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

This first charter group was easy, which was good because we didn’t do everything perfectly. I wasn’t really a bartender yet, so Bobby, the man who was paying for the charter and had invited his friends to help him celebrate his fiftieth birthday, made the drinks with great flair. I kept the bottles and ice and glasses coming and watched closely. Captains are expected to be good bartenders.

We also had a rigging problem, and again the guests were gracious. We had a lovely sail one morning across the channel on a beam reach from the Baths to Marina Cay, but when it came time to furl the sail, there was a lot of resistance. During the paint job, we had removed the headstay and let it hang to the side, and apparently this had broken one of the connections. It had been hidden by the sail wrapped around it, so the problem had not been visible, and we hadn’t tested the sail on our way from Trinidad because we had only motored. I couldn’t repair it now, with the sail out, underway, and guests aboard, and I was worried that we wouldn’t get the sail furled or that we might rip it.

As I was distracted by this, standing above the winch to look over the pilothouse at the foil, holding the line in my left hand, a large gust of wind filled the sail, and the line, which I was holding too high above the winch, came free. I grabbed for it, instinctively, but this was not a good instinct, especially while wearing fingerless gloves. The rope burn across four fingers of my left hand was extreme. Only a few patches of skin were completely missing down to bleeding, exposed flesh, but all four fingers looked like deformed wax. They were white, especially after I dunked my hand into a bucket of ice, and the pain was intense. I did get the sail furled, and brought us safely into an anchorage, but that was all I could do. I felt awful for the guests. It was a putzy bit of sailing we had just done.

By the end of the five-day charter, my fingers were healing, despite my fears that they’d be permanently deformed, and the trip was considered a great success. Bobby gave us a $2,000 tip, wrote us a lovely card, and gave glowing reviews to the broker, who sent a note of praise to the clearinghouse, who then passed the note on to other brokers. I was embarrassed about our problems with the roller furling, but we were well on our way to a successful business.

There had been one small conversation with Bobby, however, that I would never forget. It was late in the trip, after he had asked about my business and plans, and he was wishing me well. He was a handsome man, likeable in every way, and he meant only the best, didn’t mean to insult me, certainly, but he said, comparing my desires to succeed in this business to his own desires years before as he was starting his own business, “I know what it’s like. You’re nobody, and you want to become somebody.”

This comment made sense in terms of the business. It was a new business, even if it was my second go. It was true that I hadn’t made a lot of money yet, even to pay off my debts, and that I was new to the brokered charter industry. But he wasn’t talking only about the business, he was talking about me, about who I was, about my worth as a person. And I objected to being limited to this business and this role as captain. I had taught at Stanford and Cornell. I had been published in the Atlantic Monthly.

I didn’t share these thoughts with Bobby, of course. But I realized that even if I succeeded wildly in this business, it still fundamentally wouldn’t mean anything to me except financial freedom. It wasn’t how I measured who I was, and it never would be. I would always feel somewhat alienated in this role of captain or small business owner. I was a writer and a teacher. That’s who I was. I needed to start writing again soon.

The second charter was easy, a fun ten days. I practiced my skills as a bartender, enjoying it, and the kids performed skits at night on the large aft deck area, their parents lounging on the cushioned poop deck. Everyone called me “Captain Dave.” It didn’t feel like a job at all.

Immediately after this charter, however, when we went into the clearinghouse office in Roadtown to pick up our mail and news, we learned that a hurricane was headed our way. It would probably pass south of us, but it could swing north.

This presented an uncomfortable situation. We were too late to run away from it, and we didn’t have good options for weathering a hurricane in the Virgin Islands.

I finally decided to anchor in North Sound on Virgin Gorda. The sound is expansive and almost fully enclosed, like a big lake, most of it forty-five to sixty feet deep. We’d be completely exposed to wind, but we’d be protected from big waves, and we could drag on our anchor all over that bay and not hit anything.

As it turned out, the hurricane tracked far south of us and we never had wind more than thirty knots. We would have been fine anywhere in the Virgin Islands. But the experience drove home the fact that we were exposed up here during hurricane season. Nancy and I talked it over and decided to head south. We would island-hop through the Antilles for a month, spend another month in Trinidad working, then sail back up in time for the November charter shows. We had wanted to take a break and relax in the Virgin Islands for these months, but worrying about hurricanes did not promise to be very relaxing.

We returned to Road Town to make some arrangements and take on food, water, and diesel, then set off for Nevis, our first stop. It would be the longest leg, about eighteen hours. We passed between Peter Island and Dead Chest Island just after sunset and were blasted by thirty knots of wind, heavy rain, and swells about twelve feet, leftovers from the hurricane that had passed farther south. If we continued on to Nevis, we’d be pounding directly into this the entire time.

I decided this suffering was pointless. We weren’t on a schedule. I turned around and anchored for the night in Great Harbour. We left at noon the next day, the conditions much improved, and made Nevis the next morning. A spectacular volcanic mountain rising from the water, its slopes dense jungle. We anchored in light blue water just down from the Four Seasons. Our view was of undeveloped beach, then several miles of palm trees, then jungle leading up to the volcanic cone. It was our honeymoon, finally.

We zipped ashore in our new dinghy and walked a few boardwalks to have ice cream and window shop. Then a driver took Nancy and Stephen and me halfway around the island, showing us landmarks, monkeys, mangoes, and jungle. We stopped at several plantations that are now bed-and-breakfasts. Nancy and I fell in love, at least for the day, with gingerbread architecture.

Late that afternoon, after we had changed at the boat, Stephen dropped us off on the beach with the dinghy and we walked into the Four Seasons. We joined the other honeymooners in the pools and hot tubs and took in the gorgeous sunset. It was one of our favorite things to do, crashing resorts, and this was a coup.

The next day we cruised the western shores of Dominica and Guadeloupe (lovely as long as we didn’t look too closely), and then it was on to Martinique and St. Lucia. Stephen left us to fly home to Trinidad, as planned, and we found out we had a new charter from Ed Hamilton, the most important broker in the market. If we ran a good charter for Ed, we were set. We would fill our twenty weeks every year with no problem. And it was a short, easy charter, for the Young Presidents’ Association. Ed didn’t tell us who the group of ten men were, but we found out, and we felt flattered they had picked us over the seven-million-dollar, eighty-five-foot performance catamaran they had been on the year before. The charter was coming up soon, at the end of October, just before the charter show, and we were looking forward to it.