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

We took another taxi back down to the harbor, and as I hobbled out to the dock with Nancy, Barbara rushed up to us. “You’re not going to like what you see, David,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I told the marina, and they’ve brought another fender, but the damage is already done.”

As we neared the boat, I could see that a twenty-foot section of the port rail had been bashed against the wall so hard the fenders had been ripped off and the steel bulwarks bent in. The teak rail had been smashed to pieces and the stanchions bent at odd angles. Paint had been taken off the hull in some places and bare steel showed through. We had been gone only forty-five minutes, and it was already calm again. It was incredible.

“Fuck,” I said. There wasn’t much else to say. It was much more damage than we had taken from the towing attempts.

The other crew came back in the next couple of hours, just after dark, and said similar things.

“Well at least it’s not my boat right now,” I told them. “It belongs to the admiralty, and the damage should be covered by their insurance policy. They’d better cover it. And where is this twenty-four-hour guard?”

Nancy and I sat in the pilothouse, which was a gorgeous place, with large windows, dark mahogany, and plenty of comfortable seating around two tables. I just wanted to sit for a while. The crew were gathering laundry and taking care of their own business. I knew I would lose them. It would probably take a month to work out this mess and get a new rudder, maybe longer.

“There are the engines, too,” I told Nancy. “I have to work on that tomorrow, figure out why they’re not starting.”

“I want to be back home,” she said. “I mean I’m not going, I’ll stay here with you, but doesn’t this suck?”

“It does suck,” I said.

We decided to get dinner at one of the restaurants on the dock. It would cost us at least $10 or $15 each, but what the hell. It had been an awful day. We met Barbara walking back from the phones, and she joined us.

“This is good,” Barbara said. “We need something normal. Just forget the boat exists. It isn’t there.”

“What boat?” Nancy asked.

“Okay, okay,” I said. We ordered and I drank some water and looked at the clean maroon tablecloth, the candles, the white cloth napkins, my water glass.

Then Nick walked up to us, holding the back of his head with one hand. “David,” he said. “I hit my head pretty bad. I didn’t know the hatch was open in the galley, and I fell down into the engine room.” He removed his hand from the back of his head and showed us the blood.

It was a bit much to believe, but there it was.

The restaurant called us a cab, and Nick and I went outside to wait. I told Barbara and Nancy to stay and have dinner. I made sure I had money, and I knew where the hospital was. While we waited for the cab, I kept him talking, making sure he stayed lucid.

“I’m not dead yet,” he said. “Head wounds bleed a lot. They look worse than they are.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But we need to be careful. We’ll wake you up every hour or so tonight, or whatever schedule the doctor recommends. And you have to keep talking, so I know you’re fine. Let me know if you feel dizzy or faint or anything happens to your vision or you feel like you’re going to fall.”

“Keep saying stuff like that and I might.” But he had his lopsided grin that was part of why we all liked him so much.

“Sorry,” I said. “I won’t let them take your organs until it looks pretty final.”

“Cheers, mate.”

I had him sit on the curb, so that if he fell it wouldn’t be far, and we waited. The cab was taking forever. Endless headlights and small cars zooming past on the narrow street, but no cab stopping.

“Well shit-o,” Nick said.

“Indeed,” I said.

I asked if he’d be okay for a minute, and he said he would, so I rushed back the hundred feet or so to the restaurant and asked them to call the cab again. When I returned, Nick was still fine, still sitting there.

“Your dad will never forgive me,” I said. First the trip on Grendel up the coast from San Francisco, a nightmare of seasickness and mechanical breakdowns, pounding for three days into fifteen-foot seas and thirty-five-knot winds just to get to Eureka, where Charlie and Nick wisely disembarked and took a bus. Then the paint had fallen off the hull this summer during Charlie’s Odyssey course. Now this. His son had taken a semester off from Oberlin to crew from Turkey to Mexico after I’d filled him full of tropical visions, and here we’d only made it to Morocco before losing our rudder, and then Nick had fallen ten feet onto steel beams just for icing.

“My mom’s the one who won’t forgive you,” he said.

“Oh great.”

“Just pulling the old leg, mate. The ’rents will be okay.”

The cab finally came and we made it to the hospital, where the doctor, a different one from earlier in the day but also Indian, said it would probably be fine. Some painkillers, an antibiotic, and if we wanted to wake Nick all night on coma alert, we could, but it probably wasn’t necessary.

Nick called his parents, I promised we’d wake him every hour, and we were back on the street.

“No more events tonight,” I said. “This day has gone on long enough.”

I WOKE NICK every hour that night, having trouble sleeping anyway. By morning I was a wreck, and it was going to be a busy day. I needed to let everyone know about the damage at the dock, meet with the surveyor from the insurance company, write a summary of events, meet with the lawyers, try to lift the arrest, make arrangements for hauling the boat and replacing the rudder, figure out why the engines weren’t starting, and chase down the loan from John.

It was the end of October and the loan still wasn’t in. It had been promised no later than October 15, and I needed it. Amber’s mistakes and the rudder incident had made things considerably worse. The $150,000 would still be enough to pay everything, including $35,000 in interest due to lenders, but without it, I would be lost.

The marina already knew about the damage, but I had to notify my insurance company, my lawyers, and the admiralty marshal. The marshal, I learned, had not yet taken out the insurance policy. He hadn’t gotten around to it. It had kind of slipped his mind. And according to my lawyers, it would be impossible to recover losses from the admiralty. They were a government agency, the main one for anything related to boats, so if they made a mistake, oh well. No one was going to enforce it against them. Same as when a government agency screws up in the United States.

This meant convincing either the marina or my insurance company to pay for a considerable amount of damage. As I sat in the plush offices of Isola & Isola, looking at legal texts on the shelves and the finely carved wood, I couldn’t help yearning for a life with some dignity and stability.

The two lawyers who entered and sat opposite me were well groomed and expensive-looking, while I sat in a T-shirt covered with stains from oil, diesel, paint, and rust. They were handsome and articulate. They had money and power, respect and important friends. They told me they would try to go after the marina, and all I could think of was what that would cost me in legal fees, and I had to ask about the fees, too, and express again that I was having a hard time financially, which was something I was tired of doing.

They read the summary of events I had written that morning for Pantaenius, my insurance company, including a description of the damage at the dock, and they told me again they would go after Queensway Quay, but I knew my only hope was to have this damage included in my own insurance claim, as part of the same event. The boat had been at the dock where the damage occurred because I’d had no choice of berthing because I had lost my rudder. It was all one sequence of events. But as I walked back to the boat to meet with the surveyor for Pantaenius, I wasn’t convinced. They could call it two separate events, making me pay the $3,000 deductible twice, or even deny the entire claim.