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

Then I took a breath, which hurt. My back was stunned. I managed to sit up and breathe again, fell sideways, then sat up and held on. I waited a few minutes, thinking that if I had cracked my head open and were bleeding and unconscious, Nancy wouldn’t even know, and in these conditions, without an autopilot, she wouldn’t be able to leave the helm. I was taking such stupid risks. What was I doing, bailing at night on a varnished floor in big seas when I was dizzy, exhausted, and nearly naked?

When I was able, I made my way slowly down the hall and up to the pilothouse to tell Nancy what had happened. She looked at my back. “You took off some of the skin by your scar,” she said. “And it’s red. You hit the entire muscle on your right side.”

I lay down on the pilothouse cushions, our bed for the past two days, and tried to breathe. My back was so tight, it wasn’t easy.

“This boat isn’t worth it,” I said. “It’s not worth dying or even getting hurt out here.”

“I don’t want to do this ever again,” Nancy said. “Next time we have to stop at Rodney Bay so we’re always close to islands, instead of a hundred miles from land.”

“I agree,” I said. She had managed to stay calm through all of it, which was impressive. And she was still willing to do these delivery trips, just closer to land.

By daybreak, the conditions had died down to twenty knots and ten feet, but the seas looked cold, as if we were much farther north, the seas I knew from Alaska and off the Washington and Oregon coasts. Maybe it was the clouds everywhere in the distance, and the sky that was hazy and white, so that water, clouds, and sky all shared the same color, all seemed part of the same body. I remembered this same seascape on a morning on Grendel , leaving Victoria; I remembered it outside of Ketchikan with my father; I remembered it on a purse seiner in the Cook Inlet. But it was strange for the Caribbean.

Out of the milky white came a large container ship, the Tropic Sun . It passed us to starboard, heading southeast. I hailed the captain on the VHF, asking for weather information.

“We didn’t have any warning,” he said. “We had about the same conditions as you, though much farther north. Nothing on any forecast or report.”

I asked what we could expect ahead, on our way to the Virgin Islands.

“All conditions diminishing, it seems. Though there’s still no report.”

“Have you ever seen the reporting stations fail like this?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I thanked him and continued on toward a far line of thick clouds, hoping we weren’t heading straight into another storm. The strange weather was everywhere, land was far away, and there were no reports, so there was nothing to do but just continue on and hope for the best.

Later that morning, the wind came up to more than thirty knots and the seas built. I began to have trouble holding my course on the compass. I had the helm all the way to port, but I couldn’t turn.

“Can you take the helm?” I asked Nancy. “I need to check the hydraulics.”

“Oh great,” she said.

“Yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if the rudder had a problem again? Give me a minute, then turn the helm slowly all the way to one side, then all the way to the other, then five and a half turns to the middle.”

I made my way carefully to the aft staterooms. The water rushed back and forth over the floor. I had to take care of that, had to get the 220-volt submersible pump. But for now I needed to focus on the steering. I pulled up the mattress in one of the aft staterooms to inspect the big white hydraulic pump, its solid stainless ram gliding forward, pushing the fitting that turned the rudder post. Everything was working smoothly, no signs of breakage or failure or slipping.

The problem had to be with the rudder itself, which I had no way of inspecting. I slowed the engines and turned all the way to starboard in a circle, which worked fine. Then I tried turning a circle to port, and this worked fine on certain headings but not toward the course we wanted. The rudder could do the more difficult headings, such as turning into the waves, but it could not do our course alongside the waves, which should have been easier. I could not imagine what sort of damage would accomplish that. It’s a fairly simple thing, a rudder. Just a shaft, a big piece of metal hanging aft of it, and a skeg forward for support. But this rudder was acting in mysterious ways.

“We have some kind of damage,” I told Nancy. “And there’s also the problem with the diesel tanks, and the aft bilge water. We probably shouldn’t just go wherever the rudder will take us. The problems could get worse.”

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “Didn’t we already have the rudder problem, and didn’t we replace it with a new rudder?” She turned away and shook her head.

“We don’t have any money,” I said. “But there’s a $16,500 hull deductible on the policy. So we have to figure out something. A free tow from the Coast Guard, then maybe the lenders for the repairs. God, it makes my head hurt.”

“We were supposed to be past this kind of problem,” Nancy said.

So I called the Coast Guard. It was hard to believe I was calling again for assistance due to a disabled rudder. It did not seem possible to be having this same problem again. I really felt like Oedipus trying to run from his fate. Different ocean, different year, different business plan, different rudder even, but the same problem, possibly with the same ruinous consequences.

When the Coast Guard cutter arrived, it was dusk. After a fairly calm, light afternoon, full of sunshine and hope, the wind was back up to over thirty and the waves were increasing, just in time for our work on deck.

This cutter represented the cream of the U.S. Coast Guard. A fast boat for drug interdiction in their most active waters. It would be a crack crew onboard. The captain sounded cheerful and confident, and he spent a full hour planning how we would do this tow, then he took a practice pass, which took another hour.

When he began his real pass, finally, from half a mile away, Nancy and I walked forward to the bow. I had the engines in neutral, our boat dead in the water and rocking hideously broadside to the seas, as requested, so that the cutter would have the privileged position of heading into the waves. It was cold in the wind and rain and spray.

“Let’s do it right,” I said. “Let’s catch the damn thing, pull it in, and get it over the windlass. One time.”

As their boat came closer, we could hear the big engines. They were staying mostly in neutral, engaging only periodically in short bursts of power. They had a spotlight on us and all their lights on. They seemed sleek but not quite in control.

The guys on the aft deck were shouting orders at each other and struggling to keep their footing. Three of them had throwing lines with green glow sticks attached, and a spotter in front was going to say when to throw.

“Not yet, not yet,” he was yelling, and others were yelling, too. They were making it seem much more exciting and complicated than it really needed to be. Nancy and I were just waiting quietly at the lifelines for them to throw.

More yelling, and finally the green light stick came arcing toward us through the rain. Nancy caught it, mostly with her face but also with her arms, and we led it outside our lifelines and stanchions, through the scupper, then pulled in an incredibly long heaving line before we finally reached the loop of the tow line.

The cutter was coming closer. Their stern was swinging toward us, the driver still using his engines only in short bursts. The guys on the aft deck yelled at him to go, go, go, forward, forward, but it was too late. Their starboard stern rose up on a wave and bashed the end of our bowsprit, an explosion of steel on steel and some other fragile object on their boat, a light or something, shattering. Then the driver gunned it fast away from us, and they all yelled to slow down, slow down, because we were holding the end of their tow line. I was afraid we might be yanked overboard or have our limbs torn off, but we just pulled the heavy wet loop as fast as we could over our windlass. I checked that it wasn’t snagged on anything, then signaled with my arms in the air that we were done and told Nancy we should get away from the bow in case the line snapped or the windlass went flying off its mounts.