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

Several of us accused Mary Helen of making this up, but she insisted it was true. She did admit, however, that jellyfish were, in the final analysis, more complicated in their migrations than tennis shoes. They didn’t drift only with the surface current. Around bays, for instance, they could descend to a level where current would bring them back in after they had drifted out. They could seek salinity or temperature or current bands. They were able, in response to a will even more opaque than our own, to control their drift.

ALWAYS A STRANGE experience, riding a boat twenty-five feet above land, seeming to fly, and stranger still for our destination. Sand everywhere, a small Sahara, the blasters and painters in full suits with hoods, a toxic waste crew wandering this industrial desert endlessly. Downwind of us, toward the water, was nothing nice. Some huge round cement containers, an abandoned field, then industrial docks. I hadn’t thought much about blasting before, even when I had decided to do it, but I realized now it would send up a constant cloud of epoxy filler, paint, and steel mixed in with the sand. My uncle and I had prepared all of this wood for varnishing, but I could see now we weren’t going to be doing any varnishing until we left the blasting yard.

Before we could blast, we had to remove the wooden railing from the boat. This was not easy; the rails were glued down as well as bolted. Ducky, the foreman of the blasting company, decided we needed hydraulic jacks, and he drove me toward Port of Spain, the capital, in his beat-up little car. We passed roadside markets, like corner stores, made of brightly painted plywood and concrete. Trinidad looked much more third-world than I had expected. I asked Ducky how much the houses cost and he whistled and said they had gone way up. Almost 300,000 TT now for one of the nicer homes. That was a bit less than $50,000 U.S. I tried to explain that a small three-bedroom house where I was from, on the peninsula south of San Francisco, now cost about $800,000 U.S., but it sounded so crazy he didn’t believe me. He asked how much money I could make in the U.S., and when I told him I had made $27,000 a year teaching full-time at Stanford, he didn’t believe that, either.

“That mean you have no way of buying a house,” he said.

I told him that was true. That was part of the point of my trying this whole boating business. If I didn’t try something other than being a lecturer, I’d be renting overpriced apartments until I died, and I would never save a penny. I told him a one-person apartment cost more than $1,500 per month, but I could tell he didn’t quite believe this, either. The world I came from was, in fact, insane. Here in Trinidad, Ducky could make the equivalent of $15,000 U.S. a year, working very hard, and buy a good house for the equivalent of $50,000. His life made sense.

We stopped at a shop for auto parts, where I bought three small hydraulic jacks, then returned to the boat.

Seref had glued these rails never to come off, which didn’t make sense, since he hadn’t bothered to properly coat the steel beneath. When we finally made it to the aft rails on our second day of work, there was only primer beneath, if even that. Seref had done nothing to protect the steel. Just slapped the wood on and lied to me.

Ducky and one of his crew suited up at dawn the next morning, wearing hoods that had air blowing in through a small hose. This created a positive pressure seal from inside and was the only way to keep out sand, epoxy, and paint. They wore heavy gloves and boots, but the high pressure air and sand coming out of the blasting hose was capable of cutting through a boot almost instantly.

Sand blasting is truly industrial. The sound of these hoses was like the roar of jet engines, and the dust billowed out in clouds for hundreds of feet. I was up on deck when they began blasting, and I had every incentive to get my work done quickly. Even with a respirator and earplugs and goggles, the sand and epoxy dust and sound were getting in.

When I finally climbed the twenty-five feet down to the ground, two hours later, I could see their progress. Gray tracks across the red-painted underbody. Ducky held the hose in both hands and clamped it with his legs. He used short up-and-down movements to work away at the paint. The toughest areas were the ones with deep epoxy filler; the filler makes the sand bounce.

Bare steel is gray and porous, super dry and capable of quickly soaking up any moisture. The biggest challenge for a good blasting job is the weather. If it rains, the steel immediately rusts and has to be reblasted. Even too much humidity can start the rust. And this was almost the beginning of the rainy season. We were right on the edge. It could start raining any day and not let up for weeks.

I was negotiating with KNJ, the yard’s painting company, over the paint job, and this went on and on. I tried hard to keep the negotiations friendly. I wanted to enjoy the business this time. During my year of working for the dot-com, I missed Turkey and all the other places I’d been, and I wished I’d relaxed and enjoyed all of it more. I had been tense the entire summer in Turkey while the boat was being finished and launched. There had been a lot of problems, and I had let them get to me instead of enjoying that magnificent place and the adventure of what I was doing. I wanted this time to be different.

KNJ slowly came around. Nigel, the painter, looked at the job again, knowing I wasn’t going to pay the price he’d quoted, and agreed to a lower amount. So once the blasting, priming, epoxy, and bottom paint were finished, the travelift picked up the boat again, and I sailed over the dusty sea to Nigel’s trailer in a corner of Peake’s yard. Scaffolding went up immediately, which Nigel tried to get me to pay for, since it was rented from the yard. I said no, annoyed that he was already trying to nickel-and-dime me, and he just smiled. I hoped this kind of thing wouldn’t continue.

Nigel had a partner, Davey, and a crew of about ten other guys. They began with microballoons, which are microscopic glass bubbles mixed in an epoxy paste. The microballoons form a super hard shell over the steel, almost like another hull, which can be sanded down for a more even surface. This was what the faring was all about. Trying to turn my patchwork of welding seams into something smooth, “like an egg,” as Seref had said.

I wouldn’t get to know this crew the way I had gotten to know Ducky’s crew. I had a long list of things to fix or buy while in Trinidad. And the wood my uncle and I had sanded had turned from light red to dark gray in just one week. The sun was so hot that raw wood darkened noticeably in a single day.

I was in the Internet cafés every evening, keeping in touch with our clearinghouse in the Virgin Islands and the broker in Florida. The broker sold another trip for us in November, and another in February, bringing the total to five charters. If I could just get the boat fixed up and delivered on time, we were going to do well. We’d pay off most of our credit cards by January, and we’d have another full year before starting monthly payments to our lienholders. This was a pleasant change, having a business with a bright future.

But at the moment cash was tight and I was trying to get deals on everything while Nancy, back in California, was working and applying for more credit cards. I did a lot of negotiating, playing at least three local vendors off each other for every large item, working the price lower and lower, hoofing back and forth, pissing off a few people but staying on budget.

Each night I dragged a mattress up to sleep on deck amid the epoxy and paint dust, hoping the toxins weren’t taking years off my life. It was hot as hell, and muggy. There were mosquitos, so I had to put a sheet over and sleep in an oven. It was bright from the yard lights and noisy from traffic passing on the road. One of my neighbors liked to play Soca music most nights between 2 A.M. and 4 A.M., and prostitutes yelled up at me from the other side of the yard’s fence. So I didn’t sleep very well. I used the yard showers and bathrooms, ordered sandwiches from the local restaurant, and peed off the deck into the yard.