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

Nancy joined me for the last two weeks of June and the first week of July, a welcome relief even though we were both working full time on the varnish. We were about to be married, and it was a wonderful time to be together, even in an industrial wasteland.

We hired two of the painters after-hours and weekends to help us, and one of them, Stephen, we came to like and trust enormously. We hired him as crew to sail to the Virgin Islands and run our first two charters, and he started to tell us the truth about what Nigel and Davey were doing on the paint job. Davey was his friend, and a good guy, but Nigel was starting to cut corners.

Nigel was running out of money for materials. He had the paint already, but he was running short on filler for the final stages of faring. He claimed this was because he had underquoted the job, and the painting company backed him up on this, but one afternoon I saw him installing a new stereo system in his car, and it looked to me as if he had just spent too much of the money. I had paid the full bill up front. Stephen kept telling me this had been a mistake, that you never pay more than half up front in Trinidad if you want the job done, but I hadn’t had a choice because of some very touchy financial arrangements.

My relationship with Nigel deteriorated quickly. He reminded me more and more of Seref. He was cavalier about problems that he said would be fixed later, such as the white dots all over my teak deck and windlass from overspray. I was seeing a lot of big jobs being saved for later, and later was drawing near.

Nancy and I had originally planned a few weekends to tour Trinidad, but as it turned out, we took only one day off, a Sunday to watch Stephen play cricket. He kept urging me to take a day off, since I hadn’t had one in over three months. “You too stressed,” he told me. “Pressure, boy, pressure.”

Stephen picked us up in the morning. He had promised I would be able to play today, which I was excited about, though I could see I wasn’t properly dressed. Everyone wore white jerseys and white slacks.

Just before the game began, I was invited into a concrete room underneath the stands with Stephen’s team. The men stood in a circle, and the team captain welcomed me as a friend of Stephen’s. He talked about the importance of today’s match, which was against a fierce rival, and went through a prayer and proceeded to give a lot of mixed messages about it being just a game, for fun, but also being gravely important and revealing something about who they were as people and as a community and whether they’d be able to continue to hold their heads high after this day when they walked around their neighborhood. I was starting to realize that cricket is a serious sport in Trinidad, and I wasn’t surprised to hear at the end of the speech that I would be well-represented on the field by Stephen, which was a lovely, diplomatic way of saying there was no way the captain was going to let some newcomer screw up this important match.

So Nancy and I sat and watched for hours. Cricket is not an exciting spectator sport. Friends of Stephen’s did explain the rules, so we could know what was going on, and Stephen played well, and in what was apparently an exciting match by cricket standards, his team prevailed.

When the game ended, after something like five hours, the speeches resumed and continued until long after dark. I have never encountered another culture so fond of speech-making. Each team had at least five or six men who made speeches. The second speech, by Stephen’s team captain, accepting the victory and the trophy, praised the good fortune given by God and praised individual players for various feats of heroism and went into a long, spiraling history of the team and the opposing team and how they were really the same team, sharing some players over the years, and how basically everyone here in Trinidad and maybe on God’s green earth was all part of the same team, though this particular team, on this particular day, had shown its mettle and gained a great victory, which would be remembered, etc., and then, as he was wrapping up, he mentioned that we were all very honored today to have celebrities among us, who had honored us all by coming to watch today’s game. He pointed up into the stands behind us, and we were very excited, turning around to find these celebrities. But there was no one behind us. We were the celebrities. We finally stood, since that was what they expected, and waved.

KNOWING NOW THAT we were celebrities, it was hard to go back to the same old crap in Peake’s yard. Nigel was careless about overspray, he was running short on materials, and he still hadn’t started the bowsprit. Nancy flew home to take care of final arrangements for our July 21 wedding in California, and I tried to get the boat finished. I needed to sail to the Virgin Islands very soon.

This last week pushed me close to the edge. My friend Galen flew in from Hawaii to help. He had offered me a choice of this or coming to my wedding. But there was still too much to do. Oil changes late at night, working on pumps and valves and lights, getting ready to go back into the water. I was also scrambling to finish the varnish, with help from Stephen. I was almost completely out of cash. But what was taking up too much of my time was the paint job.

In addition to overspray and materials problems, Nigel was trying to cheat me on the top coats. To save time and material, he sprayed two thin coats on the starboard side on the same day, rather than on two consecutive days with a light scuff between. This left dry patches and drip marks. Stephen pointed them out to me, after hours, and said I should insist Nigel respray that side. And on the other side of the boat, Nigel hadn’t brought the faring down low enough. I had pointed it out to him many times, but he didn’t catch on until too late. Then he tried to argue that the two stripes at the waterline weren’t included in the price, and he drew one of them with a large sag.

To mark the waterline of a hull and its boot-stripes, long pieces of tape are pulled. A man stands on scaffolding and brings his hand across sideways, keeping it level, so that the tape naturally conforms to the curve of the hull at the same height. Nigel claimed to be a master at drawing a waterline, and he had a guy named Michael working for him who was also supposed to be a master, but when I looked at the bow from a hundred yards away, I could see clearly that the line on the starboard side had a long dip to it, about twenty feet long.

I pointed this out to Nigel, and he ignored me, so I pointed it out to Michael, then Davey, then went to KNJ. It was very frustrating. I remember standing out in the yard with Nigel, showing it to him. The sag so obviously there, and Nigel beside me telling me I’m seeing things, that it’s just a trick of light on the curve of the hull. He held up his two hands, one of them the smooth side of my boat, the other feeling this surface. “The hull come out, but your eye get tricked. Your eye think the hull go in.”

Under pressure from KNJ he was forced to redraw the line, but he drew it again with the same sag. I was forced to accept it because I had no more time.

Then the blasting company came to finish painting the bulwarks and forward seating area, but the crew was young and didn’t tape properly. They left drops of paint all over the teak deck.

My friend Galen was much calmer about all of this than I was, until one day he felt I was ordering him around too much. He finally blew up, basically telling me that our friendship was more important than this paint job and I needed to work on how I was addressing him.

“No,” I told him. “You’re wrong. You don’t get to feel upset. You don’t get the luxury of yelling at me or making me think about your feelings. You haven’t been working all day every fucking day for months to get this boat ready. You haven’t invested $100,000 this year. You didn’t sail across the ocean. You’re not responsible for anything. It’s not your neck if this boat doesn’t arrive in the Virgin Islands on time. And I don’t have time to deal with your feelings. I have too much other shit to deal with. If you don’t like it, fly home.”