, Ercan and another man were sanding the entire deck with a large grinder, and naturally Ercan was barefoot. I had told him to wear boots many times that summer, but he was always scoffing at my safety worries, and this time the grinder caught a bit of deck, jumped, and tore up his foot and hand pretty badly. It didn’t saw through, but it mangled skin and several toes and cut the bone.

We rushed him to the hospital, which was already a familiar place. A few weeks earlier, Seref’s son had been run over by a car while riding his bicycle through one of Bodrum’s narrow streets. He pulled through without permanent damage, and Ercan was going to do the same, but I couldn’t help being reminded of how easy it was to die or lose a limb here, how cheap life was.

I stayed with Ercan through that first afternoon and evening, and I paid for all his care. I also gave him extra cash in addition to his pay. There’s no workers’ health insurance to speak of in Turkey. Employers just pay if an employee gets hurt, or else the employee is out of luck. The cost of medical care, fortunately, is about a tenth of what it is in the United States.