A Mile Down

by David Vann

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m not going to be able to do that. I need the time to cut the dinghy free.” Then I left the radio. Maybe I should have gone for the small, light inflatable dinghy on our aft deck. It was tied with only one line, which would have been easy to remove. But I went for the larger dinghy, hanging off the davits on the stern. It was bigger and far more stable, and new. It had our boat name on it and would be easier to spot. But it was also 350 pounds, a fiberglass hull with inflatable tubes, so it was more difficult to manage.

  I untied the lines that were keeping it from swaying back and forth, and as soon as I did that, it swayed hard. We were rolling even in the little six-foot waves, and we were also heeling strangely from the water coming in below, the stern sinking first. Then I unfastened a clip on the bow that was difficult to reach. I swung a bit as we rolled on a wave, and I was out over the water, my feet kicking in the air.

  Nancy yelled at me to be careful. I freed the clip and got my feet back on deck. Then I loosened the reels that held the main davit lines, and they spun out dangerously, like fishing reel handles running free. That dropped the dinghy into the water, but each time our hull came up on a wave the dinghy was yanked by the davit lines. So I cut the davit lines, which put me out over the water again, and pulled the dinghy around toward the side boarding ladder.

  The boat was heeling far over to port as it sank, because of the open porthole we’d used for the bilge pump, which meant that the boarding ladder on the starboard side was high out of the water and getting higher, with Nancy on it. She threw in the paddles and then she was ready to jump, but her jump was going to be five or six feet at least, and if she missed, she’d be in the water.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “This is wrong. Too dangerous. I’ll bring it around to the other side.”

  I pulled the dinghy aft, but the waves were yanking it from me. I was having a difficult time controlling its two short lines, afraid I would lose them and we’d have no dinghy. Then I thought I should let VISAR know we were abandoning ship, so I tried to wrap the lines around the starboard mizzen shroud, one of our steel rigging wires, and asked Nancy to hold them.

  As soon as I left her, though, I could tell she wasn’t going to be able to hold on. I ran back to her and tied the lines around the wire.

  The radio, when I got to it at the helm, was dead. The system must have shorted out because of the flooding. The boat was getting low in the water, especially the port stern, and it was heeling over and wallowing in sick ways.

  “The radio’s dead,” I told Nancy. “Hopefully they’re coming for us.”

  I tried to untie the lines for the dinghy, but they were constantly yanked. A black nylon line and a blue sheathed polyester line. The blue line was for the bow, the most important, but I had to cut both lines to get them free, and that left the black line the longest. I remember staring at the colors, blue and black, feeling a bit confused, the knife seeming to take an awfully long time to cut through, the huge boat beneath me sagging like an old horse on its haunches, the deck getting steeper. When I finally sawed through, I grabbed the black line and just held on. The blue line was in the water.

  I pulled the dinghy aft to the stern. I had meant to make it all the way around to the port side, because that’s where Nancy was waiting with the ditch bag, but I realized I might not make it there in time. And the rail beside her was almost in the water, instead of ten feet off the water, as it should have been. The boat was going to sink to port, so if we tried to get into the dinghy there, the boat might roll over onto us.

  “We’re going off the stern!” I yelled to Nancy.

  “The stern?” she yelled. “Where?” She was panicking, finally, as the boat went down.

  “Over here!” I yelled. “Right here!” She was only fifteen feet from me, but there was all this stuff in her way on the aft deck: a big fifty-five-horse outboard motor, heavy and dangerous; a green kayak filled with four heavy dive tanks; our enormous round white fenders, over fifty pounds each; our extra chain spilled out onto the teak from its bucket; boards and paddles and other gear. I was suddenly very afraid she might not be able to climb over all of it, afraid the boat could roll over right then and I’d lose her.

  I was having a difficult time holding the dinghy, too, the black line yanking hard in my hands as I watched her come toward me. “Drop the lifejackets!” I yelled. “Just get over here!”

  She looked confused, but she dropped the two extras she was holding, held onto the ditch bag, and made it to me. Then she was ready to jump into the dinghy.

  I tried to time it with the waves, waited until a wave brought the dinghy up close to us. “Okay, jump!” The dinghy fell away, and Nancy fell down farther than I had wanted, onto her knees, but she made it.

  “I’m all right!” she yelled.

  “Okay, scoot forward!” Our deck was dipping lower on each wave, until when I finally jumped, our stern was only a few inches off the water. In the summer, kids on one of the charters had jumped off the stern over and over, squealing in delight because it had been so high.

  I grabbed a paddle. Nancy was just looking at the boat.

  “We have to paddle,” I said. “We can’t be near it when it sinks. We could get hit by a mast or the davits.”

  We worked hard to pull away from the stern. We just kept going until we were about a hundred yards away, then we heard a helicopter coming in fast, the U.S. Coast Guard.

  The helicopter hovered directly over us, about fifty feet in the air. There was a guy in a jumpsuit hanging out the side with his thumb up, asking us, I supposed, if we were okay. So I put my thumb up to say we were all right.

  The stern of our boat was getting lower as it rocked in the waves, the bow sticking up. It looked beautiful, the new cream-colored paint, the new varnish on the rails and pilothouse, the name in wedding script on the bows, the dark blue bottom paint. It was a gorgeous boat. Nancy found the digital camera in the ditch bag and snapped a couple of photos.

  The helicopter had been circling and came in close now, approaching from downwind. They had something dangling in a plastic case.

  “It must be a radio,” I told Nancy. “We’re supposed to catch it.”

  I held my hands up, showing I was ready to catch, and Nancy did the same. Having my hands up made me realize how much we were getting rocked in the waves. I had to put one hand down to hold on.

  The helicopter brought the radio right to me, the pilot impressive.

  The Coast Guard wanted to know if anyone else was onboard, and I reassured them no one was. They said the VISAR rescue boat would arrive in about twenty minutes, and I told them we could wait. They said there was also a cutter on its way, and a merchant vessel. I could see the merchant vessel a few miles east of us. It was huge. I didn’t want to be rescued by the cutter or the merchant vessel. I knew from getting on the freighter in Moroccan waters how dangerous it can be to board a big ship in waves.

  “This is Bird of Paradise,” I called on the radio. “We would like to be rescued by VISAR. We do not want to try to board the cutter or the merchant vessel. I repeat, we request rescue in the smaller, twenty-two-foot VISAR boat, because it will be much safer and easier.”

  I didn’t hear a response. There were a lot of conversations about us on channel 16, the voices overlapping, all of them difficult for me to hear: VISAR, the Coast Guard helicopter, Coast Guard San Juan, the Coast Guard cutter, the merchant vessel, and maybe even a salvage company. Coast Guard San Juan was giving an ETA for the cutter arrival, VISAR was giving its ETA to Coast Guard San Juan, and the Coast Guard helicopter was going back and forth with the merchant vessel, trying to get it to stay farther away. It was threatening to run us over, heading straight at us from upwind.

  Our boat was sinking fast. Within five minutes of us abandoning ship, it was taking large rolls to port, and the stern was beginning to submerge. The smaller inflatable dinghy was floating up off the aft deck, as were the large white fenders.

  “I can’t believe this
is happening,” Nancy said.

  “Look at it,” I said. “It’s sinking. It’s actually going down.”

  Nancy took more photos. The bow went up until the top of the mizzenmast was touching the water behind the boat. Then it fell to the side, and various items floated off the aft deck. “Take more pictures,” I said, then I looked at Nancy and saw the cap. “The cap is on the lens,” I said.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said.

  It was oddly normal, watching our boat sink. We watched it roll and tip and then the bow and its cream-colored bowsprit were pointing straight into the sky, the back half of the boat completely submerged. The main mast, all ninety feet of it, was lying out parallel just above the surface of the water. The mizzenmast and pilothouse were already gone. The varnish on the railing looked perfect. The white Italian windlass was bolted solidly in the middle of the teak deck. Everything intact, even the rigging. I realized I should never have worried about the masts. They were solid. The boat was probably much better than I had ever trusted it to be, except, of course, for the rudder, its Achilles heel.

  This was the first time I had looked at the varnish and paint and not worried about it. There would be no more maintenance, no more work. I was done. There was an odd sense of relief.

  “That’s our boat,” Nancy said.

  “It looks so beautiful,” I said.

  “It does,” she said. “We finally had it fixed up. We were going to make it.”

  The bow fell to port, rose up again only partially, then a large wave hid our view, and when it had cleared, our boat was gone.

  The liferaft popped up, inflating fast. It was huge, a raft for twenty people, orange and black, like a Doughboy pool floating out on the ocean. There were a lot of other items on the water, too: our other dinghy, boards that had fit over seats, cushions, a mattress, extra lifejackets and life rings.

  The helicopter reported that our boat had sunk. They said they would drop a smoke flare just downwind to help VISAR spot us, and we watched as they circled and dropped the smoke. I radioed to let them know I had smoke canisters, if they wanted me to light one closer, but they said I didn’t need to. They were focused mostly on the merchant ship, which was now very near. They had told it to turn away and keep a good distance from us, but it kept coming.

  Then Nancy spotted one of our CD cases floating by. “Let’s grab it,” I said, so we paddled hard, got up close, and it disappeared. We had run over it, sinking it. But then we saw a paddle drifting by and were able to grab that. It was the debris game, oddly fun in our shocked state.

  The merchant vessel seemed confused in its responses over the radio, so the Coast Guard helicopter left us to go talk to it. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have stayed, since they were using their radio, but as soon as they left, two unusually large waves hit us. Nancy was in the middle of the dinghy, holding onto the side-ropes with both hands, but I was up in the bow paddling, so when the second wave flipped us, I was thrown out of the dinghy into the water.

  I felt a sharp pain where my knee had banged hard against the fiberglass and twisted. I was underwater, and tumbling, but my eyes were open and I happened to see the blue and white bow line flying past me. I reached out and caught it with my left hand, was yanked to the surface by the force of the dinghy getting blown downwind, and saw Nancy standing in the dinghy, yelling my name. Her face looked terrible. If nothing else, I felt loved and missed.

  “I’m okay!” I yelled. “I’m here!” She looked around to both sides, then forward and finally saw me. She leaned over the bow, yelling my name, and started pulling in the line. I held on with one hand and swam with the other. I came around the side and pulled myself up on the handles, back into the dinghy. I just held onto Nancy for a moment, happy to be safe, then I worried about the possibility of other big waves and grabbed a paddle.

  “Well,” I said. “That was nice.”

  “I couldn’t find you,” she said.

  “I banged my knee,” I told her. “I think it’s hurt.”

  I paddled us around until we were facing the swells again, then I grabbed the radio, which had stayed in the bottom of the boat with our ditch bag and other stuff. It had been such a fast flip that I was the only thing to go overboard, other than the paddle I’d been holding.

  “Our dinghy just flipped,” I reported on sixteen. “This is Bird of Paradise. Our dinghy just flipped and I was thrown overboard. I got back in, but my knee was banged, and we can’t stay out here long. We need to be rescued soon.”

  I didn’t receive any response to this message. Everyone was so busy in their arrangements. I assumed they had heard, though, and that they were coming as fast as they could.

  “Let’s paddle for the liferaft,” I told Nancy. “That will be safer, in case they take a while. It’s more stable.”

  We paddled hard for the raft and passed downwind of it but managed to get back upwind and reach its boarding ladder.

  I helped Nancy get in first, threw our ditch bag, then climbed in myself, holding the dinghy’s bow line. I was tying the line to our raft when Nancy yelled that she saw the rescue boat from VISAR. I kept tying, so that the dinghy and liferaft would be together, but I looked up and was grateful to see the orange tubes of their hard-bottomed inflatable glide by.

  There were three guys on board. They came around upwind of us so that their side tube lay against the liferaft, and I helped Nancy get in, then the ditch bag, then I got in. My knee really hurt when I lifted it over the tube.

  “I banged my knee,” I told them.

  “We’ll get you taken care of,” one of them said. They were busy clipping us in so that we couldn’t fall overboard. The Coast Guard helicopter was overhead, one of the crew members hanging out the side taking photos of us.

  Then we were off, and the ride was fun. Nancy and I were in good spirits. I talked far too much, going on and on about how happy we were to be alive, how I had been thinking of joining VISAR myself, how I couldn’t believe the boat had sunk, all the work we had done, etc. I was a mess. It seemed to me at the time that I was handling it well, maintaining good perspective in the face of tragedy, but I see now that I was just a mess. In shock and elated from surviving.

  This good mood continued in both of us for several days. When we first arrived in Road Town, a clothing store gave us a $100 gift certificate. I was wearing only a lifejacket, shorts, and Tevas, so it was nice to get a dry pair of shorts and a shirt. Nancy was grateful for a skirt and blouse.

  Then we were checked into a hotel for free and given dinner for free at their restaurant. Nancy and I were amazed. Everyone was so generous. And this continued the next day with free services from a notary and even a lawyer.

  At some point, though, the elation had to end.

  MY THIRTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY was three days after the boat sank. We had dinner at the marina restaurant. All the few faces we knew were there, but we were sitting at our own table, and no one came over to say hello. I could tell they were already tired of us. It had been an exciting, tragic event that had warranted some degree of ceremony and many acts of kindness in the first two days, but now it was day three and it would be better if we could move along. We hadn’t been here long enough to become friends with anyone, and we no longer represented business with our big boat. We were becoming dead weight.

  The restaurant had a live local band playing Clapton and Jimmy Buffet songs. We splurged, having a Bushwhacker first, then BBQ chicken and ribs. I held a bag of ice on my knee. We talked of California and still getting out on the water. Michael, who had bought Grendel, would take us sailing on the bay.

  A large sloop was coming in, its navigation lights and lower spreaders lit. It was a beautiful, expensive boat, not nearly as big as ours, but probably seventy feet. It was moving slowly, all its fenders out, down the fairway between docks A and B. There was a gusty wind, as usual, so they’d be exposed and sliding sideways in the fairway, but they would turn upwind into their slip, which would make it easy. Even with the wind right,
though, I had never relaxed. It was too much weight, with too many possible surprises and too little power to control. I didn’t think I would miss big boats. Maybe small powerboats were the right thing. Nancy was always joking about boats small enough you can stick out an arm or a leg at the dock if you’re coming in too fast. That sounded good. Enjoyment on the water not spoiled by fear.

  But that night, after we’d returned to our hotel room and I watched Overboard, an ’80s movie with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, as Nancy slept, I felt so lost. I couldn’t even tell exactly what it was. I was thirty-five, and I had come close to escaping everything I wanted to escape. We’d had charters to look forward to, money coming in, the boat finally fixed and ready. We were escaping the middle class, which is really the working class. And the only thing that could have prevented our escape was some extreme event. I’d had this thought several times in the past six months—that only something extreme could stop us now. And then it had. An unforecasted storm combining a tropical wave with an upper-level low hit us with force eleven, just short of a hurricane, and we sank a mile down, in just over five thousand feet of water. Even if the insurance paid, nearly everything would go to my lenders, who certainly would not offer the loans again. So we had no way back. It was difficult to believe.

  Work so that you can keep working. I had wanted to escape this. In the summer, as we enjoyed our honeymoon in the islands and it seemed all would turn out well, I had felt that being a captain and business owner lacked dignity and engagement and was therefore no dream at all. I wanted to return to the university. But this return was dependent upon financial freedom. I hadn’t appreciated at the time that financial freedom itself is a worthy dream. Now, in my efforts to free myself from the working world, I had made myself a bankrupt, racked up more than $60,000 on my wife’s credit cards, and left the university, my former career, long enough I would not be able to return. I had trapped myself and my wife in the working world so firmly we’d have to take any jobs we could get.