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

That night, however, in about the same position where I had lost my rudder a year and a half earlier, the wind and waves came up and slapped us around. Then we heard a loud metallic booming sound in our stern area.

“Not again,” I said. Everyone woke up and came on deck, and we began checking. We weren’t spinning, so we still had a rudder.

“It could be the port transmission,” I said. “If it has saltwater in it again and slipped. Or maybe we hit something. I don’t really know.”

My crew stayed calm, and we checked everything. It was the middle of the night, no moon, and the wind and seas were building. I checked the oil in the port transmission, felt for heat on the shaft glands, listened from the aft stateroom for sounds of a bent shaft as we turned at various revolutions, checked the hydraulic ram under the bed, tried the handling and speed and gauges at the helm. But everything checked out fine.

“We must have just hit a big piece of wood or something,” I told the crew.

I went back to bed, but it was too weird. To have the same type of sound at the same time of night in the same place in the ocean, a year and a half later. I sometimes felt like Oedipus, running and running and escaping nothing.

We continued on to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands without any problems. The three and a half days underway were entirely pleasant. And we had a good time in Las Palmas. There are several long stretches of beach with hotels and restaurants built along a boardwalk, and one night we all became pleasantly lost in the twists and turns between bays and beaches. We had a feast at one of the restaurants, confusing each other’s orders, gorging on tapas and pizzas and entrees. We had too much wine and were talking too loud and poking fun at each other. Then we got lost again and straggled back to the boat.

There were also some interesting people to meet on the dock. My uncle Doug and I were busy the first day just cleaning up the engine room, because during the trip a fitting on the copper return line for one of the diesels had leaked and diesel had sprayed everywhere. Our many trips to the waste disposal took us past an old wooden schooner that was being restored, and we met an interesting captain. He had restored almost a dozen of these old boats. By the time we left, he had lent us a drill bit (which we broke and replaced with bottles of wine), we had swapped navigation books, and I had tried unsuccessfully to steal his best carpenter. All in good fun.

Leaving Las Palmas, we were sailing. The wind was good. But that night it increased significantly.

We furled our genoa first and headed into the wind. We let the main halyard go, but the sail stuck high in the track. Seref had attached the track in two pieces, and the place where the two tracks joined sometimes jammed the cars. So here I was at night in seas and wind, the sail whipping wildly, making sounds like pistol shots, and it wouldn’t come down.

I tried pulling the sail from the aft end, which meant climbing onto the roof of the pilothouse, a dangerous spot in the wind and seas. Two of my crew were at the halyard, pulling it up then releasing it, over and over, but that wasn’t doing any good either. Finally I went forward to the main mast and climbed fifteen feet off the deck, to where I could grab onto a fold of the sail. I held on with both hands, let my feet dangle above the deck, and started yanking downward with all my body weight and strength while my crew kept tightening and releasing the halyard.

Even as I was doing this, I realized it was unsafe. The deck was rolling, it was dark, we were being blasted with saltwater and howling wind, and I was dangling above the deck, yanking on something that would eventually give way. There were winches and other metal fittings I might hit on the way down, a lot of things to land on that weren’t soft. But I just did it, frustrated with the stupidity of having a main sail that wouldn’t come down.

And then the sail fell, all in an instant, and I fell fast and hard, clipping my knee on a stainless fitting on the mast. I rolled on the deck, threw out my arms to find something to hold onto, and found a bulwark for the forward seating area. I paused, wondering how hard I had hit, and then stood up. The knee was sore, but I could stand and walk, so I was okay. But I look back and cringe at how stupid I was, taking that risk.

A day and a half later, in predawn darkness, we slowed and waited in a large channel outside our port in the Cape Verde Islands. This was Africa. I had passed within sight of several African ports on my way across the Mediterranean eighteen months earlier, but this was going to be my first time actually landing in an African country. The guidebooks all warned to stop for fuel and nothing more. The crime rate, especially theft from visiting yachts, was supposed to be horrific.

The wind made it cold out in the channel. The waves were up, too, as they always are in channels, and the crew was ready for a break from the rolling, even if only for a few hours. We continued to wait, though, because I didn’t want to enter this unfamiliar port at night. The charts for it were not good, and I had no other knowledge to draw on.

The sky went from black to a very dark blue, then gradually lightened. We began to see the outline of mountains, the eastern sky behind them a paler blue. And then we could see land masses around the lights of the port, a large rock in the center of the bay and, as we approached slowly, the long line of a breakwater down low.

I tried the VHF, but no one responded. It was early on a Saturday. We crept closer and found ourselves in a little bay that was shallowing, with no fuel dock in sight and a few rocks just sticking up randomly, unmarked, so I turned us around, back toward the commercial docks, and decided to tie up next to the ships.

A man came jogging down the dock, waving for us to pull alongside. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, so he was just a local guy looking for a tip, but I was willing to take whatever help I could find.

We docked in a strong surge, greeted with a lot of words that were in English but difficult to understand, and I went ashore with my new guide and our passports and boat papers.

This town looked like a Mexican port town, the nearby hills sharp and dry, a desert with banded rock. Along the waterfront was the main road and boardwalk, with some palm trees. The town itself very sleepy. A few historical buildings and shops that were painted but most of the rest needing some work. A lot of concrete. What was different, of course, was the entirely black population, and all the details of their daily lives, from the stands at each corner selling thimblefuls of a local alcohol that looked thick and sweet to the vendors from other African countries spreading their wares on the sidewalks. Carved animals and rough iron products. I followed my guide but was distracted all along the way, wanting to soak up as much of this new place as I possibly could in a few hours.

My guide did not have a high reputation in the town. At the first stand we passed, he tried to get one cigarette, since cigarettes were sold individually rather than by the pack, and he pointed to me as credit but still was refused. I didn’t intervene. I was going to pay him $20 at the end of the day, which was more than the local wages for a week’s work, and that was good enough. I didn’t want to become entangled in any local dealings.

It was hard not to, though. My guide was telling me his life story and introducing me to people, and the government offices weren’t open yet, so we had some time to kill. We went into a large market building, where several dozen women stood at their stalls selling grains and vegetables, local honey and nuts and fruit and the local alcohol. Several tried to get me to try this stuff, and I kept resisting, but finally one woman basically poured a shot-glass of it into my mouth, which annoyed me considerably. The drink was both sugary and very high proof.