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

This second towing attempt was going to be the same horror as the last, I knew. Without a bridle, we couldn’t keep the line away from the bowsprit and anchors. The line was heavy dock line for a ship, five-inch-thick nylon, but the force of a hundred tons being yanked through a twenty-foot wave was more than enough to sever it against any kind of edge.

When I finally got our bow up to their stern, the freighter crew threw their lines and one of them wrapped high around our headstay. I watched it wrap around and then the monkey fist dangling there, about ten feet off the deck, just out of reach. And my crew hadn’t noticed. They were trying to catch another line. The headstay is the heavy stainless steel wire leading from the end of the bowsprit to the top of the main mast. It’s the main wire holding the mast up. If we fell away from the freighter at this moment, which could very easily happen as our bow came up over a wave and caught the wind, and if the hard yank of the rope on the headstay were enough to make the stay or one of its fittings fail, which was also possible, then the main mast would be pulled down backward onto the deck by its backstays. The mizzen would come down, too, right on top of us.

“Tell them to get that line off my headstay,” I told Nancy. “If that line doesn’t come off right now, it could pull down our masts. Understand?”

“Oh God,” Nancy said, and she ran forward.

It was my most concentrated time on the throttles. I had to keep us close behind their stern. I was surprised to find that I felt not frightened but deeply sad. If I failed, one of my crew or Nancy might be killed as the rigging came down, and it was in fact most likely that I would fail. I couldn’t control the wind or waves or the freighter or even my own boat. I stared at that stern and the waves and worked the throttles at revs the engines should never have been subjected to. I could smell the smoke in the exhaust, even in fifty knots of wind. I was willing to destroy my engines. And it took an impossibly long time. The crew didn’t understand immediately, and then they saw it and tried to reach it and couldn’t, then Matt finally got the boat hook and tried to undo it with that, and the crew on the freighter were not bright enough to give them any slack, but I couldn’t leave the throttles to use the radio. Barbara and I were silent. She was staring at the crew, too, and probably thinking similar thoughts. Loss of life and limb, real disaster, was only moments away, and there was nothing more we could do.

Matt caught the line with the boat hook and freed it from the headstay. Seconds later, though I still tried to keep us close to the stern for the towing attempt, our bow was blown hard and fast to starboard and we spun away from the freighter.

I tried to stay calm on the radio as I brought our boat back around for another attempt. “That heaving line was wrapped around my headstay, and none of your crew noticed. They should have cut that line as soon as they saw it wrapped.”

“I am up here in the bridge. You will have to notify me of such things.”

“I’m trying to steer the boat with only the throttles. My hands aren’t free. You tell your first mate to pay some attention and try to avoid getting us killed.”

“I have been in contact with the owners, and they have suggested that we tow you from your main mast. If you have a line you could put around your main mast, and if we then towed you back the other way to Gibraltar, downwind, it might go easier.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “My masts are wood, and they’re only deck-stepped, so that’s not a possible tow point. And I can’t have you tow me downwind without a rudder. I’ll be powerless to keep from going sideways down a wave, and then I’ll get yanked by your short tow rope and the boat will broach. Why don’t you just give us the bridle and long tow line, which I know you have?”

He didn’t answer, and it was time to try moving up to the stern.

My crew caught a line and hauled it in, again with time only to throw it over a cleat and then retreat to midships. Again the terrible yank, the line too short, and the towline severed. It was so stupid.

“Surprise, surprise,” I said over the radio. “The short tow line without a bridle was severed again.”

“I am not required to tow you, and we are trying our best.”

“You are in fact required to help me, and if you endanger my vessel or crew unnecessarily through not providing the kind of assistance that you could have provided, you are responsible for that also.”

“We will try one more time, and then I suggest you take the offer of the helicopter from the Moroccans.”

Matt was back in the pilothouse, along with the other crew, and he wanted to talk with me, so I signed off the radio. He looked angry and frustrated, which was a bit frightening with his height and his military haircut, but with him the anger was just a way of getting through the work, nothing personal.

Nick and Emi just looked exhausted and scared. Everyone was soaked.

“What about using chain?” Matt asked. “We could wrap chain around the cleat and put it out past the bowsprit and tie the towline to that. That would keep the line from chafing on the anchors or bowsprit.”

It was a good idea. “Will you be able to get the line attached?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, let’s do it,” I said. “But be careful out there. Don’t get in the way of anything. Let the boat get hurt, not you.”

I radioed the German captain and again asked for the proper equipment, which he again refused. So I told him we were going to try using chain.

As I brought the boat around and worked my way up toward the freighter, Matt wrapped the chain from the starboard anchor around a deck cleat and had a length of about twenty feet going forward through the gap for the anchors.

I was spun several times by the wind, and the freighter crew was not good at throwing lines, but my crew did catch one finally, and Matt somehow attached it to the end of the chain. To this day, I have no idea how he did it, and he did it quickly, while the bow pitched and buried itself in those waves.

My crew retreated to midships, and when the tow line came tight with a hard yank that pulled us through a wave, it held. Still a terrible way to be towed, but I hoped it might work. Maybe we’d make it to Casablanca and have a new rudder made, and maybe the delay wouldn’t be more than a week. Seemed optimistic, but you never know. Steel is easy and fast to work with, unlike fiberglass or wood.

We were yanked through another wave, several feet of solid water coming over the bow, and in that instant as the water stood above the bow, I was staring at the chain wrapped on the large steel cleat. I was staring at it, and I didn’t blink, and the window was clear from just having been drenched, and yet all I saw was that it had vanished. Too quickly for me even to see it go. The steel deck cleat was torn off at its base, the heavy chain was gone, the huge 300-pound anchor was gone, and all that was left was 450 feet of additional chain from the locker flying away at a terrific pace. It caught and severed and we were spinning free, no longer attached. Some of the steel of the bulwarks at the opening for the starboard anchor had been bent outward. Gouges in the teak deck, also, where the deck cleat must have skipped twice. All that damage, all that force. It was too much.

“We’re not going to try that again,” I said to Nancy and Barbara.

“Wow,” Barbara said.

The crew was back in the pilothouse as I called the captain over the radio.

“That took off my deck cleat, anchor, and anchor chain,” I told him. “But you couldn’t give me any of the equipment I needed when I needed it.”

“I recommend accepting the helicopter,” he said. “Unless you can continue on your own.”