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

As we came to our last day in Bodrum, Seref was holding all of my papers. Ostensibly this was because he was clearing customs and immigration for me. But it was also a power play. I had to pay him the last two or three thousand I owed before I could go. I promised I would make the payment within a week, with a transfer from the U.S., since I didn’t have the cash now, and he finally agreed to this, seeing no other option, but then he wanted to go for a little walk to discuss his “commission.”

The boat that was supposed to cost $300,000 or $350,000 and be perfect had in fact cost $600,000 and was full of flaws I would be fixing for years, but Seref expected a bonus for all of the good work he had done. He wanted his tip to be based on the total cost, including the original purchase of the hull and the cost of the items I had shipped. He wanted 15 percent, which was $90,000. I knew that he had been collecting commissions all along and had probably bought some of his new rental car fleet with my money during the winter, delaying the construction. But for now I had to pretend a commission was coming so he would let me leave.

Seref had one hand on the back of my neck as we walked along. It was evening, very balmy, the Bodrum waterfront a place I was actually quite fond of and was going to miss, even the mopeds sputtering past.

“I build this boat for you like it is my own boat,” he said. “Do you like your boat?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s beautiful. Thank you. And though we’ve had some bad moments, I want you to know how much I appreciate the work you’ve done for me.”

He seemed to relax a bit. “You are my friend,” he said. “Most men demand full commission before the boat leaves, but I know your money, that you have no money until you get this loan from John, and your schedule, and I know you won’t forget me when you leave here.”

“No,” I said. “And you’ll have to come visit this winter in Mexico, and then I’ll be back here next summer. We have the new thing for the Brits next summer, after all.”

“Yes,” he said. He had made a new alliance in the past few weeks with a British travel company that catered to older guests. He had told them about my educational charters and they seemed interested. The next summer, using leased boats, we were going to run educational charters for hundreds of old Brits, and I was going to supply all of the professors and set up the curriculum.

I didn’t believe any of this, of course. It was just a ploy by Seref to encourage me to pay his commission. If I thought I was going to make a lot on future business, I would have more incentive.

“Yes,” Seref said again. “This will be very good business for us.” Then he stopped, and I stopped, too, since he still had his big hand on my neck. He reached into his pocket with his other hand and pulled out an old compass. “I have a gift for you. My father give me this compass, for my first boat.”

“Seref,” I said. “I can’t take that. That has so many memories for you.”

“Please,” he said. “My friend.”

So I took the compass and made a great show of my gratitude and how much his friendship meant to me and how much I was going to miss him.

“Come,” he said, satisfied finally, or at least realizing this was the best he was going to get. “We go to my office for the papers.”

We picked up the papers, including passports and the bluebook for the boat, then I was back on board, the boat and new crew and guests ready, and I was greatly relieved. I was going to get out of here in one piece. It was dark, about 10 P.M., our spreader lights on as we pulled anchor and freed our lines. Baresh was waving goodbye to us. He was a sweet young man. He had been paid the least, and I had given him the biggest tip, which I was glad of now.

We motored out from under the magnificent castle, set our sails, and escaped across the wine-dark sea.

MALTA AT SUNRISE is one of the more spectacular things a sailor can see. It’s always a pleasure to view an island for the first time from the water, to approach it as the ancients did, as travelers did through all the ages until the airplane. But Malta is a special treat, because at first you see only lovely hills, light beige and pink in the light before the sun has risen fully, with what seem to be cliff faces, and it is only as you come closer that you see that some of this rock, some of these cliffs, are in fact fortifications and monuments, built from the stone of the island. You begin to make out the medieval walls and the towers. You watch the city make itself in the light, and still you don’t see anything modern, but only what a medieval traveler would have seen. And this impression remains mostly intact, even as you draw close. Only after you’re inside the harbor do you notice the smaller shops and buses and cars and power lines. Malta is an enchanted island, the place I was most eager to visit of all our ports from Turkey to Mexico.

I radioed for a slip and was assigned an agent, who would take care of our other needs as well. I had quite a few things to buy and fix while in Malta. One of the inverters had blown out, and we needed a spotlight, a pump, several spares, and some hardware. This in addition to filling diesel, propane, water, and provisioning for the next leg to Ibiza, in the Spanish Balearic Islands.

I was afraid, with all of this to do, that I wouldn’t see Malta at all, and this in fact is what happened. While my guests and Nancy and even the crew were able to tour the island, I worked nonstop. I heard about the Blue Grotto and other places I had wanted to visit, but I didn’t see them. A lot of pirate movies have been filmed on Malta, because of the spectacular coastline, and renting these movies was going to be the closest I would get.

The only taste of Malta available to me was the language. Because Malta is a small island country in the middle of the Mediterranean and has been an important trading port for thousands of years, its language is a blend of the tongues of all the sailors and conquerors who have passed through. When I first heard Maltese, I actually laughed, because I thought someone was just being very funny. But it was no joke. The blend is mostly Arabic and Sicilian but includes Greek, Spanish, French, English and other tongues, including African tongues, with a bit of the Swedish chef thrown in. It’s the most improbable, liquid, beautiful mess of language I have ever heard.

This humored me as I went about my tasks. But I was preoccupied by the fact that business at home in California was not good. Amber was not selling our winter trips in Mexico.

There was no reason these trips should not have sold. I had a famous professor teaching the Archaeology of the Maya, an excellent Spanish language instructor, a famous poet, and other solid offerings. Mine was the only overnight charter boat on that entire coast south of Cancun. And Cancun was an easy place to fly into. I had advertising through the University of San Diego as well as through Stanford. The advertising budget was a bit short for magazine ads and direct-mail postcards, but the numbers were still far too low. Amber just wasn’t good at selling trips, or she wasn’t trying.

I was also worried that she wasn’t paying bills correctly. I sent an e-mail with precise instructions for the new loan from Rand and Lee; exact amounts were to be paid on each of my dozen credit cards. I was so late on so many bills that I had to be careful what I paid when, to keep all of the various creditors sufficiently appeased.

We finished our preparations and set sail for Ibiza. My crew were college students taking fall semester off. Nick, Charlie Junkerman’s son, had suffered up the California coast with me two summers earlier, on the way to my first charter season in the San Juans with Grendel . I had promised him and his parents that this trip would be better, an enjoyable cruise through the Med and then an easy downwind sail across the Atlantic and Caribbean to the Yucatan. Emi had been a student in one of my undergraduate courses. She was from Homer, Alaska, and had spent many seasons working on her family’s commercial fishing boat. Her boyfriend Matt, also an Alaskan commercial fisherman, had joined us even though I wasn’t paying him.