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

We sailed early the next morning for Trinidad and arrived just before dark. Back in the ugly industrial port, but this time we wouldn’t have to haul out, and I would take some time to write every day. We wouldn’t repeat the panic of our first visit to Trinidad.

It was good to see Stephen again. He and two friends put another coat of varnish on the exterior wood, polished the hull, sanded the deck, and sanded and varnished every stateroom and the main salon and all the floors throughout the boat. They also sanded and painted the engine room and the two largest bilge areas. They even sanded and painted the insides of my two water tanks, which was an especially tough job. I bought a thick epoxy paint, high in solids, and a big fan to pull out the fumes. The guys wore respirators, but it was still rough.

The most difficult job, however, was repainting all eight guest bathrooms. The white epoxy paint over the steel had started to bubble from moisture. Stephen pointed out that this should never have happened, that the painters in Turkey had not used the correct primer. By now, he had zero respect for the Turks. He and his friends went through each bathroom first sanding down to steel with a big orbital sander and forty-grit paper. Then they worked up through layers of primer and filler and paint and finer sandings to a finish that looked beautiful and would last. But it was a huge amount of work, more than any of us had expected.

“Next summer, someone else can paint your other tanks,” Stephen told me. “I not doing no more inside painting on this boat, boy.”

“You can just supervise next summer,” I told him. “We’ll leave the boat with you, and you can hire others to do the work.”

“I doesn’t mind the outside painting, or the outside varnish,” he said. “Just no more inside, boy.”

I was already leaving most of the work to Stephen’s supervision. He always worked hard, whether I was there or not, and he knew far more about painting and varnishing than I did. I was focusing on the rigging, systems maintenance, my writing, and running the business.

By the time we left Trinidad the second time, we were happy to get out of there. The boat looked perfect inside and out, thanks to Stephen, and we wouldn’t have to return here until next summer.

We cleared customs on Friday, again with the man with long purple nails, who this time could not find any reason to detain us, and we spent the remainder of the afternoon and evening stowing and checking everything. We tightened the standing rigging and checked our electronics and engines and tanks and the weather, and we went to bed early so we’d be well rested, since it would be just the two of us doing alternating ninety-minute watches for three days.

WE LEFT AT 7 A.M., found the seas very light once we were out of the dragon’s mouth, and had an entirely pleasant first day and night, as predicted on the weather report. We napped and ate and read, and I checked the systems after every watch. It was good to be on our way, looking forward to a successful winter in the Virgin Islands.

The next day, Sunday, the waves were two- to three-feet high but glassy and reflective. The surface, untouched by any wind, made the ocean seem solid rather than liquid, a bright metal sheet crumpling without sound. This was unusual, and I stood at the aft of the pilothouse wondering at it. In the distance ahead we could see a small squall, a cloud with dark rain beneath it and the waters roughened. Nancy was happy to see this. It would dump a little rain and cool us off a bit. Then the sky would brighten again and the sun would steam the water off the deck.

But this squall didn’t pass so quickly. For almost an hour, we had thick rain and gusty winds, the seas increasing. I was listening to music on a Walkman and enjoying the occasional spray and the feel of powering through the waves. I liked this, the raw animal nature of the boat. The growling of the big Perkins diesels.

It was late afternoon, less than an hour before dark, and within just a few minutes the spray was coming over the deck with every wave, and then I could hear howling in the rigging and my wind instruments showed thirty to thirty-five knots. I took the headphones off and listened more carefully to the wind, the engines, and the other sounds of the boat, the various things shifting as we hit a bigger wave and rolled about twenty-five degrees.

In only another couple of minutes, the sea changed yet again, building far too quickly into forty-knot winds pushing up larger swells, and the wind was coming from too close to north. We weren’t in gusty tradewinds or squall winds anymore. We were in something with a counterclockwise, cyclonic movement. There had been nothing at all on the Inmarsat-C weather forecast.

I called on the radio for weather info. “U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, this is the sailing vessel Bird of Paradise .”

No response. We were a hundred miles from any land except Aves Island, which is only a small rock sticking up absurdly in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

“Calling all stations,” I repeated three times, and again no response.

Only a few minutes had passed, but the swells had become streaky white with foam and were breaking and confused, coming from two different headings, the newer storm waves from the north colliding with swells from the east. Our heading was impossible, since it put us in the trough of swells that were big enough now to make us roll fifty degrees on our side. I changed our heading to go into them and throttled down because the bow was hitting so hard as we raised up over one wave and slammed into the next.

The acceleration of conditions was astounding. Fifty knots on the wind gauge, and in the dim light, the white of waves breaking. Waves five times the size of what we’d had only an hour earlier — steep, close together, not in long organized lines from one direction but hunching up in individual hills and peaks. I throttled down again, making only five knots and still slamming hard, solid water coming over our bow, the bowsprit buried each time.

The light was dying, and I had to lean forward to read my wind gauge. It showed fifty-eight knots, which is storm force eleven, right before a hurricane. I didn’t know what I was going into. If it were a hurricane, running would be the only option because the winds could be anything, 100 or 160 miles per hour or even higher. If it was a low pressure storm that had come from north of us, however, or a white squall kicked up suddenly from colliding weather systems, it would be wiser to cut straight through, exposing us to risk for a shorter time and keeping our defensive position of bow first, so we wouldn’t roll over in a trough.

Nancy was already below in the main salon looking on the Inmarsat for any new weather reports, and we did receive a new report but it said nothing at all about this storm. Absolutely no mention. According to the Tropical Prediction Center in Miami, Florida, we were experiencing no more than twenty knots of wind and eight or nine foot swells, normal conditions.

I tried the VHF again. Tried calling the U.S. Coast Guard, tried calling the French Navy, tried calling in Spanish, tried calling all stations. There was no response. So I decided to give a report to the Coast Guard in case they could hear me even though I couldn’t hear them.

“U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, this is the sailing vessel Bird of Paradise , the sailing vessel Bird of Paradise . We are at latitude 15 degrees 22.5 minutes north, longitude 63 degrees 27.6 minutes west. We are in sixty-knot winds and seas over thirty feet. We are bearing zero one five degrees northeast at—” But then, in the last light of day, we saw an enormous wave. Our bow went up and still the wave rose and then it was breaking above us. Our bow went so high, so straight up into the air for so long, we could feel our entire yacht — all 200,000 pounds of it — actually hanging, ready to fall backward off the wave, and still the wave rose higher and the part that had broken was blown over our pilothouse at highway speed, thousands of gallons of water turned into smoke.