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

We hurried back to the pilothouse and I called the captain on the radio, letting him know our end was ready. Neither of us mentioned the collision.

He let out line for a while, getting farther away from us, then caught up the slack and pulled us with a jerk, our bow tipping sideways and coming around fast in an extreme yaw to port then back to starboard. We kept going to starboard, like a waterskier going for outside the wake, leaning away from the tow boat, and I tried to correct with the rudder, which had some effect but not much. The cutter’s solution was to speed up. We whipped back and forth but mostly to starboard, and the captain said he was letting out more line, finding the proper tow length so we’d be in sync on the swells, and the tow did become a bit smoother, if too fast for my tastes, but then the line broke.

Their boat receded, we slowed, and I called on the radio to notify them. We were in a heavy squall, over forty knots of wind blowing buckets of rain into our pilothouse from behind, so that even twenty feet into the pilothouse, the ceiling was wet. The rain was cold, too. This was definitely a northern storm that had come down into the Caribbean. I went forward on deck and pulled up their tow line, about fifty feet, which meant it hadn’t been severed by any chafing on our end.

I stood there for a while staring absentmindedly at the green light shining through the messy pile of their heaving line. I was drenched in the rain, and only my hand on a stanchion was keeping me from being thrown overboard. We would have to catch their line again. I wanted to sleep. I wondered why I persisted in this whole boating thing.

One thing about being at sea is that you don’t really get to stop. You can never say, “Okay, to hell with this, I’ve had enough, I’m outta here.” Until you arrive in port, you’re stuck, and conditions can always worsen, the boat can always break in new ways, whether you’re prepared or not. Even in port, you can slip anchor, blow against other anchored boats in crosswinds and currents, or run aground. In a marina, battering, chafing, and electrolysis are still possible, as are propane explosion, electrical fire, sinking through siphoning and all the hazards of docking, all the expensive things you can run into and crush. A boat simply does not allow for genuine rest. Its essential nature is peril, held in check only through enormous effort and expense.

I had worked hard to get this boat back after the bankruptcy, and that effort seemed odd to me now. How had I believed that it would not be the same horrific shit over and over if I got back on board? What was wrong with me?

THE CAPTAIN OF the cutter said his crew had tied something incorrectly. Apparently this fifty feet of line I now had on deck had been tied to a longer piece. I said no problem and waited, hoping they’d figure out how to tie a bowline, but they were out there for quite a while and didn’t return, so I called again on the radio.

“We dropped something in the water,” the captain said. “And it looks like we need to retrieve it. We’ll be back in just a minute.”

So Nancy and I waited, curious to find out what they had dropped. We could see them circling around in the rain, and something flashing in the water. Then they seemed to give up. We could still see the flashing.

When the captain came back on the radio, he sounded very calm, as if dropping something in the water and not recovering it were a regular occurrence. He suggested we try the tow from starboard this time, to prevent such extreme yawing. He also wanted to try the approach from upwind, coming down past us, which sounded bizarre to me, but I didn’t feel I could object. I was supposed to leave my boat dead in the troughs again, so it was up to him, whatever he wanted to do, and he had already run into us once, so somehow that seemed to take the worry out of it.

Nancy and I returned to the bow. The cutter was being blown down onto us, its stern sagging, which seemed inevitable and was the reason I wouldn’t have tried from upwind. The captain had to punch the engines to bring his bow around and avoid hitting us again, which put him past us, but his crew threw two lines anyway, into the water. Then he was in reverse, trying to get back, which was not going to work in these waves. Luckily, his crew decided to throw the last line. The thrower did an amazing job, from the distance he was at, and we caught it, led it through the scupper, and hauled in until we had the loop over our windlass.

Back in the pilothouse, I told the captain we were ready and neither of us mentioned that we were towing from the port side again instead of the starboard side. Then Nancy yelled for me and I went aft. She pointed overboard. There was a white canister liferaft floating near us. I looked up on our pilothouse roof at our own liferaft to confirm that it wasn’t ours.

“That must have been what they dropped in the water,” Nancy said. She had one hand over her nose and mouth, which is what she does when she’s laughing so hard she’s starting to snort. I laughed, too. It was pretty incredible. They had somehow dropped their liferaft overboard and then hadn’t been able to retrieve it. And the liferaft hadn’t deployed, either. It should have automatically inflated when yanked by a lanyard tied to deck, but apparently that had never been tied.

Nancy and I checked the towline every thirty minutes and finally asked for slack to adjust the line. It was chafing in several places. The cutter wasn’t careful to stay in front of our bow, however. The new helmsman (the captain had retired for the evening) managed to get his boat behind our boat facing the opposite direction. We were facing one way, with the towline going back underneath our boat, and he was a hundred yards off our stern facing the other way. How he managed to think this was okay was beyond me. I explained the situation to him, then gave Nancy the radio and went aft with a flashlight. As he pulled us backward through the water, I could see the towline coming out from under our stern on the starboard side, shallow and bent at an angle, which meant it was hung up on something, probably our damaged rudder. I let out a little yell of frustration, and Nancy wanted to know what was up.

“Tell him the towline is caught on our rudder and to quit pulling us backward,” I yelled.

Nancy told him this over the radio, but he kept pulling us backward.

I went to the radio. “Look,” I told him, “you can’t keep towing us backward with the towline caught around our rudder.”

“Roger that, sir, we’re trying to address the problem now.”

“Maybe you could let the line sink, then use the slack to make a turn to port. Hopefully the line will clear.”

I could hear his engines. He was still trying to pull his way out of it, which was impossible. I didn’t want to think uncharitable thoughts about our rescuers, but this helmsman had zero idea how to drive a boat.

“You might consider letting the line sag and sink first,” I said. “My wife will be on the radio, and I’ll be on the stern letting her know where the line is.”

“Roger that.”

I couldn’t help making a comment to Nancy. “If he’d pulled a waterskier even once in his life, he’d know how not to get the line all screwed up.”

“Maybe it’s his first time out,” Nancy said.

I went back to the stern and gave reports to Nancy, which she passed on to the helmsman. He finally let us drift and the line sag until I couldn’t see it anymore. Then he drove a bit, but still going the opposite way, not trying to turn. The line came up and I saw that it was on our starboard side now, the same side as the cutter. If he went now toward our bow, the line would clear.

“Tell him to turn hard to port.”

Nancy relayed the message, but we were drifting over the line. It would go back under us again. Then he gunned his engines, still going in the opposite direction. He was not trying to turn to port at all. He was just going to yank us around from behind at full speed.