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

I hated to take my hands off the throttles, but I had to radio the other captain. “This is just to verify that you’ll be sending a long line to us first, which we will use as a bridle, tying it to both sides of our bow.”

“I don’t have that line for you. I have only one tow line. This is the tow line they are throwing to you now.”

“But that won’t work,” I said. “We can’t be towed from just one side of the bow. We have to have a bridle.”

“You will have to put it in the center.”

I couldn’t respond because I had to throw the starboard engine hard forward, the port engine hard reverse. The bow straightened but also jumped forward, very close to the freighter’s stern, which came down with a huge crash just as two men threw their lines, both of which fell short.

“Put it in the center?” I yelled over the radio. “We have a bowsprit. And we have anchors that will sever the line.”

I had to let go of the radio again.

“We are doing our best,” the captain said. “We do not have what you are requesting.”

“Nancy, go tell the crew this line is it. They have to get it attached through the hole in the bow for the anchors and then to a cleat or the windlass, preferably a cleat.” We had enormous steel cleats that were welded to the steel deck underneath the teak.

Nancy worked her way forward along the rail, struggling to hold on amid the spray and storm-force wind.

Our bow went up over a wave just as the freighter’s stern drifted to the side, so the wind caught us full blast and spun us, dipping our rail almost to the water. I held on to the throttles and saw the crew holding on to lifelines and keeping so low for balance they were lying on the deck. As we came back around, the boat stalled broadside and I gunned the engines at full power to bring the bow up. I tried not to appear panicked, since Barbara was on deck now. She didn’t know how to swim. She was wearing a lifejacket, sitting braced against a table, and not saying anything. I didn’t like it at all that she or anyone else was experiencing this.

The bow came around under force of the engines, but the trick, with no rudder, was to avoid coming around so fast as to then spin the other way. I had to ease off at the right moment. I succeeded this time, and was able to go straight for a minute and catch up to the freighter, but I was blown in a circle once more before getting the bow up to their stern for another attempt. This time our bowsprit must have come within ten feet of their stern. Completely terrifying. My crew up there and the boat only minimally under my control. Nancy was back beside me, drenched even in her foul weather gear. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and then watched the crew.

The freighter crew threw lines again, three of them at the same time, which didn’t make any sense, but Matt, in a leap on that rolling, pitching deck, right at the lifelines, caught one. He and Nick and Emi hauled the line in and I tried to keep us in position. Tiny, fast adjustments.

They led the line through the gap for the starboard anchor and threw the loop around the cleat just as I was losing the boat to starboard. We were blown sideways away from the freighter as the line played out from their end, and then I saw the freighter crew cleating it off.

“No!” I yelled into the radio. “They can’t cleat it off now. They have to let out a long line. It has to be long enough to be submerged. Tell them to take it off! Now!”

Then I yelled to Nancy, “Tell the crew to get away from the bow!”

She ran forward, looking scared, and the captain came back over the radio. “We do not have a longer line,” he said.

“You have a longer line!” I yelled. “Give us the goddamn longer line!”

The short line caught tight then and yanked us horrendously to the side, our boat at such a steep angle I thought we might go over. If we hadn’t been a sailboat, with heavy keels and built to heel over and recover, we would have been lost. Any motoryacht would have capsized instantly. The crew and Nancy had made it back to midships just in time and were clinging to the lifelines and the seating area. Barbara was under the table holding one of its legs to keep from flying. The bowsprit was holding only because it was a monstrously heavy piece of steel. We took several feet of green water, pounding back against the crew, then wallowed for a moment before being yanked through another wave, taking green water again. This severed the line against the flukes of our starboard anchor and we were spinning free of the tow.

“Goddamnit,” I said into the radio. “You put my crew and my vessel at risk. Give us a bridle, a long bridle, and then give us a proper tow line.”

“We will make a turn, go behind you, turn again, and then you may try the tow again. We will search again for a longer line, but I can tell you we do not have what you are requesting.”

“With a ship that size, I know you have enough docklines to give us one for a bridle and three more tied together for a long tow line.”

“We cannot give up all of our dock lines for you. If we lose the lines, or use them to tow you, what do we use when we arrive in port?”

“We’ll give them back to you in the harbor as we’re taken on by a tug, or a pilotboat can bring you new ones. We have to have a safe tow line.”

“I cannot risk the security of my vessel. I will give you what I can.”

A large wave caught us then from the stern, as the boat was spinning, and I heard a crashing sound. Thousands of gallons dumped onto our aft deck, and our Mediterranean boarding ladder, which was fifteen feet of solid teak and weighed more than 500 pounds, came loose from its steel mount and began swinging at the stern, ripping off the wooden taff rail and bouncing on its lines.

There was no good way to deal with this. The ladder was heavy enough to crush and kill anyone caught between it and the deck. We had to bring it in before it took out our backstays and our mizzenmast, but it was held high on a halyard and was out of control, too dangerous to approach. I took the halyard and waited for the right timing, for the ladder to swing in over the poop deck. My three crew were ready but kept jumping back out of the way. The deck rolling in the big waves, the wind screaming at over fifty knots, the ladder just one more uncontrollable force until finally it swung in over the poop deck long enough for me to let the halyard go and my crew to pull it forward, where we lashed it down.

I returned to the throttles to face us again into the waves. The boarding ladder was my fault. I should have stowed it on deck before we left Gibraltar. It was necessary for the Mediterranean but only a hazard for an Atlantic crossing. I had been thinking we might need it in the Canary Islands. The hydraulic ram popping loose was my fault, too. I should have checked it. There had been so many things to do before we left Turkey, and I’d been exhausted. I had checked hundreds of other things, but I’d been in a rush and the board beneath the bed wasn’t easy enough to remove, because of the bad carpentry. It was also possible that the ram had been sabotaged by a disgruntled crew member or worker during our final days in Turkey, because the safety on the ram should not have failed, and it was hard to imagine how it could have come fully unscrewed across more than six inches of tight threads.

The freighter passed again and I tried to maneuver us closer. The waves remained sharp, their tops blown off in spray, the spray everywhere, filling the air, and the Moroccan Coast Guard still wouldn’t send a boat and there were no private boats willing to offer a tow. The freighter was our only option. The Inmarsat-C was supposed to relay distress messages by satellite to ships in our area, but the German ship reported they hadn’t seen any notifications.