A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

PART TWO

MALTA AT SUNRISE is one of the more spectacular things a sailor can see. It’s always a pleasure to view an island for the first time from the water, to approach it as the ancients did, as travelers did through all the ages until the airplane. But Malta is a special treat, because at first you see only lovely hills, light beige and pink in the light before the sun has risen fully, with what seem to be cliff faces, and it is only as you come closer that you see that some of this rock, some of these cliffs, are in fact fortifications and monuments, built from the stone of the island. You begin to make out the medieval walls and the towers. You watch the city make itself in the light, and still you don’t see anything modern, but only what a medieval traveler would have seen. And this impression remains mostly intact, even as you draw close. Only after you’re inside the harbor do you notice the smaller shops and buses and cars and power lines. Malta is an enchanted island, the place I was most eager to visit of all our ports from Turkey to Mexico.

I radioed for a slip and was assigned an agent, who would take care of our other needs as well. I had quite a few things to buy and fix while in Malta. One of the inverters had blown out, and we needed a spotlight, a pump, several spares, and some hardware. This in addition to filling diesel, propane, water, and provisioning for the next leg to Ibiza, in the Spanish Balearic Islands.

I was afraid, with all of this to do, that I wouldn’t see Malta at all, and this in fact is what happened. While my guests and Nancy and even the crew were able to tour the island, I worked nonstop. I heard about the Blue Grotto and other places I had wanted to visit, but I didn’t see them. A lot of pirate movies have been filmed on Malta, because of the spectacular coastline, and renting these movies was going to be the closest I would get.

The only taste of Malta available to me was the language. Because Malta is a small island country in the middle of the Mediterranean and has been an important trading port for thousands of years, its language is a blend of the tongues of all the sailors and conquerors who have passed through. When I first heard Maltese, I actually laughed, because I thought someone was just being very funny. But it was no joke. The blend is mostly Arabic and Sicilian but includes Greek, Spanish, French, English and other tongues, including African tongues, with a bit of the Swedish chef thrown in. It’s the most improbable, liquid, beautiful mess of language I have ever heard.

This humored me as I went about my tasks. But I was preoccupied by the fact that business at home in California was not good. Amber was not selling our winter trips in Mexico.

There was no reason these trips should not have sold. I had a famous professor teaching the Archaeology of the Maya, an excellent Spanish language instructor, a famous poet, and other solid offerings. Mine was the only overnight charter boat on that entire coast south of Cancun. And Cancun was an easy place to fly into. I had advertising through the University of San Diego as well as through Stanford. The advertising budget was a bit short for magazine ads and direct-mail postcards, but the numbers were still far too low. Amber just wasn’t good at selling trips, or she wasn’t trying.

I was also worried that she wasn’t paying bills correctly. I sent an e-mail with precise instructions for the new loan from Rand and Lee; exact amounts were to be paid on each of my dozen credit cards. I was so late on so many bills that I had to be careful what I paid when, to keep all of the various creditors sufficiently appeased.

We finished our preparations and set sail for Ibiza. My crew were college students taking fall semester off. Nick, Charlie Junkerman’s son, had suffered up the California coast with me two summers earlier, on the way to my first charter season in the San Juans with Grendel. I had promised him and his parents that this trip would be better, an enjoyable cruise through the Med and then an easy downwind sail across the Atlantic and Caribbean to the Yucatan. Emi had been a student in one of my undergraduate courses. She was from Homer, Alaska, and had spent many seasons working on her family’s commercial fishing boat. Her boyfriend Matt, also an Alaskan commercial fisherman, had joined us even though I wasn’t paying him.

The trip through the Strait of Sicily was rough. So when we pulled into Ibiza after three days at sea, I was tired. A beautiful harbor, with a huge castle on the point, but also an overcast, blustery day. As I entered the narrow fairway to the marina, the wind was gusting at over thirty knots from behind, which made our entire boat act like a sail. I had the engines in reverse as I was blown down the fairway past dozens of multimillion-dollar motor yachts.

I saw very little of Ibiza. It’s a famous party town, one of the most famous in the world. Clubs that pound all night. We were seeing it in mid-October, though, after the high season, so it was quieter. The castle was magnificent and much better preserved and more accessible than any other I had visited in the Mediterranean. I felt the full enchantment of the place at night with Nancy, walking the fortified walls lit in green and white, following mazes down inside the castle, stone passageways that twisted and turned and finally emerged in some new vista of lights overlooking the harbor and city. I longed to have just a little more time, but I was on a schedule, meeting people in Gibraltar, the Canaries, and St. Lucia, and I had to keep the boat running. I had to arrive in Mexico on time for my new permits and licenses and other preparations for the winter charters.

So we sailed for Gibraltar, Nancy and the crew and I. No guests. And we hit no weather at all. It was flat calm. Reflective, like a mountain lake, with no boats and no wind. Even when I had hit a huge calm in the Pacific a thousand miles out from Hawaii on Grendel and seen a blue whale, I had been able to detect a very gradual swell, but on this trip there was no swell at all. We motored without sails across endless glass, laughing with each other at the oddity of it. Our last night, we passed through an enormous fishing fleet, lights everywhere on the water, like fireflies. Off in the distance were two lighter patches of sky that over the hours became the two Pillars of Hercules, Gibraltar and Europe on the right, Morocco and Africa on the left. Two such different worlds so close to touching. We could see the lights of individual buildings on both shores, and heavy shipping traffic in between. Scores of tankers and freighters were anchored in the shallows, our radar dotted up for miles.

We entered the Bay of Gibraltar, passing just southwest of the famous rock, which was lit by spotlights, and waited half an hour or so for daylight to make our approach into a marina. I felt lucky to be experiencing all of this, voyaging from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and I think the crew felt the same way. In the future, though, I wanted to have the luxury of visiting every port. We had passed so close to Tunis, an African port, but the schedule hadn’t allowed a stop. We had passed Sicily, also, without stopping. We had sailed close enough to see these places, the outline of their mountains, had studied them through the binoculars, knowing we were missing everything. I missed Turkey already like a second home, ached for it despite all the hassles. And what about these other countries, if only I could spend some time in them?

In Gib, as the locals refer to it, we were joined by Barbara, one of my lenders who had already been on trips in the San Juan Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Mexico. She was happy to be on vacation, away from the responsibilities of her law firm and kids, and she was anxious to head out.

My three crew were busy roaming Gibraltar for various spares and offshore equipment. The entire country is only three miles long and a mile wide, a warren of small shops that seem nearly invisible but are known, without exception, by every Gibraltarian. And the landmarks are houses and neighborhoods, rather than streets. “That’s near Imossi House, just before Irish Town,” they’ll say. Gates and walls are also used as landmarks. The walls run everywhere, large stone structures with various important gates commemorating war. The whole country a small wart on Spain’s backside (which Spain would like to have removed), but it looks nothing like Spain, and it even has its own weather, because of the Rock, which catches what is usually the only cloud for hundreds of miles and then manages to squeeze some rain and cold out of it, while Spain remains sunny and hot.

The main chandlery in Gibraltar was Sheppard’s, very near our marina. They can boast the highest prices for marine hardware anywhere in the world, combined with the very worst customer service. They can offer all this because they have no competition, a condition guaranteed to continue into perpetuity because of tight, nepotistic control over business licenses.

Gibraltar, all in all, is a dark and depressing little place. The bright spots are the pasties and the megayachts. The pasties at Dad’s Bakehouse are extremely cheap and tasty. Delicious pastry filled with the classic beef, potatoes, carrots, and onion, or variations with chicken or veggies. I was also fond of several fish-and-chips shops. And you can’t beat Gibraltar for megayachts. Everyone stops in Gibraltar on their way in or out of the Med, and these largest yachts tend to make their transits every year between the Med and the Caribbean. Boat International, the magazine that features them, is the only magazine I treasure, and for each megayacht that pulled up, Nancy and I would pull out the appropriate issue and stroll the dock to gaze at the exterior and check out the interior and specs in the magazine. Megayachts are a ridiculous waste of money, costing twenty million dollars or even ten times more, but they are also among the most beautiful and amazing objects created by humankind. Our favorite was a long blue hull of classic design with a high bow and a narrow stern, a varnished deckhouse and other classic brightwork combined with an ultramodern rig and underbody. The perfect fusion of the traditional and the modern, and as large as three city buses placed end to end.

We made good progress on our work, despite the distraction of these yachts parked right next to us, but the weather turned sour and delayed our departure. It was cold and squally, with a lot of rain and no weather window appearing.

I spent more and more time in the Internet café, fighting Amber. She assured me she had paid bills correctly after we received the $150,000 loan from Rand and Lee. But when I called my various cards to verify, I found she had mispaid my bills by an astounding $48,000. On my biggest AmEx card, she had paid $18,000 more than I had asked. This was $18,000 that didn’t need to be paid until the next month. She paid over $10,000 on another bill that wasn’t yet due. And she didn’t pay anything on a $12,000 bill that had to be paid immediately. I couldn’t understand how she could be so incompetent. I had written down the details very clearly and reminded her to double-check when she paid. She was a Stanford graduate, not an idiot, so the only explanation was that she didn’t care. She had already informed me she was moving on to a new job at the end of the month. A friend of hers had started a dot-com with millions of dollars, so she was getting a job as a product manager, even though she had no idea what that role entailed. And she didn’t care if my business went straight into the toilet.

I felt trapped. I should have been in California, saving my business, but I also had to stay with the boat and deliver it to Mexico. The winds were increasing, the weather turning foul, so I couldn’t have left the boat even if there had been no deadline for getting to Mexico.

The storm increased to hurricane strength, with winds topping seventy-seven knots on the rock and more than fifty in the harbor. Our huge boat, with almost ten feet of hull from the water to deck level, and then the large pilothouse and thick wooden masts, was exactly broadside to the wind. We used every dock line we had, until there was a web of more than twenty lines coming from all our scuppers to every fitting on the dock. We were using winches and cleats and the windlass. But still the wind heeled the boat more than twenty degrees and we had to jump to the dock and back. Most of the time, Barbara couldn’t make the leap. Her legs weren’t long enough.

On the other side of our concrete finger, megayachts were tied stern-to, their bows facing into the wind, held by double anchors. We watched one of these, a hundred-foot motoryacht, slip back and grind its stern against the concrete, which bit deep into its fiberglass. My crew and I ran over to help, trying to put fenders between the boat and the dock and yelling over the wind for the yacht’s crew. They couldn’t hear us, but they could feel and hear the grinding from inside. They came running out, fired up the engines, and put out more fenders, but the forces were enormous.

We had visitors day and night from the dozen or so fifty-foot fiberglass yachts that were downwind of us. If our lines failed, we would, in a matter of seconds, be blown across about fifty feet of water and pulverize all of those little boats, many of which had cost between $300,000 and $600,000. So their owners took a special interest in our lines and how they were secured and whether they would hold. They were of the opinion, of course, that our lines were not thick enough, and they hassled me so continuously I finally went to Sheppard’s and paid more than $300 for two twenty-five-foot lines. It was a waste of money, but I was under a lot of pressure, from the marina as well as from the boat owners. So in the end we had almost thirty lines holding us to the dock, including two of the thickest that could be purchased in Gibraltar, and though we were heeled over in the wind and bouncing in the waves, we held.

When the winds finally died down, we had been delayed a full week, and another storm was supposed to come soon. A weather window of three or four days, long enough for us to get clear of the area, was predicted, so I decided to make a dash for it.

WE WATCHED THE Pillars of Hercules passing astern and followed the African shoreline. After an hour or two, we hit large standing waves, almost twenty feet high. We weren’t in the mouth of the strait anymore, but even this far out, the tremendous volume of water draining from the Mediterranean to meet Atlantic swells was causing the same kind of standing waves I had seen while rafting Alaskan rivers with my father. They’re called standing waves because they stay in one place, where the collision of forces causes them. In rivers, they’re behind underwater boulders. In the ocean, they’re at the meeting point of opposing currents, usually over shallower water. They’re extremely dangerous not just from overall height but from how steep they are and how close together, and I could not avoid them. Even in a ninety-foot sailing yacht, the force of the waves was frightening.

Luckily we had strong engines and were through quickly. By late afternoon, we cleared the lighthouse on the final point. The hills were lush and green, not quite how I had imagined Morocco. But the water was bright turquoise, the air warm. The African coast would fall steadily away to port, and we’d be in the Canary Islands in three or four days. We couldn’t raise our sails yet, since the wind was straight on our nose, but after the Canaries we could run downwind all the way to Mexico. And we’d be arcing south, to catch the tradewinds, so we’d soon be able to trade our foul-weather gear for shorts and T-shirts.

That evening the seas increased a bit and the ride was bouncy, but at the time I went below to sleep we were still making 11 knots, very fast time, plowing into each wave with a concussion that sent spray over the pilothouse. All systems were checking out perfectly and the crew were in high spirits.

I fell asleep with Nancy in one of the aft staterooms but was awakened suddenly by a loud metallic popping sound right underneath us. I checked my watch to see it was 1:33 A.M. When things go seriously wrong, you have to keep track of the time.

In the ten seconds it took me to run up on deck, the boat had gone into a spin, the engines still on full, the boat lurching wildly.

“Put the engines in neutral,” I yelled, but Emi was panicked and Nick looked stunned. So I pushed them aside and cut the engines myself. The seas were thrown up in jagged shapes by our spin, their edges caught in moonlight. The wooden helm turned idly in my hands, offering no resistance.

Matt came on deck, then Nancy.

“It’s the steering or the rudder,” I said. “I need to check the hydraulic ram under the bed. Matt, get the emergency tiller.”

I went below and took the mattress off, but I couldn’t raise the plywood piece under our bed; it was cut too tight. This was why I hadn’t checked on the ram before we left. I could hear the rudder banging against the hull and hear wood being ripped apart. I asked Nancy to get Matt and a flathead screwdriver.

When she returned, Matt and I pried the board with two screwdrivers, then Nancy turned on the flashlight and we saw the hydraulic ram disconnected from the fitting on the rudder post. Every time the rudder swung underneath and banged the hull, the fitting on the post tore into the wooden wall separating this stateroom from the next.

“We have to stop the rudder from swinging,” I said. “It could open up our hull.”

So we went back up on deck. The emergency tiller was heavy iron about eight feet long, with a fitting to attach to the rudder post. Once attached, it swung back and forth with the full force of the huge rudder beneath in large seas. We were not strong enough to stop it. Emi came very close to having her legs crushed between the tiller and the poop deck.

“Tie it off on the winches,” I yelled. The wind was over thirty knots and howling.

The others weren’t sure what to do, but Matt grabbed a spare halyard and I grabbed a dock line. We caught the end of the tiller, then wrapped the lines around the winches. The big primary winches were strong enough to pull the tiller to the center and hold it there.

“Okay,” I yelled over the wind. “We need to go below now and reattach it. Matt, we’ll need the big adjustable wrench and some of the larger C-wrenches, twenty-four and above. Emi and Nick, stay up here and make sure those lines stay on the tiller. Nancy, check on Barbara to make sure she’s all right.”

I was not happy to have one of my lenders onboard. The boat was new, and this kind of thing should not have been happening.

When we went below, we could see the rudder post still moving a bit. So we tried tightening the lines with the winches, but there was no way to get it absolutely still in those seas. This was a problem, because the stainless steel shaft from the hydraulic ram had a threaded end that had to be screwed into the fitting on the rudder post. You can’t screw something in unless it’s lined up perfectly. I felt the despair I had felt on many occasions that summer and fall since the final stages of building and launch, when the sheer size and weight of the boat presented something too industrial to manage.

But for Matt, who had done hundreds of impossible, shitty tasks in worse weather on purse-seiners in southeastern Alaska, this was just another day at the office. He crawled down in with the rudder post and ram, at home with the rumble of the engines and the lurching back and forth in seas, and told me to line up the ram while he held the post in place. So I tried to line up the ram with one hand, ready with a wrench in the other.

We tried a lot of times, timing it with the waves. Matt was grunting and then yelling in frustration, grease on his hands, the fitting slipping and pulling away from him. We came close enough to turn the wrench several times, but the threads wouldn’t hold. It had to be lined up perfectly.

Matt’s hands and arms were in close to where the fitting kept jerking past the ram; he could have gotten caught between the two pieces of steel. And I didn’t know what we would do if we couldn’t get the ram reattached. Then Matt yelled, “Now!” and I turned the wrench as fast as I could and we had done it. The rudder post was reattached. I tightened the safety, the piece that had somehow failed, and hurried back on deck.

The crew untied the lines on the tiller while I put the engines in gear. I did several tests at slow speed, and everything felt fine. We topped off the steering fluid to be safe, but the steering wasn’t slipping. It felt firm. So I bumped the engines back up, though not quite as fast as before, and changed our course for Casablanca. We needed to check the rudder and hull for damage before continuing on to the Canaries. It would be a delay of a day or two but hopefully not more.

Emi and Nick took their watch again, and the rest of us returned to bed, exhausted. I lay awake for a while wondering why I had chosen this kind of life, feeling afraid of the boat, afraid of the wind and sea, afraid of the licenses and permits I would have to apply for again in Mexico, afraid most of all of my bills and debts, especially after the damage Amber had done. If John’s loan didn’t come through immediately, I wouldn’t have enough money even for diesel, or to pay the crew when we arrived. This life I was leading now was in many ways completely irrational, which made it seem plausible that I was doing all of this for unconscious reasons, trying to relive my father’s life, for instance, or testing whether I’d kill myself as he had if things got bad enough. There had to be something going on that I wasn’t fully aware of, because this was crazy.

I fell asleep finally, and when I awoke, it was only a few hours later to a hideously loud bang beneath me and the same fullspeed spin.

On deck, the crew had already cut the engines and Matt was getting the emergency tiller. The wind and seas had come up even more, which was not good.

I went below and looked under the bed, surprised to find the ram still connected. Everything looked fine with the post and its fitting and the ram. “Tell them to turn the wheel all the way to port, then all the way to starboard,” I told Nancy, and when they did, I could see the rudder post turn just as it was supposed to, but we were still lurching in circles.

I went back on deck and tried the wheel myself. “We’ve lost our rudder,” I said. I couldn’t believe it had happened, but it had. If the steering gear works, but there’s no response, and there’s no sound of a loose rudder banging the underside of the hull, then there’s no rudder down there. Shaped like the tail of an airplane, with the one severed stainless steel post sticking out, it was flying down to the bottom of the ocean.

There was one ship near us on the radar. We could see its lights far off to port. I hailed on the VHF and said we were disabled and needing assistance.

“This is the Birgit Sabban. I am not able to give you a tow,” the very German voice of the captain came back. “I have limited maneuverability in these seas.”

“Please stand by on sixteen,” I told him, and I tried hailing the Moroccan Coast Guard and any other vessels in the area but received no response.

I put the engines in gear and tried steering with them on our previous heading, giving the starboard engine more thrust when I wanted to turn to port, and vice-versa. It worked a bit.

The crew were watching me. “That’s crazy,” Matt finally said. “You can’t keep going without a rudder.”

“We can steer with the engines,” I said.

“Maybe you can,” Nick said. “But not us.”

They were right, of course. It was crazy. I couldn’t steer all the way to Casablanca myself, without help. At slow speed, it would take more than a day to get there, maybe longer. And then, as I was thinking these things, distracted, the boat went into a spin.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense to try to steer without a rudder in seas.”

“Right-o, then,” Nick said in his fake British accent. “At least we’ve established that.”

Everyone grinned. I put the engines back in neutral, then left the helm for the Inmarsat-C station in the main salon. I sent a distress message saying we were disabled, without a rudder, and in need of assistance. Then I returned to the radio.

The German captain was planning to go into the port of Kinitra at daylight, in just an hour or so, to pick up cargo.

“I need you to stay here,” I said. “We need assistance. We can’t make way consistently in the same direction without our rudder.”

“I’ll be in radio contact,” he said. “I am proceeding now to Kinitra. I will continue to try to reach the Moroccan Coast Guard for you on short, medium, and high frequency radio.”

He was leaving us. “You’re required by international law to stay and provide assistance,” I said. “I have reported the name of your vessel, the Birgit Sabban, by Inmarsat-C, and I expect you to remain here.”

There was some delay after this. “Okay,” he finally said. “We will remain here with you until daylight and then attempt a tow.” I thanked him and we waited for daylight.

As we waited, however, the wind and seas kept increasing. The wind was over forty knots and the seas fifteen to eighteen feet. I was using the engines to try to keep our bow into the waves, but I also couldn’t stray too far from the German ship and I couldn’t keep us straight anyway. Every time we went broadside to the waves we rolled hideously. The waves were a bit too small to be able to capsize us by rolling us over, but it felt close.

The German captain raised the Moroccan Coast Guard on medium wave radio, but the Moroccans couldn’t send out any boats because of the rough weather. All they could offer was a helicopter with a diver, if we wanted to abandon ship. This option would be possible only during daylight.

“We need a tow,” I told the German captain. “We need a very long bridle with a shackle, and we need a tow line long enough that it will be submerged to absorb shock. We’re over a hundred tons.”

“Do you have this tow line?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Nothing long enough or heavy enough.”

“Well, I don’t have this equipment either.”

“You have long dock lines that are thick enough,” I said. “Give us one of those for a bridle, and a shackle if you have it, and then make several lines into a long towline to tie onto it.”

“We will see what we have,” he said.

Daylight was a dull metallic color in this weather. The German ship was green and 300 feet long. It made a slow circle and passed in front of us, into the wind and waves.

“I am limited in maneuverability,” the captain said. “I can only make a track into the wind and you will have to bring your bow up to my stern.”

“I have no rudder,” I said.

“This is all I can do, or I will not have control in these seas.”

So I used the engines to steer the boat. The wind and seas continued to build, the waves very sharp, becoming twenty-footers packed close together, driven by wind over fifty knots. I could get the boat moving several knots forward, catching up to the freighter, but then my bow would take three feet of solid water over the top and the boat would slew to the side from the impact. The wind would catch us as we came up high over the next twenty-foot wave and blow us into a spin. In the spin, another twenty-footer would catch us broadside and roll us more than fifty degrees, which meant looking down across 21.5 feet of deck more or less straight into the water. Fifty knots of wind has tremendous force. The engines were strong, and I was using all the power they had, but if the wind caught the boat right, there was no stopping the spin without a rudder.

An hour later, when I was finally in position behind the stern of the freighter, I tried to hide in its wind shadow, but it was weaving a bit. The German ship’s crew was on the stern, ready to throw small lines with monkey’s fists, a knot shaped like a ball. To get close enough for my crew to catch one of these, I would need to place our bowsprit within about twenty feet of the German ship, which was a fearsome sight. The stern of the freighter was fifty feet high and flared on the sides, so that when the stern came down after each wave, it flattened the seas with a loud crash and then a sucking sound as it rose up again. I had to use the engines to keep my bow straight behind the freighter’s stern, but I couldn’t drift forward any faster than the freighter was going.

I hated to take my hands off the throttles, but I had to radio the other captain. “This is just to verify that you’ll be sending a long line to us first, which we will use as a bridle, tying it to both sides of our bow.”

“I don’t have that line for you. I have only one tow line. This is the tow line they are throwing to you now.”

“But that won’t work,” I said. “We can’t be towed from just one side of the bow. We have to have a bridle.”

“You will have to put it in the center.”

I couldn’t respond because I had to throw the starboard engine hard forward, the port engine hard reverse. The bow straightened but also jumped forward, very close to the freighter’s stern, which came down with a huge crash just as two men threw their lines, both of which fell short.

“Put it in the center?” I yelled over the radio. “We have a bowsprit. And we have anchors that will sever the line.”

I had to let go of the radio again.

“We are doing our best,” the captain said. “We do not have what you are requesting.”

“Nancy, go tell the crew this line is it. They have to get it attached through the hole in the bow for the anchors and then to a cleat or the windlass, preferably a cleat.” We had enormous steel cleats that were welded to the steel deck underneath the teak.

Nancy worked her way forward along the rail, struggling to hold on amid the spray and storm-force wind.

Our bow went up over a wave just as the freighter’s stern drifted to the side, so the wind caught us full blast and spun us, dipping our rail almost to the water. I held on to the throttles and saw the crew holding on to lifelines and keeping so low for balance they were lying on the deck. As we came back around, the boat stalled broadside and I gunned the engines at full power to bring the bow up. I tried not to appear panicked, since Barbara was on deck now. She didn’t know how to swim. She was wearing a lifejacket, sitting braced against a table, and not saying anything. I didn’t like it at all that she or anyone else was experiencing this.

The bow came around under force of the engines, but the trick, with no rudder, was to avoid coming around so fast as to then spin the other way. I had to ease off at the right moment. I succeeded this time, and was able to go straight for a minute and catch up to the freighter, but I was blown in a circle once more before getting the bow up to their stern for another attempt. This time our bowsprit must have come within ten feet of their stern. Completely terrifying. My crew up there and the boat only minimally under my control. Nancy was back beside me, drenched even in her foul weather gear. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and then watched the crew.

The freighter crew threw lines again, three of them at the same time, which didn’t make any sense, but Matt, in a leap on that rolling, pitching deck, right at the lifelines, caught one. He and Nick and Emi hauled the line in and I tried to keep us in position. Tiny, fast adjustments.

They led the line through the gap for the starboard anchor and threw the loop around the cleat just as I was losing the boat to starboard. We were blown sideways away from the freighter as the line played out from their end, and then I saw the freighter crew cleating it off.

“No!” I yelled into the radio. “They can’t cleat it off now. They have to let out a long line. It has to be long enough to be submerged. Tell them to take it off! Now!”

Then I yelled to Nancy, “Tell the crew to get away from the bow!”

She ran forward, looking scared, and the captain came back over the radio. “We do not have a longer line,” he said.

“You have a longer line!” I yelled. “Give us the goddamn longer line!”

The short line caught tight then and yanked us horrendously to the side, our boat at such a steep angle I thought we might go over. If we hadn’t been a sailboat, with heavy keels and built to heel over and recover, we would have been lost. Any motoryacht would have capsized instantly. The crew and Nancy had made it back to midships just in time and were clinging to the lifelines and the seating area. Barbara was under the table holding one of its legs to keep from flying. The bowsprit was holding only because it was a monstrously heavy piece of steel. We took several feet of green water, pounding back against the crew, then wallowed for a moment before being yanked through another wave, taking green water again. This severed the line against the flukes of our starboard anchor and we were spinning free of the tow.

“Goddamnit,” I said into the radio. “You put my crew and my vessel at risk. Give us a bridle, a long bridle, and then give us a proper tow line.”

“We will make a turn, go behind you, turn again, and then you may try the tow again. We will search again for a longer line, but I can tell you we do not have what you are requesting.”

“With a ship that size, I know you have enough docklines to give us one for a bridle and three more tied together for a long tow line.”

“We cannot give up all of our dock lines for you. If we lose the lines, or use them to tow you, what do we use when we arrive in port?”

“We’ll give them back to you in the harbor as we’re taken on by a tug, or a pilotboat can bring you new ones. We have to have a safe tow line.”

“I cannot risk the security of my vessel. I will give you what I can.”

A large wave caught us then from the stern, as the boat was spinning, and I heard a crashing sound. Thousands of gallons dumped onto our aft deck, and our Mediterranean boarding ladder, which was fifteen feet of solid teak and weighed more than 500 pounds, came loose from its steel mount and began swinging at the stern, ripping off the wooden taff rail and bouncing on its lines.

There was no good way to deal with this. The ladder was heavy enough to crush and kill anyone caught between it and the deck. We had to bring it in before it took out our backstays and our mizzenmast, but it was held high on a halyard and was out of control, too dangerous to approach. I took the halyard and waited for the right timing, for the ladder to swing in over the poop deck. My three crew were ready but kept jumping back out of the way. The deck rolling in the big waves, the wind screaming at over fifty knots, the ladder just one more uncontrollable force until finally it swung in over the poop deck long enough for me to let the halyard go and my crew to pull it forward, where we lashed it down.

I returned to the throttles to face us again into the waves. The boarding ladder was my fault. I should have stowed it on deck before we left Gibraltar. It was necessary for the Mediterranean but only a hazard for an Atlantic crossing. I had been thinking we might need it in the Canary Islands. The hydraulic ram popping loose was my fault, too. I should have checked it. There had been so many things to do before we left Turkey, and I’d been exhausted. I had checked hundreds of other things, but I’d been in a rush and the board beneath the bed wasn’t easy enough to remove, because of the bad carpentry. It was also possible that the ram had been sabotaged by a disgruntled crew member or worker during our final days in Turkey, because the safety on the ram should not have failed, and it was hard to imagine how it could have come fully unscrewed across more than six inches of tight threads.

The freighter passed again and I tried to maneuver us closer. The waves remained sharp, their tops blown off in spray, the spray everywhere, filling the air, and the Moroccan Coast Guard still wouldn’t send a boat and there were no private boats willing to offer a tow. The freighter was our only option. The Inmarsat-C was supposed to relay distress messages by satellite to ships in our area, but the German ship reported they hadn’t seen any notifications.

This second towing attempt was going to be the same horror as the last, I knew. Without a bridle, we couldn’t keep the line away from the bowsprit and anchors. The line was heavy dock line for a ship, five-inch-thick nylon, but the force of a hundred tons being yanked through a twenty-foot wave was more than enough to sever it against any kind of edge.

When I finally got our bow up to their stern, the freighter crew threw their lines and one of them wrapped high around our headstay. I watched it wrap around and then the monkey fist dangling there, about ten feet off the deck, just out of reach. And my crew hadn’t noticed. They were trying to catch another line. The headstay is the heavy stainless steel wire leading from the end of the bowsprit to the top of the main mast. It’s the main wire holding the mast up. If we fell away from the freighter at this moment, which could very easily happen as our bow came up over a wave and caught the wind, and if the hard yank of the rope on the headstay were enough to make the stay or one of its fittings fail, which was also possible, then the main mast would be pulled down backward onto the deck by its backstays. The mizzen would come down, too, right on top of us.

“Tell them to get that line off my headstay,” I told Nancy. “If that line doesn’t come off right now, it could pull down our masts. Understand?”

“Oh God,” Nancy said, and she ran forward.

It was my most concentrated time on the throttles. I had to keep us close behind their stern. I was surprised to find that I felt not frightened but deeply sad. If I failed, one of my crew or Nancy might be killed as the rigging came down, and it was in fact most likely that I would fail. I couldn’t control the wind or waves or the freighter or even my own boat. I stared at that stern and the waves and worked the throttles at revs the engines should never have been subjected to. I could smell the smoke in the exhaust, even in fifty knots of wind. I was willing to destroy my engines. And it took an impossibly long time. The crew didn’t understand immediately, and then they saw it and tried to reach it and couldn’t, then Matt finally got the boat hook and tried to undo it with that, and the crew on the freighter were not bright enough to give them any slack, but I couldn’t leave the throttles to use the radio. Barbara and I were silent. She was staring at the crew, too, and probably thinking similar thoughts. Loss of life and limb, real disaster, was only moments away, and there was nothing more we could do.

Matt caught the line with the boat hook and freed it from the headstay. Seconds later, though I still tried to keep us close to the stern for the towing attempt, our bow was blown hard and fast to starboard and we spun away from the freighter.

I tried to stay calm on the radio as I brought our boat back around for another attempt. “That heaving line was wrapped around my headstay, and none of your crew noticed. They should have cut that line as soon as they saw it wrapped.”

“I am up here in the bridge. You will have to notify me of such things.”

“I’m trying to steer the boat with only the throttles. My hands aren’t free. You tell your first mate to pay some attention and try to avoid getting us killed.”

“I have been in contact with the owners, and they have suggested that we tow you from your main mast. If you have a line you could put around your main mast, and if we then towed you back the other way to Gibraltar, downwind, it might go easier.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “My masts are wood, and they’re only deck-stepped, so that’s not a possible tow point. And I can’t have you tow me downwind without a rudder. I’ll be powerless to keep from going sideways down a wave, and then I’ll get yanked by your short tow rope and the boat will broach. Why don’t you just give us the bridle and long tow line, which I know you have?”

He didn’t answer, and it was time to try moving up to the stern.

My crew caught a line and hauled it in, again with time only to throw it over a cleat and then retreat to midships. Again the terrible yank, the line too short, and the towline severed. It was so stupid.

“Surprise, surprise,” I said over the radio. “The short tow line without a bridle was severed again.”

“I am not required to tow you, and we are trying our best.”

“You are in fact required to help me, and if you endanger my vessel or crew unnecessarily through not providing the kind of assistance that you could have provided, you are responsible for that also.”

“We will try one more time, and then I suggest you take the offer of the helicopter from the Moroccans.”

Matt was back in the pilothouse, along with the other crew, and he wanted to talk with me, so I signed off the radio. He looked angry and frustrated, which was a bit frightening with his height and his military haircut, but with him the anger was just a way of getting through the work, nothing personal.

Nick and Emi just looked exhausted and scared. Everyone was soaked.

“What about using chain?” Matt asked. “We could wrap chain around the cleat and put it out past the bowsprit and tie the towline to that. That would keep the line from chafing on the anchors or bowsprit.”

It was a good idea. “Will you be able to get the line attached?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, let’s do it,” I said. “But be careful out there. Don’t get in the way of anything. Let the boat get hurt, not you.”

I radioed the German captain and again asked for the proper equipment, which he again refused. So I told him we were going to try using chain.

As I brought the boat around and worked my way up toward the freighter, Matt wrapped the chain from the starboard anchor around a deck cleat and had a length of about twenty feet going forward through the gap for the anchors.

I was spun several times by the wind, and the freighter crew was not good at throwing lines, but my crew did catch one finally, and Matt somehow attached it to the end of the chain. To this day, I have no idea how he did it, and he did it quickly, while the bow pitched and buried itself in those waves.

My crew retreated to midships, and when the tow line came tight with a hard yank that pulled us through a wave, it held. Still a terrible way to be towed, but I hoped it might work. Maybe we’d make it to Casablanca and have a new rudder made, and maybe the delay wouldn’t be more than a week. Seemed optimistic, but you never know. Steel is easy and fast to work with, unlike fiberglass or wood.

We were yanked through another wave, several feet of solid water coming over the bow, and in that instant as the water stood above the bow, I was staring at the chain wrapped on the large steel cleat. I was staring at it, and I didn’t blink, and the window was clear from just having been drenched, and yet all I saw was that it had vanished. Too quickly for me even to see it go. The steel deck cleat was torn off at its base, the heavy chain was gone, the huge 300-pound anchor was gone, and all that was left was 450 feet of additional chain from the locker flying away at a terrific pace. It caught and severed and we were spinning free, no longer attached. Some of the steel of the bulwarks at the opening for the starboard anchor had been bent outward. Gouges in the teak deck, also, where the deck cleat must have skipped twice. All that damage, all that force. It was too much.

“We’re not going to try that again,” I said to Nancy and Barbara.

“Wow,” Barbara said.

The crew was back in the pilothouse as I called the captain over the radio.

“That took off my deck cleat, anchor, and anchor chain,” I told him. “But you couldn’t give me any of the equipment I needed when I needed it.”

“I recommend accepting the helicopter,” he said. “Unless you can continue on your own.”

“Stand by, please,” I said.

I was still using the throttles, trying to keep our nose into the seas, but my focus now was on the crew and Barbara and Nancy, who were waiting for something from me. Then I decided to just try it again, what the hell. I steered the course for Casablanca with the engines, working hard on the throttles. I went straight for a minute or two, then spun again.

“Okay, never mind,” I said. “We’ve been trying this for ten hours. I haven’t left the throttles for ten hours.” It was amazing. Each hour I had thought it couldn’t get worse, and each hour it had. “We can only get the helicopter during daylight, which is only about two more hours, but really a bit less in this weather. Let me check our position again for a second.”

I went to the chart and plotted our position while Matt used the engines to try to keep us into the waves. The waves were just big enough and steep enough to roll and capsize us if one hit exactly right while we were sideways in the trough.

“We’re only about fifteen miles from land,” I said. “Sixty miles from Casablanca, but only fifteen from land, which means we could drift enough during the night to go aground in high surf. I can’t keep the boat going straight under power, which means I can’t control the boat or guarantee we won’t drift into land. We’re not on fire, and we’re not sinking. The boat is still seaworthy.”

“Ha,” Barbara said.

“We are still seaworthy,” I said. “Because we’re not on fire or taking on water. But I can’t think of any other options right now. I can’t figure out how to make this work. We can’t get a tow, we can’t make our own way, and it’s not safe to just wait for better weather or a better chance at a tow, because night is coming and we’re too close to land and these seas are big enough to capsize us and may get bigger.”

I was starting to repeat myself, I knew. It was because I was getting choked up. The feeling came out of nowhere. It was the thought of having to tell my crew that we would be abandoning ship, something I had never imagined I would say. I wonder if any captain really believes he or she will ever have to give that order. It was almost impossible to speak. “I think we have to abandon ship,” I said. “I don’t think the helicopter is that great an idea, either, and I always thought it would be safest to stay with the boat, even if it was swamped, but I can’t guarantee your safety onboard anymore, so it’s time to get off.”

No one looked happy, but no one disagreed, either.

I called the German captain. “Please call the Moroccan Coast Guard and ask them for the helicopter as soon as possible.”

He asked for confirmation and I gave it.

“David?” Barbara asked. “How do we get onto the helicopter?”

“They drop a diver and then we get into the water one at a time and they lift us up on a harness or in a basket, with the diver helping us while we’re in the water.”

“I don’t swim.”

“I know. You’ll be wearing a lifejacket, and the diver will help you.”

“I won’t be able to see, either, without my glasses.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. It was terrible.

“You have to promise me you’ll go with me, David. If you’ll go into the water with me, I’ll do it.”

I thought about that. It meant I’d be in the water the whole time she was being lifted up. I couldn’t help but think of sharks. I’ve always been unreasonably afraid of them. “Okay,” I said. “I can’t think of why not. We’ll have to be the last two, and I’ll help you swim to the diver.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

We had to wait about twenty minutes for the helicopter. Everyone trying to think of what he or she needed to take, heading below to collect things.

“You can’t take your stuff,” I said. “It will weigh you down in the water. So no one takes anything except maybe a wallet.”

Matt relieved me at the throttles while I sent another distress message on the Inmarsat saying we were abandoning ship. Then I set off the Inmarsat’s alarm and the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) so we could track the boat. And I called the German captain, who verified the helicopter was on its way. I was worried about the helicopter. So many helicopters went down in storms, and our boat was still seaworthy. We were still safely aboard it. The weather was even starting to die down, the wind just over forty knots, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t come right back up. The weather reports weren’t telling us much. I was also worried about salvage rights. If I stayed on board, no one could claim salvage rights, but if I left, anyone could claim the boat, I believed. I wasn’t completely sure.

“I keep thinking I should stay with the boat,” I told everyone in the pilothouse. “So no one can claim salvage rights.”

“David,” Barbara said. “You promised. You’re coming with me.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not thinking straight. It’s just that if I lose this boat, I’ve lost everything. Even if I get a full payout on the insurance, I owe more than that in the business and I have no way back.” It was stupid to be talking aloud about all of this, I knew, but I couldn’t help it. I’ve never been great at keeping my own counsel.

“The boat’s not worth it,” Barbara said. “You’re making the right decision. And you’ll find a way back. I know you will.”

I didn’t believe her, of course. I felt beat.

I got on the radio with the German captain. “Do you know how salvage rights work?” I asked him. “If I get off the boat, can the next person who climbs on board claim the boat?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m not sure what all of the laws say.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then I’d like to notify you and anyone else hearing this, notifying all stations that I am not giving up any rights to this vessel. I intend to come back in another boat tomorrow and get back on board. I am getting off the boat now only to assist with the safety of my crew and passengers, but I am not abandoning the vessel.”

There was no response from the German captain or from any other station. I hailed the German captain again and made arrangements to use his liferaft, in case the helicopter plan didn’t work. Then I was talking to the crew about the helicopter versus the liferaft. I don’t think anyone wanted to hear, but I felt I needed to warn them. “The sides of the ship are pretty high, so there’s some risk there on the rope ladder, but otherwise the liferaft might be safer. The helicopter might be riskier. Sometimes they go down in storms.”

Nancy looked at me and I could tell I should shut up. I was not exactly reassuring Barbara or the crew. So I shut up.

The German captain came on over the radio and said we should see the helicopter any minute, and then we heard it and saw it coming in low. I took my handheld VHF onto the aft deck to talk with the pilot.

I called the helicopter on the VHF but didn’t get a response. They were hovering close enough that I could see the pilot and copilot, so I held my VHF in the air and pointed at it and tried hailing them again, but nothing happened, so I went back to the helm and tried on the mounted VHF. The German captain came back instead.

“They do not have a radio onboard,” he said.

“The rescue helicopter doesn’t have a VHF?”

“No,” he said. “They do not have a VHF or any other kind of radio.”

I looked around at my crew. “A Coast Guard rescue helicopter out in a storm for an abandon ship and they don’t bring a radio.”

“So much for the Moroccans,” Nick said.

“Well shit-o,” Matt said, trying to do Nick’s Brit voice.

So we waited and watched as they lowered their diver down on a cable. The cable had a small step, too small to see.

“No basket,” I said. “It looks like we have to stand on that cable. We’ll be clipped in, too, I’m sure. Make sure you’re clipped in and that the diver checks everything.”

The diver had to swim a hundred feet upwind toward us, into the waves. He had fins, a mask, and a snorkel, but he was struggling. We had seen quite a belly when he was being lowered down, and his arms were thin. We had an out-of-shape diver rescuing us, without a radio.

When he was within about thirty feet, he motioned for us to come, so Matt gave Emi a last hug, said “Here goes,” and jumped in. He swam out quickly to the diver and then they both swam a bit farther away from the boat, the diver holding onto Matt to help him. The ocean was dark green and gray in the overcast light, streaky with spray. The wind and seas had died down but were still high.

The helicopter came closer, but not close enough, and I was confused about what the diver was doing. He and Matt were just floating there. This went on for some time. Meanwhile, we were drifting toward them. We were rolling enough in the seas that our large steel hull presented a danger to them if we came too close. And our ninety-foot main mast, swinging in long arcs, was a hazard for the helicopter.

The diver was having trouble. He seemed tired. Matt was supporting him in the waves, helping him. And then the diver pointed at our boat, gave Matt a weak push toward us, and swam the other way toward the helicopter.

We couldn’t believe it. The diver was saving himself, leaving Matt in the water. Emi was the first to yell and start looking for a line. We all scrambled for lines to toss overboard for Matt.

“Swim toward the bow!” I yelled to Matt. “Around the bow to the boarding ladder!” I didn’t know whether he could even hear us in forty knots of wind. We couldn’t bring him up on the port side. There was no ladder, and he could be pushed under by the rolling of the hull.

Emi was frantic. Nick and Nancy and Barbara were all grabbing lines, too. We had several docklines and several halyards overboard for Matt. I was afraid to use the engines because I might just make things worse. I could run him over or send us too far away, or wrap a line on a prop.

Matt was swimming hard for the bow as we drifted down onto him. He caught a line that Emi and Nick led under the bowsprit from the starboard side, so he was able to hold onto this as he swam, and he cleared the bow. He kept holding on, and stayed close to the boat, Emi and Nick pulling him aft toward the boarding ladder. Then I threw him a life ring attached to a line, and he grabbed onto that. Someone lowered the boarding ladder, I’m not sure who. Emi went down the ladder as Matt came close, and she grabbed him by the collar of his lifejacket to help him onto the lower step, which was plunging into the seas, and then up the other steps onto the deck.

Matt was exhausted. We all went back inside the pilothouse. The helicopter had vanished.

“We’re going to need that liferaft,” I told the German captain.

“It is already inflated and towed behind us. Can you see it?”

It was raining hard and the visibility was bad, but the ship was not far away, and I could just make out the orange raft.

“Thank you,” I said. “Are you going to come around with it?”

“I am turning into the wind now. You will need to come to it.”

“Make sure all the lines are up,” I told my crew. “I don’t want a line around a prop.”

In a few minutes, they reported the lines were up, and I engaged the engines, trying to go straight. The liferaft was about five hundred yards away and moving at several knots.

As I closed the gap, I told the crew what the procedure would be. “I’ll try to put the raft beside our stern on the starboard side. I’ll come in close and hit reverse and that should pull our stern close. Matt will be the first one in, if you’re feeling up for it. Can you jump holding a line and then tie it off?”

Matt nodded.

“Okay, Matt jumps in first with the line, and Nick holds onto the line from our deck. Wrap it around a shroud so you’re not holding all of the weight. Then it will be Emi, then Nancy. Then it will be Barbara. I’m sorry I won’t be jumping with you, but you’ll have lots of area to jump into, and Matt and Emi and Nancy will be there to help.”

“Okay,” Barbara said.

“Then I’ll take the line from Nick, and Nick will jump in. Then I’ll jump in, bringing the line with me. Okay?”

I was having trouble bringing the bow around to get up to the raft. One of the lines had wrapped around my props.

“Fill the ditchbag,” I said. “You can bring your most valuable items, just a few things, whatever will fit in the bag along with the emergency stuff that’s already in there. We can toss it in after Matt. But you have only the next five minutes or so to do it.”

I was having a lot of trouble with the engines, having to punch the throttles to get anything out of the props. It was getting dark and this was our last chance before we’d have to get into our own liferaft, and I didn’t know how the freighter would pick us up in our own raft. In these seas, we could be killed if we floated under their stern.

“Come on,” I said. “Come on.” I asked the captain if he could let out the line a bit more, but he said that was all there was. I asked Nancy to put the portable VHF in a baggie and then in my foul weather gear pocket, and I had my knife. The others were done gathering their things and were waiting on deck. The EPIRB and Inmarsat were flashing red and beeping. It was a scene I hadn’t imagined I would ever see.

“Let’s rehearse the order,” I said, and everyone called out what they would do and when. “Make sure your lights are turned on and working, make sure you have a whistle.”

It took much too long to get up to the raft. The props were badly fouled. But the liferaft did get closer, and closer, and finally I was within a hundred feet of it. I brought the bow in, almost ran it over, and hit reverse.

“Go now!” I yelled. I ran from the helm to the rail and saw that the raft was touching us. Matt was already in, tying off the line.

“It’s on!” he yelled, and Emi threw the ditch bag. Then she jumped. It was about ten feet down to the raft. She hit right in the center. The raft had a partial enclosure on the top, and Matt and Emi were trying to untangle themselves from it to leave room for the next.

“Now Nancy.” And Nancy was in, then scrambling to get out of the way, then Barbara jumped with a yell and was fine, then I grabbed the line from Nick. His foot caught on the wooden rail as he jumped, so that he spun forward in the air and landed on his face at the edge of the raft, his legs in the water. The others pulled him aboard. I unwrapped the line and jumped, trying not to land on anyone.

And that was it. We had abandoned ship. I sat there in the raft, in the storm, and watched my boat float away. It was rocking wildly, the dark wooden masts arcing low to one side and then the other, but it was not taking on any water. It could rock in those seas forever, it seemed, and yet I had abandoned it.

We were being pulled in by the freighter’s crew. I took the VHF out of my pocket, protected in its baggie, and talked with the captain.

“Please be sure to keep us well away from the stern,” I said, and he said he would. I could see his crew with the line going forward over the deck to pull us from midships and keep us clear. They had a rope ladder over the side with wide wooden rungs. I felt only sad, and tired, not excited or scared. But I still had the task of getting the crew safely onboard. This was why I couldn’t have stayed with my boat. The side of the freighter was lower than the stern but still high, and when it rolled away from us, we’d see thirty or forty feet of steel, and then it would roll back down at us. Barbara was overweight, without a lot of upper-body strength, and she couldn’t see without her glasses, and she couldn’t swim.

“I’ll help you at the ladder,” I told Barbara. “I’ll climb on behind to help hold you onto it, but you need to get your feet onto a rung quick and don’t let go for anything. We have to time it for when the ship rolls toward us. Grab the ropes then and get your feet on a rung immediately. Then the ship will swing away and you’ll be lifted from the water. Once you’re on, keep moving up, and their crew will help you. Nick will come after me, but otherwise we’ll use the same order for climbing the ladder that we used for jumping into the raft. Matt will be our guinea pig, as always.”

“Call me chum,” Matt said.

Up close, it was pretty frightening. The ship rolled a hell of a lot, and sucked at the water. “Keep your arms and legs inside the raft!” I yelled. My crew were trying to push off the ship when we were sucked in close. “The raft can take it.”

The ladder was made of crappy old rope and chewed-up wooden rungs. And the rolling was so extreme that the ladder would stay close for only a second or two before it was yanked high into the air away from us. I didn’t know if Barbara would make it. I wasn’t strong enough to hold her on if she wasn’t holding on well herself.

Matt went first, catching hold fast and then yanked upward, his feet slipping. He was strong enough to hold on, but I was glad Barbara had her glasses off and couldn’t see what it looked like. Emi went next, grabbing the ladder late because we were thrown by a wave, but she caught it and had no problem once she was climbing. The crew pulled her onboard and now she and Matt were looking down at us from the rail, shouting encouragement.

Nancy grabbed the ladder, but we were thrown so hard to the side, swirling past it, that she couldn’t hold on and was pulled out of the raft before she let go. This put her in the water between the raft and the steel hull, and I felt the sudden panic of losing her. In an instant, it was clear how much I loved her. Nick and I lunged for her and pulled her back in just before the raft rubbed up against the steel.

“Oh God,” Nancy said. “That wasn’t good at all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She was more hesitant the next time, so we waited for several waves, and then she caught one, climbed, and was pulled aboard.

That meant it was Barbara’s turn.

Nick and I were talking her through it, one of us on either side, holding the ladder when we could and waiting for a good wave.

“I think it’s going to be the next one,” I said. “Get ready to grab on quick and get your feet onto a rung.”

The wave came, we were lifted high up against the ladder, and she grabbed on, but the wave pushed us to the side and I fell, holding onto the ladder with only one hand. Nick had fallen, too. Barbara stepped onto the rungs just as the ship lurched away from us. I managed to get one hand up to push on her backside, but I wasn’t there behind her on the ladder as I had promised. Both of her hands were holding a wooden rung, not nearly as good as holding onto ropes, and her feet were on a rung not far below, so that she wasn’t standing up straight but was in a crouch. The boat was heaving very hard, with a lot of force to fling her off. I didn’t think she was going to make it, and I was ready to try to catch her, but I was afraid she would slide down the hull and be pushed under water as it rolled back.

Then I heard Barbara growl. It was a low, guttural growl, a primal refusal to die, and she held on and climbed up to the next rungs, and by the time the ship had rolled back toward us, the freighter crew and my crew were pulling her aboard.

“Oh God,” I said. I was so grateful.

Barbara hugged the crew on deck, and we waited a minute or two, collecting ourselves, then the ship rolled close and Nick climbed up the ladder, and when it rolled close again, I went, holding a line to pull up the ditch bag, and we were safe.

THE FREIGHTER CREW, all from Kiribati in the South Pacific, were warm in their welcome, and the two Germans, the captain and first mate, were gracious. We were given their own dry clothing and excellent quarters. I didn’t change but went up to the bridge and looked at my boat, half a mile away now, still heaving back and forth. It looked small from here, but riding high off the water. I couldn’t grasp that I had lost the boat, that it was no longer mine. I still hoped I would somehow get back on board. But most of all I was grateful that no one had been hurt. We were all safe, and the only issue now was property, which is only money.

I was thinking also, though, of the time when a captain I had hired had abandoned Grendel near the Guatemalan border with its engine destroyed. I’d had to replace that engine with no facilities, no marina even, and it had taken almost four months to get the boat out of there.

The captain told me he would circle my boat all night, to keep it safe from pirates. He showed me on the radar. A ring of small vessels about three miles out, waiting. Moroccan fishermen who would come aboard to strip the electronics and anything else they could use. I was surprised at his interest, having assumed he would continue on to Kinitra, his intended port, as soon as we were aboard. But he had given up on Kinitra, and said he would try to tow my boat in the morning if the seas died down. He would tow it ninety miles back to Gibraltar.

I didn’t say anything at the time, standing in the bridge with the captain, but I knew what was going on. Now that I had abandoned ship, he was going to claim salvage rights. I wondered if we would suddenly see better towing gear, and I wondered if he had pulled this scam before.

The captain was a deliberate man, in his fifties, sitting at his comfortable helm seat and chain-smoking. He was dressed in a white shirt and gray slacks, as if he were at the office. He spoke almost perfect English, as did his first mate. The bridge was quiet and dark, the sound of the strange two-cylinder diesel like a great vacuum pump far below. He steered with a small joystick, just tiny adjustments to circle my boat. His claims about only being able to go upwind in a straight line seemed not quite true.

“Ich kann ein bischen Deutsch,” I said. I spoke a bit in German about hiking in the mountains of Germany and visits with my German grandfather to the konditerei, the bakery, for sweets. The captain indulged me and spoke of boyhood treks and blueberries.

We slipped back into English to discuss the Moroccans and their lack of a VHF. He had never heard back from the Moroccan Coast Guard.

He had also contacted my insurance company, as I had. I assumed the owners of the ship would try to recover towing fees, and I suspected they would ask for some outrageous payment for salvage rights. I wanted to know whether the first mate or captain had ever been involved in this before. “Have you ever rescued any other boats?” I asked.

“Yes,” the captain said. “Another sailboat, a similar size as yours.”

So this captain had known what he was doing. I felt sure he would produce better towing equipment in the morning.

I said goodnight and descended to our quarters to change out of my wet clothes and take a hot shower. The freighter crew had invited my crew to watch a video about their home in Kiribati, but everyone had said no because they were tired. They were stretched out in dry clothes in a small sitting area eating lunchmeat and crackers.

I woke several times that night. The captain and his first mate were taking turns on the watches. Neither of them seemed inclined to speak. They had more or less the same attitude. Whichever one was awake would sit smoking and making small steering adjustments in a manner that looked contemplative, as if trying the joystick for the first time, over and over. The glances at the large radar screen below, showing my boat and the ring of Moroccan fishermen/pirates, the glances at depth and radios, then more of staring three hundred feet to the bowlight and beyond. The slow rolling and the vacuum pump sound of the diesel. I had no idea how they could spend years like this. I suppose it was peaceful and ordered and safe.

We could see the masthead light on my boat, arcing back and forth. I had turned it on at the end to keep the boat visible, and I had left the engines and electrical system running so that all systems would stay up, bilge pumps included. I had no idea what to hope for, whether for complete loss or recovery or something else. I was so tired, and no matter what happened, my original plans were stretched and broken. The idea of getting to Mexico on time to run my winter charters, after first sorting out the salvage mess and then getting a new rudder and probably finding new crew, seemed remote. Finding money to pay the $3,000 deductible and anything not covered by insurance, and finding money to pay the lenders and all the bills, was still the largest worry, worse by far than losing my rudder at sea. If the loan promised by John didn’t come in, I was going to go under, despite the recent loan from Rand and Lee. There wasn’t enough time to raise $150,000 from other sources. Especially once word got around about the lost rudder and the cancelled winter schedule. It seemed like I had already failed, and was just hanging on to make sure it was real.

In the morning, I climbed down into the liferaft with the first mate and one of the crew from Kiribati. My own crew had to stay on board. The captain explained to me that his company was now responsible for the boat, liable for it because of their salvage claim, and my crew was not allowed on board. They were letting me on, though, because they had to have someone who knew the boat. Placed into the raft with us was a hundred-foot bridle of very thick dock line, exactly what I had requested the day before.

The freighter circled more deftly than it had before and brought the liferaft close. The seas and wind had died down considerably. They had not blown my boat onto land during the night, obviously, which meant that we could have stayed aboard, though in that case the freighter probably would not have stayed with us all night.

When we came close to the stern rail of my boat, I climbed aboard quickly, the first back on deck. I considered telling the other two to stay in the raft, refusing to let them board, but I hesitated and they climbed up after me. I needed help with the towline, and I needed the tow. I was too tired to think clearly. I wonder now what would have happened. Would they have fought me to come aboard? Would the captain have refused to help me afterward and let me drift? Or would I have won the day, handling the tow lines myself and avoiding the salvage claim? I have no idea.

What happened was that they came aboard and we tied the bridle to the bows. They even gave me a large shackle so that when the towline was thrown to us we would be able to simply slip the shackle over and screw in the pin.

I couldn’t steer up to the freighter’s stern reliably with fouled props, and the German captain didn’t want that anyway. He was happy to pull his freighter alongside, close enough to throw a line across our deck. It’s true the seas were much calmer, the wind much lower, but what the captain was willing to do had also changed considerably.

I called him on the radio. “I see you have all of the equipment you said you didn’t have.”

“The conditions have changed,” he said. “We were unable to provide other assistance in the sea conditions that prevailed yesterday.”

“You’re a liar,” I said. “And a criminal. You put my crew and my boat at risk. You went for the salvage claim. You are not going to get away with this.”

There was a pause, then he came back on the radio. “My instructions are to tow you to Gibraltar. Are you willing to help ensure the safety of the vessel during that tow?”

“Yes I am, you sonofabitch.”

“Thank you, then. Please stand by on sixteen.”

The tow line he used was five times the length he had offered us the day before. It was long enough that the middle section stayed slack in the water the entire time, absorbing shock. It was exactly what we had needed.

To keep the boat from crawfishing side to side, we dragged dock lines, a sea anchor (a kind of underwater parachute) with a big hole cut in it, and two plastic kayaks, which swamped and darted back and forth under the surface like green lures. With all of this trailing from the stern, the boat sawed back and forth very little, and we were able to reduce the chafing of the towlines at the bows.

The tow went smoothly for the day and a half back to Gibraltar. The first mate puked a few times, seasick, then sat on the poop deck and smoked. The man from Kiribati puked a few times then slept in the pilothouse. I fixed canned meals and amused myself with the Inmarsat. To get it to stop beeping, I had to cut its power. When I brought it back up, there were finally some response messages, asking me to verify that I had set off the Inmarsat distress alarm and my EPIRB. “Just a bit late,” I typed. “I’m being towed to Gibraltar now.”

Then I sent an e-mail to Seref. “We’ve lost our rudder near Casablanca. It fell off. I can’t possibly express to you how disappointed I am in this boat.”

I checked the engine room, then turned off the engines. Everything seemed fine down there. The main salon and galley, however, were a wreck after the night of rolling. The contents of the refrigerator had spilled across the salon floor, which luckily was teak, like the deck outside, and could be cleaned. Dishes had flown out of the dishwasher and broken. Everything we had stowed under the salon desk had come loose.

The weather had become clear and sunny. The seas had steadily dropped, and by the time we made Gibraltar, they were almost flat.

I had banged my knee on something during the previous day’s towing attempts, and since then it had stiffened. By the time we began the tow, I was hobbling, and by the time we reached Gibraltar, I basically couldn’t walk. I wasn’t sure how the whole knee thing had happened.

As we entered the Bay of Gibraltar, the German captain and I were busy on the radio making plans. He would dock first and then a tugboat would moor us alongside. In the meantime, we needed to retrieve the items dragging behind. I hobbled as best as I could to help, but the first mate did most of the cutting, letting the crew member from Kiribati do most of the hauling, and the cutting was indiscriminate. By the time I yelled out, he had cut one of the kayaks free, which now was drifting out of the Bay of Gibraltar.

“You won’t do anything more on this boat without my permission,” I told him. “This is still my boat, and I’m still the captain.”

“No you’re not,” he said. “You can fuck off, as you Americans like to say. You’re going to bring me a nice income.”

“Income?” I asked.

“The first mate receives five percent, and the captain receives ten percent. That’s from the salvage claim. We also receive a bonus if the towing charges are more than the cargo from Kinitra.”

“You’re a criminal,” I said.

“The captain and I are smart,” he said, “and you are not. Poor little stupid American, out on the high seas. It’s a big world, isn’t it?”

As it turned out, that was to be one of the more pleasant encounters of the day. There is an outer wall of the Gibraltar harbor called Impound Island, which is where the larger arrested ships are kept. Enormous rusting hulks from third world countries, abandoned. Being towed past them by a freighter was like looking at my own failure, perfectly manifested. A dream and the empty hull left over when it dies.

Once the Birgit Sabban had docked, a tug pulled us close. My crew and Nancy and Barbara waved down at me, looking showered and well-rested. But before I could tie off, the man from Kiribati climbed onto my lifelines and leapt for the freighter. He caught the edge of the deck and dangled from the freighter’s side. I looked down at the thin strip of water sucking between our hulls. If he fell, he was most likely going to die. And I had no control over my boat. The other Kiribati crew and my crew on the deck of the Birgit Sabban rushed to help him, grabbing at his blue jump suit and the backs of his arms. A confusion of movement and yelling, but they pulled him aboard.

The German first mate standing beside me laughed. “He thinks your boat is cursed. Maybe he is correct.”

We tied off to the freighter, exchanged crew, and then the German captain informed me that the admiralty marshal of Gibraltar was coming to arrest the boat. My insurance company and the shipping company had not come to immediate agreement, so my boat would be put under twenty-four-hour guard, and I was responsible for paying for the guard. This was becoming so bad so fast, I decided to contact the law firm in Gibraltar that had set up my company and registered the boat.

We didn’t have a phone onboard, so I would have to wait until after I was arrested. While I was waiting, the German captain came by and handed me his cell phone with a call from my insurance company representative. The woman sounded friendly, but I told her I wanted to consult my lawyers.

“Why would you need to do that?” she asked. “Did you do something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “But I don’t like being arrested. I don’t feel well represented.”

“We are here to represent you. You must cooperate with us if you want us to consider coverage of your claim. We need a full written account of what happened, and we’ll send a surveyor to assess the damage. The boat will need to be hauled out. But first you must tell me what happened.”

“I look forward to working with you,” I said, “after I talk with my lawyers. In the meantime, if you could keep the boat from getting arrested, that would be a plus.”

Barbara was a lawyer, with her own firm in Colorado, and she agreed with this approach. “You have to be careful,” she told me. The boat was her asset, too, as one of the lienholders. “We’ll get through this, David. It will all work out okay.”

My crew were only slightly less anxious than the man from Kiribati to leave the boat, but we had to wait for the admiralty marshal. Nancy was the only one who would stay with me in the end, I knew. There’s an enormous comfort in knowing you won’t be left completely alone to wade through unfortunate circumstances. When I’d had problems with Grendel in Mexico, I’d been alone, and that had definitely made it worse. I knew that if and when I sailed out of Gibraltar again to cross the Atlantic, Nancy would be with me.

At the moment, Nancy was worried about my knee and made me promise we’d see a doctor as soon as possible.

When the admiralty marshal finally arrived, he was kind and apologetic. I was not personally under arrest, only the vessel. It would be moved to one of the marinas and placed under twenty-four-hour guard, with only the crew allowed to board. The documents I had to sign made it clear the boat was no longer mine, but was in the possession of the admiralty, so I asked about insurance.

“We will take out a temporary insurance policy today,” he said.

“And who will pay for that?” I asked.

“I’m afraid those costs will have to be recouped also, sir.”

The admiralty marshal could do nothing but apologize, and I didn’t press, since he wasn’t a bad guy. He posted a notice on one of our pilothouse windows saying the boat had been arrested, then left.

Only Queensway Quay, the crappiest marina in Gibraltar, could take us, and that was along a seawall, not an actual slip. I didn’t have a choice. The boat wasn’t mine anymore, and the marshal had required it be moved immediately. Queensway Quay arranged a tow, and I knew this would be part of my bill, too.

This towboat was small, about forty feet, with two crew on board. They came alongside and arranged a bridle at the bow, short trucking straps with a shackle. I wasn’t happy about how close the shackle was. It was going to bang against my bow.

“That’s all we got, mate,” the captain of the tow said.

I limped back to the pilothouse and hoped for the best. My crew cast off our lines and the towboat captain just took off. He hadn’t judged the wind or current or done anything to help us spring away from the freighter, so we were pulled along its side with our shrouds scraping, then past the bow at about ten knots, missing the next ship, moored directly ahead, by only a few feet.

“What are you doing?” I asked the captain on the VHF. “I don’t need any more damage. Try taking it easy and thinking a little.”

“I’ve driven towboats all my life, mate. I know what I’m doing.”

“You scraped us along that freighter and almost slammed us into the next ship at high speed.”

“Almost, mate. That’s the operative word here. Almost. No harm done.”

I was at the helm but couldn’t do anything without a rudder. I had tried to start my engines to assist with the tow, but they weren’t starting for some reason. I suspected the batteries were low, though I wasn’t sure how that could have happened. I would have to worry about it later. No one was allowing any time for it now.

The captain towed us at high speed, then abruptly stopped. He had to check something, and he and his mate weren’t even looking up as we drifted very quickly.

“Someone get on the bow and yell at him,” I said. “We’re going to run him over.”

I tried hailing on the VHF, but the captain wasn’t near his radio, so I followed Matt and the others to the bow. Sinking a towboat would probably look interesting. By the time I had hobbled up there, though, Matt had yelled and the captain ran forward to slam both throttles. He made it out from under my bow just in time.

“Christ,” I said to Matt. “When does it end?”

“It never ends, David. It’s a boat.”

As we entered the tiny marina, we were drifting to the side in current. The captain did a pretty decent job, though, of pulling us in a tight circle to place us against a high stone wall.

I was not happy about this wall. It looked as if it would smash us if there were any surge. I called Queensway Quay again on the VHF and asked if they had anything else, but they didn’t. Because of the boat’s size, this was the only space available in all of Gibraltar.

A thin guy came down the dock and warned us about surge. He lived on a sixty-foot tug parked inland from us on the same wall. “It comes in hard,” he said. “For just a short time, but it’ll knock the piss out of you.”

We were already using all of our fenders and spring lines, so he came back with some old tires that we roped up and hung over the side, too. A very friendly guy. Matt and Emi headed off with him, I think to share a pint. Nick went looking for a phone, and Nancy and I visited the marina office, asking again to be moved or to borrow some larger fenders, both of which they refused.

When we returned to the boat, Barbara wasn’t back, and the admiralty marshal’s guard hadn’t shown up, and I didn’t want to ignore my knee any longer, so we went looking for the hospital.

Gibraltar’s a gloomy place, always cloudy because of the rock. Nancy and I had grown oddly fond of it, mostly because of one restaurant pub called the Clipper, which serves heaping portions of comfort food. Chicken pie with mash and peas, that sort of thing. But I felt like an outcast now, unable to pay my bills, under arrest, invalid, brought back under tow when I should have been in the Caribbean.

We took a taxi up a steep hill and then had several flights of stairs. The hospital was small and grim, as they are everywhere except the U.S., where they are large and grim. The doctor was Indian. He prodded and rotated my knee, which made me yelp more than once, sending sharp pains all through my leg and into my stomach, and then told me it was just a nasty infection from the cut I had on my knee. If I had taken the time to apply a bit of Neosporin during the towing incident, I would have been fine. But of course I hadn’t even noticed the cut whenever it happened. He gave me a topical and an antibiotic and said I’d be walking normally in twenty-four hours.

We took another taxi back down to the harbor, and as I hobbled out to the dock with Nancy, Barbara rushed up to us. “You’re not going to like what you see, David,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I told the marina, and they’ve brought another fender, but the damage is already done.”

As we neared the boat, I could see that a twenty-foot section of the port rail had been bashed against the wall so hard the fenders had been ripped off and the steel bulwarks bent in. The teak rail had been smashed to pieces and the stanchions bent at odd angles. Paint had been taken off the hull in some places and bare steel showed through. We had been gone only forty-five minutes, and it was already calm again. It was incredible.

“Fuck,” I said. There wasn’t much else to say. It was much more damage than we had taken from the towing attempts.

The other crew came back in the next couple of hours, just after dark, and said similar things.

“Well at least it’s not my boat right now,” I told them. “It belongs to the admiralty, and the damage should be covered by their insurance policy. They’d better cover it. And where is this twenty-four-hour guard?”

Nancy and I sat in the pilothouse, which was a gorgeous place, with large windows, dark mahogany, and plenty of comfortable seating around two tables. I just wanted to sit for a while. The crew were gathering laundry and taking care of their own business. I knew I would lose them. It would probably take a month to work out this mess and get a new rudder, maybe longer.

“There are the engines, too,” I told Nancy. “I have to work on that tomorrow, figure out why they’re not starting.”

“I want to be back home,” she said. “I mean I’m not going, I’ll stay here with you, but doesn’t this suck?”

“It does suck,” I said.

We decided to get dinner at one of the restaurants on the dock. It would cost us at least $10 or $15 each, but what the hell. It had been an awful day. We met Barbara walking back from the phones, and she joined us.

“This is good,” Barbara said. “We need something normal. Just forget the boat exists. It isn’t there.”

“What boat?” Nancy asked.

“Okay, okay,” I said. We ordered and I drank some water and looked at the clean maroon tablecloth, the candles, the white cloth napkins, my water glass.

Then Nick walked up to us, holding the back of his head with one hand. “David,” he said. “I hit my head pretty bad. I didn’t know the hatch was open in the galley, and I fell down into the engine room.” He removed his hand from the back of his head and showed us the blood.

It was a bit much to believe, but there it was.

The restaurant called us a cab, and Nick and I went outside to wait. I told Barbara and Nancy to stay and have dinner. I made sure I had money, and I knew where the hospital was. While we waited for the cab, I kept him talking, making sure he stayed lucid.

“I’m not dead yet,” he said. “Head wounds bleed a lot. They look worse than they are.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But we need to be careful. We’ll wake you up every hour or so tonight, or whatever schedule the doctor recommends. And you have to keep talking, so I know you’re fine. Let me know if you feel dizzy or faint or anything happens to your vision or you feel like you’re going to fall.”

“Keep saying stuff like that and I might.” But he had his lopsided grin that was part of why we all liked him so much.

“Sorry,” I said. “I won’t let them take your organs until it looks pretty final.”

“Cheers, mate.”

I had him sit on the curb, so that if he fell it wouldn’t be far, and we waited. The cab was taking forever. Endless headlights and small cars zooming past on the narrow street, but no cab stopping.

“Well shit-o,” Nick said.

“Indeed,” I said.

I asked if he’d be okay for a minute, and he said he would, so I rushed back the hundred feet or so to the restaurant and asked them to call the cab again. When I returned, Nick was still fine, still sitting there.

“Your dad will never forgive me,” I said. First the trip on Grendel up the coast from San Francisco, a nightmare of seasickness and mechanical breakdowns, pounding for three days into fifteen-foot seas and thirty-five-knot winds just to get to Eureka, where Charlie and Nick wisely disembarked and took a bus. Then the paint had fallen off the hull this summer during Charlie’s Odyssey course. Now this. His son had taken a semester off from Oberlin to crew from Turkey to Mexico after I’d filled him full of tropical visions, and here we’d only made it to Morocco before losing our rudder, and then Nick had fallen ten feet onto steel beams just for icing.

“My mom’s the one who won’t forgive you,” he said.

“Oh great.”

“Just pulling the old leg, mate. The ’rents will be okay.”

The cab finally came and we made it to the hospital, where the doctor, a different one from earlier in the day but also Indian, said it would probably be fine. Some painkillers, an antibiotic, and if we wanted to wake Nick all night on coma alert, we could, but it probably wasn’t necessary.

Nick called his parents, I promised we’d wake him every hour, and we were back on the street.

“No more events tonight,” I said. “This day has gone on long enough.”

I WOKE NICK every hour that night, having trouble sleeping anyway. By morning I was a wreck, and it was going to be a busy day. I needed to let everyone know about the damage at the dock, meet with the surveyor from the insurance company, write a summary of events, meet with the lawyers, try to lift the arrest, make arrangements for hauling the boat and replacing the rudder, figure out why the engines weren’t starting, and chase down the loan from John.

It was the end of October and the loan still wasn’t in. It had been promised no later than October 15, and I needed it. Amber’s mistakes and the rudder incident had made things considerably worse. The $150,000 would still be enough to pay everything, including $35,000 in interest due to lenders, but without it, I would be lost.

The marina already knew about the damage, but I had to notify my insurance company, my lawyers, and the admiralty marshal. The marshal, I learned, had not yet taken out the insurance policy. He hadn’t gotten around to it. It had kind of slipped his mind. And according to my lawyers, it would be impossible to recover losses from the admiralty. They were a government agency, the main one for anything related to boats, so if they made a mistake, oh well. No one was going to enforce it against them. Same as when a government agency screws up in the United States.

This meant convincing either the marina or my insurance company to pay for a considerable amount of damage. As I sat in the plush offices of Isola & Isola, looking at legal texts on the shelves and the finely carved wood, I couldn’t help yearning for a life with some dignity and stability.

The two lawyers who entered and sat opposite me were well groomed and expensive-looking, while I sat in a T-shirt covered with stains from oil, diesel, paint, and rust. They were handsome and articulate. They had money and power, respect and important friends. They told me they would try to go after the marina, and all I could think of was what that would cost me in legal fees, and I had to ask about the fees, too, and express again that I was having a hard time financially, which was something I was tired of doing.

They read the summary of events I had written that morning for Pantaenius, my insurance company, including a description of the damage at the dock, and they told me again they would go after Queensway Quay, but I knew my only hope was to have this damage included in my own insurance claim, as part of the same event. The boat had been at the dock where the damage occurred because I’d had no choice of berthing because I had lost my rudder. It was all one sequence of events. But as I walked back to the boat to meet with the surveyor for Pantaenius, I wasn’t convinced. They could call it two separate events, making me pay the $3,000 deductible twice, or even deny the entire claim.

I met Nancy on the boat, told her my thoughts, and she said, “Well, look at the bright side. It can always get worse.” I couldn’t even laugh.

The surveyor arrived, a friendly and handsome man in his fifties named Nick Bushnell. Very cheery in a button-down shirt, slacks, and a leather jacket. He was carrying a clipboard. I had done nothing wrong, but I was afraid anyway, as I suppose all people naturally are around insurance adjusters. I wondered whether I could be found negligent in some way that would invalidate my claim. I was afraid to tell him about the hydraulic ram coming loose, for instance. The ram coming loose was as simple as a loose screw, even if it was an enormous and specialized screw, and why hadn’t it been checked and tightened before heading out to sea? If I was found to be negligent, I would lose the boat and much more. I couldn’t possibly afford to pay for the tow or the salvage claim or the repairs.

“I know you’ve been through an awful time,” Nick said. “But I just need to hear what happened and take note of the damage to the vessel.”

I began with the sound of the rudder breaking off and told the story from there. I tried to help the insurance company by detailing how the German captain had lied and endangered the crew and vessel. Nick asked why I had abandoned ship, and I gave my reasons.

Nick listened carefully and took notes. “Sure,” he said periodically. “What else could you do?” He sounded reassuring, and I hoped he was sincere.

He asked questions about each of the towing attempts, the tow back to Gibraltar, the kayak that was lost in the harbor, and the damage at the dock. “For now I want to make two lists,” he said. “The damage that occurred before arriving at the dock and the damage that occurred afterward. That’s really a shame the admiralty didn’t act as they were required. You’ve had an awful bit of luck, mate. We’ll see what we can do about that.”

“I’m hoping it can be viewed as one event,” I said. “So that I don’t pay the deductible twice. It seems to me that it was the same event, since I’m here at this wall as a direct consequence of losing the rudder.”

“Yes, I can see that. I can understand the argument, and I can try to put it to Pantaenius that way, in a favorable light, especially since it seems to me you’ve acted to the best of your ability throughout the ordeal to limit the damage. It’s often the case that there’s consequential damage after an event, and anything you’ve done to limit that argues in your favor, I would think.”

I was pleased to hear this. He seemed to be taking my side.

“The one thing I’m still in the dark about,” he said, “is how this rudder came off in the first place. You’ve said it was unskegged, and that certainly makes it weaker, but I have to believe they would have used the right-sized post for it, and I’m not sure why that post would have sheared off. We’ll see more once the boat comes out of the water, but can you tell me anything more about why it might have come off?”

This was the moment I had feared. I couldn’t hold back the incident with the hydraulic ram any longer. “Well,” I said. “I don’t know why either, and I also want to see what it looks like out of the water, but I think it must have been a combination of factors. We were moving fast through high seas, about eleven knots with both engines at 2200, and I think the seas were about twelve to fifteen feet at that point. I don’t remember exactly.”

“That’s fine,” Nick said. “I’ll be looking up all the weather records. I have a friend at the RAF base here.”

“Great,” I said. “So I think it was the stress of that, combined with the lack of a skeg, and then the safety on the hydraulic ram failed, too, earlier in the night, and we had to put the emergency tiller on and reattach the ram, so it may have fatigued then, too.”

“The hydraulic ram became detached from the rudder post?”

“Yes.”

“Can we take a look at the ram?”

We went below and looked at the ram and the damage the fitting on the post had done to the wood. I felt sick. I was afraid this was going to invalidate the entire claim.

“Now how did that come off?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know. It’s not supposed to. That piece is supposed to lock.”

“And how long was it off?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes. It’s hard to tell. It was kind of a panicked time.”

“Yes, I can imagine. But you were able to get it back on in those seas. Did you hear any other sounds while you were doing that? Anything from the rudder?”

“It was banging a bit. I think its top edge must have hit against the hull, limiting how far it could swing. I imagine we’ll see marks when we’re hauled out.”

So now I had confessed everything. I only hoped Nick and Pantaenius would be kind. Nick took some more notes, then had me turn the helm both ways while he watched the rudder post. He came back up to the pilothouse, made some more notes, told me he’d try “straight away” to arrange the lifting of the arrest and the haul out, then left.

Nancy and I heated some cans of soup for lunch and sat in the pilothouse staring into our bowls as we ate. The crew were helping to clean the mess from the tow, but they were also spending quite a bit of time on shore, which was fine. They were frequenting Dad’s Bakehouse and the Clipper and other comfort spots. At the moment, it was getting windy and rainy, and that’s always when food in a warm, homey pub sounds best.

After lunch, I tried again to start the engines. They wouldn’t turn over, and by now their batteries were low. I was tired and didn’t feel up to the project, but I decided to shop for a twelvevolt charger to give a direct boost to the start batteries. That would be a good backup to have on board anyway.

Nancy and I walked a long way in our foul weather gear. Half the length of the country, in fact, to Sheppard’s chandlery in Marina Bay. But we found what we needed, and the price wasn’t marked up as high as usual. This was a rare find, perhaps even a mistake on their part. We snapped it up quickly and left.

I charged the starboard engine for quite a while, tried it with the boost and still didn’t get it to turn over. So I went down to the engine room to inspect. No visible sign of problems on the starters, batteries, or connectors. I couldn’t think of what else to check, so I just started checking everything, and when I looked at the oil in one of the engines, I found the problem. A terrible problem that I’d had before and hadn’t thought was still possible. The oil was creamy, which meant saltwater had gotten into the engines, siphoning back through the exhausts.

I was so frustrated I started yelling, which made Matt, Emi, and Nancy come down to the engine room. “The engines are full of salt water,” I told them. “That’s why they won’t start.”

“Oh no,” Nancy said. “Not again.”

“We have to drain the oil,” I said, “then remove the injectors and blow the saltwater out. Then we have to change the oil a million times and run under load at the dock with the fill caps off and our lines doubled, which we actually can’t do because of the fouled props. Goddamnit.”

I was demoralized during this time, pushing myself to get through each part of each day. Nancy encouraged me to remember the good parts of my last few years.

“Look at me,” she said, and I looked up and she was beautiful and it was a comfort to have her with me. “You’ve changed people’s lives. Think about Pete, and Dave, and others who care more about their writing now than anything else. Think about that guy who quit his job to go sailing, and the people who decided to retire early. Think of the great friends you have now that you met through the trips.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Seriously, David. It was a unique program you set up, and you worked hard, and this will all get better. And think of all the places we got to see, too.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ll quit moping.” I did feel lucky and grateful to be with her.

I was helped also by Nick Bushnell. He managed to get the arrest lifted, and he convinced Pantaenius to accept the damage at the dock as part of the overall claim. He also found a yard in Spain that could haul us, in Sotogrande, about fifteen miles down the coast, inside the Mediterranean, and he arranged the tow to take us there. His help was an unexpected kindness, a great gift.

Sotogrande has a beautiful marina lined with pastel buildings. A large country club development, one of the exclusive golf and marina communities along the Costa Del Sol. Several tenders were waiting and helped the tug maneuver us to a stern tie along the inner quay. We couldn’t go directly to the slip under the 150-ton travelift, unfortunately, because there was a waiting list to be hauled out. Nick Bushnell impressed upon me the need to visit the office several times each day to make sure I was hauled out soon. “You need to keep after the Spaniards a bit,” he said.

Senor Guido, the yard manager, was likeable and mild-mannered, in his early forties and a bit plump. I explained my situation to him and he sympathized. My boat was also larger than any other sailboat the yard had ever hauled, if you considered its weight and beam, and it needed a lot of work done quickly, all covered by a large and reputable insurance company. This made it attractive business. And I was constantly in his office, just saying hello, so that none of the other captains could get around me. I was hauled out within three days, which Nick Bushnell said was a new record. If I could be repaired and back in the water within three weeks, I’d make the crossing to Mexico in time for all but the first charter.

When the boat was finally parked on the pavement, we could see the prop shafts bundled with dock line. Amazing they had still delivered enough power to maneuver up to the liferaft. On most boats, attempting to use the props with line around them would have bent the shafts, but these were very thick.

The rudder was completely gone. Just an inch or so of steel rod sticking out from the bottom of the hull, its edges uneven from having been torn off. Nick Bushnell examined it and said there was no way of knowing exactly why it had done that. For the repair, the new rudder could be made in the yard, but the post, which would need to be solid Aquamet 22 or some other high-tech stainless steel, 3.5-inches thick, would have to be custom-made in Algeciras or another city.

The challenge now was to get the repairs done on time. The shops in the yard were independent. They paid a commission to the marina, but I had to contract separately with the metal fabricators, the painters, the carpenters, etc. Each shop was busy, and the proprietors, each an oddball in his own way, had to be wooed.

The workday here was not what I was used to. It started at about nine-thirty at the local Café Ke for breakfast, which meant coffee and almost an hour of shooting the breeze. Then actual work from ten-thirty until two. Then lunch from two until four, then work again until five, six, or whenever they happened to feel like stopping. Every two or three days there was a national holiday and no work at all.

For the first couple of days, until I figured out this schedule, it was nearly impossible to find anyone. Endless walks back and forth across the yard, chasing shadows. When I finally caught on and appeared at Café Ke at ten one morning, it was like a revelation. Absolutely everyone was there, all in one small room. In half an hour, I was able to circulate to everyone I needed.

My break from the daily antics of the boatyard was to go to Puerto Banus with Nancy. Puerto Banus is one of the spots where the wealthiest people in the world gather. The harbor is tiny and filled with expensive yachts. The narrow, short road along this waterfront has become a car show. A Mercedes, Porsche, or BMW doesn’t mean anything here, except the rarest models. German practicality run over by the extravagant waste of British and Italian models. We saw Bentleys — not one but several — Aston Martins, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. A few token Americans, such as the Shelby. We always enjoyed the show, and the fact that the drivers looked unconcerned, as if they weren’t parading. We found the one or two reasonable places to eat, and after some food and a stroll, we’d hit the Internet café.

Two things were becoming clear. First, there was no way the boat would be finished in three weeks. It would be more like six weeks, probably, so I would lose all my crew. Second, I would have to fly to California for a week to put my business back together. Amber and her friend Heather, whom she had basically forced me to hire part-time, were messing up everything, and they were both about to bail for the big bucks at a dot-com, so I needed to hire and train someone new. The dot-com thing was annoying. Heather was straight out of an unimpressive college, with zero experience, and somebody was going to pay her $50,000 to start. I had made $27,000 as a lecturer teaching full-time at Stanford. Amber, who couldn’t even pay bills correctly, was going to be a product manager and make even more.

MY SIX DAYS in California were extremely rushed. The first night back, I met with Amber and Heather.

Our office was just one room in a two-storey building in Menlo Park, but it was big enough, and it was clean. Heather had done a lot of filing. She and Amber showed me what she had done, and it became clear that all she had done was filing, and I saw that she had filed documents related to my pickup truck in four different folders. “Nissan,” “Truck,” “David,” and “Insurance.” I had paid a thousand dollars or so over the past month for unnecessary and poorly executed filing.

Amber and Heather were both young. Amber about twenty-three, maybe, and Heather probably a year younger. They were acting like schoolgirls caught not having done their homework. It was odd. I was running a business. This was my life. It wasn’t an amusement. But I could tell that less than complimentary comments about me had been the staple in this office for some time.

I was going through bills with Amber when we came across one small one, for only $700, that had been paid late, after three written notices.

“I asked to have the small bills paid on time,” I said. “Especially ones like this related to marketing materials.”

“I know,” Amber said. “I meant to pay this one, and he called several times. But I just forgot.” Then she giggled. She actually giggled, and Heather, who was standing in the doorway, had to suppress a giggle. I learned a couple of years later that Amber was a stoner, so I have to assume now that this giggling was marijuana.

“Well it says here he’s going to report me to credit agencies if it’s not paid by September 1. But it looks like it wasn’t paid until late October.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what happened.” And she smiled.

I looked at her, and I couldn’t figure out how things had gotten this bad between us. “This is my credit,” I said. “It’s not funny.”

“Look, David. You weren’t here. I’m always having to juggle bills because you don’t have enough money. I’m tired of it. Now you get to do the juggling.”

“You mispaid bills by $48,000 in one month,” I said. “And you let me be reported to credit agencies for small bills that we could have paid.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all done now. And it’s late. We’re outta here.” She and Heather left.

I sat in my office under the fluorescent lights that night and finally just put my forehead down on the desk. I had been out of the country most of the time, but Amber was a smart, educated person, a Stanford graduate who had needed a job after her marriage engagement was broken off, and I was a reasonable and obviously trusting employer. I just didn’t understand.

I spent every waking hour that week in the office. I went through all of our records and updated QuickBooks, having to call Amber several times a day because records were missing or entered incorrectly. She hadn’t recorded deposits, for instance. I could find a deposit on a bank statement but had no way of knowing which three passenger payments were included in it, and she had kept no record at all. Taxes were going to be a nightmare.

I also tried to save our winter charters. I made a lot of phone calls, but the list was too old. These were potential passengers from a month or two earlier who had never received a brochure in the mail or a follow-up call from Amber. By now, they had made other plans, booked other vacations. She had let my business die.

I wasn’t convinced my new employee was going to be much better. If I’d had more time and other choices, I wouldn’t have hired her. But I didn’t have more time or other choices, and I had to have someone in the office. So I simplified our sales and customer service protocols, producing a series of sheets which told her exactly what to do at every step in all aspects of the business. The only important element I had to rely upon her for would be sales. I couldn’t return calls from the middle of the ocean.

I still didn’t have John’s loan, and I needed it desperately, so I wanted to drive down to Hemet in Southern California to see him, but he wouldn’t return my calls, and I didn’t know exactly where he was living. I had talked with him a week earlier, and he had told me then that he was delayed because the bank was slow to clear funds out of the trust. But he had assured me he was still giving the loan.

I did manage to pull in two more small loans, $5,000 and $10,000, but I was getting frantic. I was supposed to pay $35,000 in interest on December 1, a few days away, and I didn’t have enough money.

I returned to Spain trying to remain hopeful. But in my week away, the contractors had really slacked off, so I was in a panic trying to get everything done. My new crew were arriving in a few days and I planned to set sail in a week for Mexico. Everything had to be finished immediately.

So many things had to come together, it was overwhelming. I really didn’t think it could be finished on time. Further delay would mean canceling more winter charters, and possibly losing my crew again, neither of which I could afford.

The welders stayed until after 8 P.M. every day, and I had to pay overtime and tips and be there through all of it to pat their backs and do some of the work myself and keep them going.

The carpenter was high-maintenance, a young guy with long curly hair who felt he was an artist, but he did replace the deck piece and aft rail. The painters touched up the side of the boat and bow, and a few days before we were to launch, I actually had a new rudder and post in place. I still didn’t have a skeg, but the fabricator assured me it would go quickly, and it did. He brought out some pieces of steel, welded them to the hull, welded the attachment, and there it was, ugly but burly. A rudder that looked a little small to me, smaller than the last one, but which certainly would never fall off. Nick Bushnell and the naval architect approved it for Pantaenius, so that I would still be insured, then some bottom paint was brushed on and we were ready.

My new crew had arrived a few days earlier and were working hard painting bilges and such. One of them was my friend Adriana, a Mexican lawyer I’d met at Stanford who was my partner on paper for the Mexican corporation. She was going to help me obtain permits for winter charters.

The last day was an ugly rush. The bill for the marina went higher than expected, the various contractors tacking on little bits here and there in outrageous ways, so Nick Bushnell was scrambling to get more money from the insurance company and I was scrambling to get enough of my own money to cover my part. I ran completely dry in my two checking accounts and on all of my credit cards and all of Nancy’s cards. I finally had to borrow about $150 from my crew, otherwise the marina wasn’t going to let us leave. The whole thing was embarrassing.

But we did leave, and right away, the steering felt wrong. Just coming out of the travelift and crossing the marina, I was having trouble going straight. Even allowing for greater lag time in the steering, it wasn’t consistent. It felt random. I desperately wanted to hide the problem from Nick, so that my insurance would remain intact, but he could tell. Once we had cleared the channel and were on our way to Gibraltar to pick up the new anchor chain, he tried the helm.

“It does seem to be a problem,” he said. “You can probably manage it, but if you wanted to go back, I could try to present that to Pantaenius.”

“I’m screwed financially if I don’t keep going,” I said. “I can’t afford new crew or to cancel my winter charters.”

Nick raised his eyebrows and shrugged. He was my friend. He was doing everything possible to get me to Mexico where I could bring in some income. That was my highest priority, to bring in some money to pay my bills.

I kept testing the steering and decided we could make it to Mexico. It wasn’t a safety or seaworthiness issue. It was just a convenience issue. It was difficult to steer. I had to stay right on top of it, and even then, I sometimes couldn’t keep it straight. The crew would be frustrated, and our crossing time would be slow, probably six weeks, but the rudder would stay on, and we’d get used to it.

“I think I need to continue on,” I told Nick. My crew was listening, and they looked worried, but they weren’t saying anything. I had never wanted to reach this point, where I was forced to go to sea. I believed a captain should take a boat to sea only when he felt it was ready. But that would have meant giving up on the business and screwing all of my lenders and Stanford Continuing Studies and teachers and students. I had made a lot of promises.

We rounded Gibraltar, into the bay, then I had to turn ninety degrees to starboard to enter the channel for the marinas. It was hard to get the turn to begin, then I swung too far to starboard, then tried not to overcorrect, but it wasn’t turning back at all. We were heading for the rocks. So I turned farther to port, and then we swung too far in that direction. We swung four or five times before straightening out, as if I had never driven a boat before in my life.

By the time we were done taking on our 450 feet of chain, it was after dark, and I decided it was stupid for us to sail for Mexico without a good night’s sleep. The crew appreciated dinner ashore, and we all turned in early.

We left just after daylight. The crew tried hard to steer straight, but it was close to impossible. The rudder seemed to have a mind of its own, with no pattern at all. They were good crew, but they had to say something.

“It’s inconvenient,” I said in response. “But it’s not a safety or seaworthiness issue.” This was Gibraltar to Cancun, almost six thousand miles on the track through St. Lucia, a trip that would take at least six weeks, sailing twenty-four hours a day. They were dreading the experience, and I couldn’t blame them. But I didn’t feel I had a choice.

Then, about an hour and a half into the trip, we heard a terrible grinding sound from one of the engines and it lost power. I took the helm, yanked the throttles back to neutral, and went below.

Nothing was visible on the engine, and all its gauges and fluids checked out normal. I had a crew member at the helm run the engine at different revs, and the sound happened again at high revs, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The engine bucked when it made the sound and was clearly under enormous strain. It could have been a bent shaft, but both shafts were turning smoothly. It could have been the starter engaging for some reason, but that seemed unlikely. It could have been something deep in the guts, I supposed, a piston somehow sticking or rusted bearings around the bases of the rods, but I didn’t know that part of the engine. It could have been something wrong with the transmission. I checked the transmission oil, but we were getting bounced in seas, and it was difficult to see much. The dipstick was scalding and had to be unscrewed with an eighteen mm socket, then pried out with two fingers, but in the look I was able to take, it looked fine.

I went back on deck and took over the helm. “We only need one engine,” I said. “Even if we can’t figure out the problem with the port engine, we can still make it on the starboard. We were going to run on one engine most of the time anyway, to save diesel, and of course we’ll try to sail as much as possible. And we can have the port engine checked out when we’re in the Canaries a few days from now. But I realize this sucks, and the steering sucks. I just need to think about it for a few minutes.”

I gave the helm to someone else and went back to sit on the poop deck with Nancy.

It was sunny and the wind and waves weren’t bad. It seemed like we could just go, and we’d make it. We had all our food, and one engine, at least, and the crew would be all right.

“I want to keep going,” I said. “But I think it would be a stupid decision. We should have both engines, and we should know what the problem is, and the steering is awful. It will be so frustrating, the crew will probably get off at the next port, in the Canaries. And then we’ll be stuck in the Canaries, with no cash and no crew and the insurance probably unwilling to cover the problems. The truth is, even if the steering and engine were fine, I don’t have any money for diesel along the way or to pay the crew when we arrive. I’m screwed. John’s loan just hasn’t come in on time.”

Nancy didn’t say anything. She looked unhappy.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll tell the crew we’re turning around. The worst would be if we got caught in a storm with steering that wasn’t right and we lost control of the boat. That would be worse, I guess.”

“This is bad enough, though,” Nancy said. “You’ll have to cancel classes, and hire new crew, and you won’t be able to pay the interest you owe…It goes on and on.”

“I know.”

“What a nightmare,” she said.

So we turned around, running on one engine. I radioed the marina in advance and let them know I had one engine and a new rudder that wasn’t steering correctly, so they gave me an easy outside slip.

After docking, I called Nick Bushnell and went looking for Fred the Perkins dealer, but Fred had just left for New Zealand. As my crew waited around for the next two days and did some work repainting bilges, I tried my best to get a quick repair. Fred’s mechanic and the mechanics from Sheppard’s and another mechanic all looked at it, but the engine wouldn’t repeat its problem. We ran it hard at the dock, in gear, with triple dock lines, but we couldn’t get it to make the sound. We did a compression test, which turned out normal. Everything else checked out normal, too. The engine problem remained mysterious, as did the rudder problem.

These problems were nothing, however, compared to my financial problems. I was calling John several times a day, leaving messages on his answering machine which, by the end, were basically pleading. I told him I was going to go under if I didn’t get the loan. I suggested giving the loan in stages, or even just giving a smaller loan.

I was at the Internet café for long stretches each evening, and under advice from Rand, my principal lender, I had sent an e-mail to all of the lenders asking for a restructuring of the loans. I told them that with the setbacks from the war in Kosovo, construction that was delayed and had gone over budget, repairs from the loss of the paint and the rudder, loss of crew, and a promised loan that had not yet materialized, I wasn’t able to pay the first interest payments that were now a week overdue. I had offered an interest rate that was too high and a payback schedule that was too quick if anything went wrong. I now needed $87,000 within the next week, at a minimum, to prevent American Express from taking legal action against me. And I had other bills. I was asking the lenders for a restructuring of the loans at a lower interest rate over a longer period of time, and I was asking for new loans to cover my bills now to keep the business afloat.

It was an unpleasant letter for the lenders to receive. They wanted more info, which I gave, and Rand gave me $24,000. We had previously agreed that, because he and Lee planned to use a lot of charter time on the boat, they would pay $1,000 per month toward operating expenses over a two-year period, so he was accelerating all of those payments into one lump sum. It was remarkably generous. But none of the other lenders seemed likely to give or loan more money. As several of them put it very clearly, they didn’t want to risk throwing good money after bad.

I finally received a short e-mail from John, titled “Nut-Vice Judas.” He had praised me on previous occasions for running a unique and risky business, for “putting my nuts in the vice” to make my dreams happen. In this e-mail, he said he couldn’t give me a new loan because of various bills and such. It was difficult to believe, however, that $3.5 million had evaporated in a few weeks, so that less than $150,000 was left. Amber must have told him not to give me the loan. That was the only explanation Nancy or I could believe.

These were grueling, shameful times. Rand suggested bankruptcy. I took offense, at first. Bankruptcy seemed unimaginable. But when no new loans came in, and Rand canceled his $24,000 check to cut his losses, which bounced a lot of checks and left my Citibank account $11,000 overdrawn, and my previous boat Grendel still didn’t sell, even at a reduced price, and my new employee wasn’t selling any new trips, and I couldn’t even get my engine fixed, I had to admit, finally, that I had failed. I took late night walks around Gibraltar, the streets empty and hollow, what was happening to my business and life shielded by disbelief. I had liked who I was — the founder, teacher, and captain for these educational charters. A man with self-made freedom. Now I was someone else, someone who had failed and was going to cheat a lot of people out of their money, plain and simple. A guy who didn’t pay his debts, a man with no integrity. I told Rand and my new employee that I was going to have to put the boat up for sale here in Gibraltar and probably file for bankruptcy, unless it sold right away for a high amount. I would write a note to the lenders explaining.

But my new employee jumped the gun. She told all of the lenders and passengers right away that I had filed for bankruptcy. She even put it on our answering machine message. Just the fact that I was considering it was supposed to be confidential, and this was outrageous. I was very angry.

One of the lenders sent me a note that she had been considering lending more money, a significant amount of money, and she was amazed and upset to learn from our answering machine that I had already filed for bankruptcy. I responded to this and other long e-mails with my own long e-mails trying to explain, but the damage had been done. I had failed in the business. I didn’t want anyone to throw away more money. On top of this, my new employee had handled the situation in the worst possible way. I hated every minute of trying to deal with this mess. I really wanted to die.

I sent the crew home, buying their tickets and paying the marina bill with the last money I had. I could leave the boat cleared of expenses, but that was it. I didn’t have enough money left over even for my own plane ticket home. I had poured everything into the business.

I arranged with Nick to bring the boat back to Sotogrande, where the insurance might be willing to pay for repair of the engine and hauling of the boat to modify the rudder. Or they might not. In any case, the marina there would cost less per day than Gibraltar, and the boat would be more likely to sell, and the repairs might get done. It was the best I could do for the lenders. If they wanted me to return in January to work on the boat, to fix it up for sale, I would do that too.

Rand paid for my flight home, and Nancy’s parents paid for hers. On the morning of the day we were to fly out, we moved the boat from Gibraltar to Sotogrande with two crew Nick had lined up for us. We paid them with the food from our refrigerators and freezers.

It was a sad last trip on the boat. It had been such a grueling, pointless struggle: getting through construction and financing and launch in Turkey; then the charters with the various problems, including water in the engines and paint falling off and the emergency haul-out; then the quick trip across the Med, the rudder falling off, and ten hours at the helm for the towing attempts, followed by six frustrating weeks in the yard, trying to get the Spaniards to do the work, afraid all the time of the bills I couldn’t pay; and now these new problems with one of the engines and the new rudder, with bankruptcy as the whipped cream and cherry. I’d had enough.

AFTER PAYING FOR my flight home, Rand set up an appointment with a bankruptcy attorney, and he gave me cash to get through the next few weeks. If he hadn’t done this, I don’t know how I would have gotten by. I didn’t have even $10, cash or credit.

This bankruptcy attorney gave us some helpful information, but he was not up to the task of a complicated bankruptcy. I soon met with another attorney, recommended by another of my lenders, and he seemed capable. After a lot of discussion, I decided to file a personal bankruptcy under Chapter seven, with the three corporations (California, Gibraltar, and Mexico) listed as personal assets. I didn’t have the option of reorganization, because my debts, both secured and unsecured, were too large.

Bankruptcy law is very generous to the debtor. I might be allowed to keep Grendel, for instance, my forty-eight-foot boat that still hadn’t sold. I could claim a $50,000 homeowner’s exemption even though it was a boat, and this, combined with the $34,000 bank mortgage and $10,000 in private loans secured against it, meant that the bankruptcy trustee could not make any money from selling, so he most likely would consider it not worth the effort.

In the end, I hoped that most of my lenders would be repaid from the sale of the boat in Spain, and I would keep Grendel (with its mortgages still intact) and $4,000 in IRAs. I would still have other private debts, however, which the court would discharge but which I would have to repay anyway. I owed my mother $60,000, for instance, and my sister $11,000. I would also need to repay money that I was borrowing from Rand to get through the bankruptcy and to get my life back together. I would end up at far less than zero net worth.

And then I ran into new problems. I called the attorney general of California’s office because I was not able to refund passenger deposits for the winter charters. I had collected only $14,371 in deposits, from six passengers, but I had no cash to repay even this amount. I had a California Seller of Travel license, however, and I had contributed yearly to the Travel Consumer Restitution Fund as a part of this ongoing licensing process. I thought my passengers might be able to make claims against this fund to get their money back, and I wanted to make sure they received their money, so I was calling on their behalf to find out how and where they should make their claims.

After several voicemail messages back and forth, I spoke over the phone with a deputy attorney general who told me very directly that he was going to come after me. He said that every time I had used passenger deposits to pay for diesel, crew, slip fees, food, or any other operating expense, I had committed embezzlement, a felony offense.

He claimed this on the basis that I had two corporations, one in California and one in Gibraltar. The California corporation had a Seller of Travel license, had collected the monies, and, in his opinion, was a Seller of Travel and not a “carrier.” The Gibraltar corporation owned the boat and was therefore the carrier. A carrier can legally use deposits to pay for a boat’s operating expenses, whereas a Seller of Travel cannot.

I realized at this point that I had made a mistake. I should not have called, and my passengers had no right to make claims against the fund. I had the Seller of Travel license only for when I leased boats, but in this case I had not leased a boat. I had used my own boat and was a “carrier,” like a cruise line, rather than a Seller of Travel, which is basically a travel agent.

I tried to explain this to the deputy, calmly. The Gibraltar corporation was owned by the California corporation and had been set up only to allow flagging of the vessel. It had no bank account, no employees, no income or expenses, and no office. The California corporation could not have used the passenger deposits to buy the trips from the Gibraltar corporation, because there was no one to pay, and the Gibraltar corporation could not have paid for operating expenses because it had no bank account or employees. In summary, the California company was the “carrier,” I had not broken any laws, and my passengers had no right to make claims against the fund. I apologized for making this mistake.

The deputy attorney general said no. Just said no, flying in the face of common sense and reason. It was hard to know how to respond. He understood what I was saying, but he still claimed that the company with no bank account and no employees was the company I had to pay for obtaining the charters, and that if I had ever paid operating expenses with money from the California company, it was a felony charge of embezzlement and I was going to jail.

It was just before Christmas, sunny and bright outside. I was trying to think of some other simpler way of explaining this to him. Surely a deputy attorney general of California was capable of basic reason. I was getting scared. Then he told me the only thing I could do that would keep him from pressing charges would be to repay in full the $14,371 I owed to passengers. I explained that I had no money at all, that everything had gone into the business, because I had in fact not embezzled anything, not even my own savings and wages from teaching, and this was why I had to file for bankruptcy. But he said I had to pay or he would press charges.

I made my mistake with him then. I didn’t raise my voice, and I didn’t get angry. I just asked, in a very humble tone, what happened if I contested this, because it didn’t make sense. I felt I was allowed at least the question, to find out what my options were, but this was a mistake.

I began calling attorneys immediately. I also called one of my lenders, who happened to be a deputy attorney general of California in a different office. He thought the charges were nuts, but it was clear he wasn’t going to step into the case and interfere, either. Apparently it was bad etiquette for one deputy to step in and question another deputy’s case. So I found an attorney, a guy named Jack, who specialized in this area and had in fact written part of the current Seller of Travel Law. He represented cruise lines and travel agents. And he knew this deputy personally.

Jack met with me on Christmas Eve. Rand was lending me the money to pay his fees. Jack said this deputy was known as a hothead and it was too bad I had questioned his authority, even obliquely. He would take it personally and make sure he nailed me, even if it was a waste of time and not in the best interests of the citizens of California. On the very day I had spoken with the deputy, Jack had put a case on his desk involving about $150,000 in real fraud. A company had sold a lot of trips to Baja California with no intention of ever providing the trips. After they collected the deposits from consumers, they packed up and left town. The consumers filed police reports. Jack presented the case for prosecution, and the deputy decided not to take it. He took mine instead.

This, Jack said, was to make his numbers look good. He could win the case against me easily. I had called the AG’s office myself, basically turning myself in, and although the case against me had zero merit and was a departure from the AG office’s own practice of “following the money” to determine who the carrier was, the deputy knew that I was declaring bankruptcy and didn’t have any money. This meant I wouldn’t be able to pay the $20,000–$25,000 to defend myself in court. He would have an auditor review my books, and he would file hundreds of counts of felony embezzlement against me, for every time I had paid an expense to run a charter. Fighting this would be too expensive and high-risk for me, since if a jury didn’t understand the case I could end up in jail.

I was speechless. This deputy attorney general was letting $150,000 in real fraud slip by and coming after me instead, on the basis of an idea that didn’t follow even his own practices. And he could get away with it because I was poor.

Jack dictated a letter to him that day, explaining everything and asking him to drop the case. Jack also used the occasion to further some of his own interests, adding a garbled paragraph about the history of Seller of Travel Law. The inclusion of these vague bureaucratic threats, combined with the fact that Jack had trouble arguing my case clearly (I had to revise many of his sentences to make them understandable), did not inspire confidence. By the end of the day, I realized Jack was a hack. I was capable of making the case more clearly. But of course I didn’t have the personal relationship with the deputy, and I wasn’t a celebrated lawyer or one of the authors of the Seller of Travel Law. I had to take what I could get.

There was another issue we discussed that day, which was my consumer bond. The Travel Consumer Restitution Fund was really a secondary fund. My primary protection was a $10,000 bond through Redland Insurance Company. When I contacted Redland to find out how my passengers could make their claims, Redland responded by immediately canceling my bond and hiring a collection agency to beat the shit out of me. They refused the claim and also sued me for $12,000 to indemnify them against claims.

So Jack dictated a letter to these folks, too. The California attorney general and Redland Insurance Company were making my bankruptcy and the loss of my business seem like the easy parts.

For more than twenty years, I had felt doomed to repeat my father’s suicide. I had believed that eventually I’d hit a low point, a time when all had gone wrong and I was under pressure, and suicide would be waiting for me then, something irresistible. It really had felt like doom, something that inescapable. But what I realized now was that I’d fallen as low as I could imagine falling, overcome by feelings of fear, guilt, shame, self-pity, and persecution, and still there was no thought of suicide. My mind just hadn’t gone there. I was not my father, and I no longer had to fear repeating his suicide. This was a wonderful and unexpected gift, a release, and made a difficult time far less difficult.

After this meeting, I asked Rand for a loan for the $14,371. I didn’t want to spend my life in prison on several hundred bogus felony counts, and I didn’t have the money to fight the charges.

Rand had already done more than pay my flight home. He had also given me some cash to get through the end of December, set up the appointment with the bankruptcy attorney, and even promised me a job. A few weeks before, when I had still been in Gibraltar, he had told me he wanted to set up a website that would review and rank crewed charter companies— a consumer guide for vacations on the water. He said he would hire me for a year to travel the world, interview charter companies, evaluate their services, and write the reviews. It was incredibly generous, and the thought of it definitely helped me get through a hard time. But he wasn’t going to loan me this new money, even as an advance against my pay. He didn’t want his loans to be never-ending.

Everyone knew I was about to file for bankruptcy, and I had no credit whatsoever, and I needed to find a $14,371 loan.

It’s hard to get people to loan you money right before you file a bankruptcy that will discharge that loan. Who on earth would do it? But what kept me trying was this thought: Could a jury of ordinary folks be counted on to understand that the Gibraltar company was set up only to register the vessel? Wouldn’t it be pretty easy to paint a picture that I was doing something dirty in setting up these foreign corporations? Most Americans instinctively distrust that kind of thing.

Then Rand relented and said he would loan $10,000 if I could get the $4,371 from someone else. It was to be an advance against the Redland Insurance bond, for a few weeks. Rand and his wife Lee were saving me again, and I was unspeakably grateful, but I still needed the other part of the loan.

For the next two weeks, as I filled out my bankruptcy schedules, tried to clean up nearly impossible taxes after Amber’s lack of accounting, and worked on a business plan for Rand, I tried to find a loan, but there weren’t many places to turn. Finally, I called Charlotte Calhoun, my last hope.

Charlotte Calhoun was the custodian for a very large family fund that gave gifts to various causes. She didn’t owe me anything, and there was no compelling reason for her to give me a loan. She was in her early sixties, I think, and had been a student in one of my Continuing Studies courses in creative nonfiction. Her memoir, which took place in China and was set against the background of her husband’s long illness and eventual death, was beautifully written and moving. I had encouraged her, and I had offered to keep looking at her manuscript after the course ended. She had also come on a charter in Turkey in the summer of 1998; afterward she set up a yearly $10,000 gift to Stanford Continuing Studies to be used to pay the salaries of visiting teachers on my trips. I had never asked her for a loan for the new boat, because I knew she would not be interested in that kind of thing and I hadn’t wanted to offend. But I called her now, and I told her the situation.

Charlotte said yes. I felt terrible asking her, but she was extremely gracious about it. She wanted to loan the full $14,371, in case the bond never came through, and she wasn’t worried about repayment. I could repay her if it became convenient. She thought keeping me out of jail on trumped-up charges was worth the money.

I was so grateful, I cried. None of the awful events of the past months had made me cry. But kindness — generosity that isn’t obligated in any way — is much more affecting.

Charlotte’s loan saved me. The money was put into a trust account with Jack, and the deputy called off his auditor in San Francisco. The deputy also sent a letter saying the AG’s office wouldn’t take action against me as long as the money went to all the passengers and I didn’t break the law. This last clause allowed him to still come after me at any time on the same bogus charges, which was his way of keeping me quiet and the reason you’re not learning his name here. Jack, whose name has been changed to show his worth, was supposed to get an admission that the charges were inappropriate, but he failed.

I had to give up on the $10,000 bond from Redland Insurance Company, also. The deputy attorney general had promised to go after Redland for the bond money, since by law they should have had to pay, but of course he didn’t follow through. They were still suing me for $12,000, however, to indemnify the bond amount and to pay their collection agency. They put marks on my credit history and threatened me in every way they could. So I just listed them in my bankruptcy papers and gave up.

By this time, toward the end of January 2000, the business idea with Rand had become more than just an online consumer guide to yacht charters. We had decided to go for a full boating portal. There was no good boating portal on the web yet, and vertical portals, which focused on bringing together vendors and consumers for a particular industry, were the hottest item for new venture capital investment. Rand’s brother-in-law, Tom, was a venture capitalist and CEO of a start-up, formerly the CFO of Safeway and other large corporations, and he was willing to help us out. I was writing a business plan, and he was going to review it and help us through revisions and research until we were ready to present our plan for funding. Rand, in his characteristic generosity, was willing to split the founder’s shares with me, fifty-fifty.

I clung to this opportunity. This was before tech stocks crashed, and the opportunity looked very good, especially compared with anything else in my life. I put the plan together by the end of January, after about three weeks of working around the clock, and it was a good first stab. Rand’s brother-in-law Tom was impressed. The total market was over $50 billion, the magic number, and the industry was fragmented, with tens of thousands of small businesses and great inefficiencies. It was a perfect example of a market in which a portal could gain dominance, both on the business-to-consumer and business-to-business sides. My plan was for an infomediary, a business that would consolidate information and facilitate transactions, trying to capture only a tiny percentage of a huge volume.

I worked long hours polishing this plan for presentation to investors. Timing was everything. If we were too late, we’d get nothing. And then, on February 8, 2000, the new issue of Boating Industry International featured an article on Internet portals for the boating industry. They had surveyed the field, doing exactly the research I had done, and much of my business plan was in that article. They confirmed that all of the current companies approaching the opportunity were falling short. But the article also listed some new sites that were about to go up, and one of these presented a problem. When I went to their site, which hadn’t been up two weeks earlier, I read about their management team and funding. They were six months ahead of us, and that meant we were sunk.

I asked Tom about other options, about where I could go next, and he suggested approaching them for a partnership. Since the Internet game was a race, in which companies could not develop quickly enough no matter how fast they moved, we might take care of some aspect of the portal in cooperation with them.

So I called the CEO of this dot-com, and he was interested, but he was going to be out of the country for a few weeks. We would meet when he returned. This delay was not good, because Rand was going to throw in the towel, on my recommendation, and things were moving so fast in the industry that even three weeks later, our position was no longer quite as strong. So I kept the appointment but turned it into a job interview.

I was hired, and Nancy took a job at carclub.com, just a few blocks away along the waterfront in San Francisco. We were both happy defectors from teaching, working crazy hours but feeling like it was going to amount to something.

The bankruptcy went well, also. I filed, had my hearing, then needed to wait three months to find out if any of the creditors would file objections to the discharge. It didn’t look like anyone was going to do that. My private lenders were remarkably gracious about the whole thing, telling me they had made the investment with their eyes open, knowing it was a risky business. Only Amber was nasty about it, which was ironic, since she was the only person other than me who could be considered responsible for the failure. She and Heather were trying to sue me through the Employment Development Department, and Nancy and I received a lot of e-mails and phone calls from Amber, but none of this had any effect.

At the bankruptcy hearing, I was questioned for about forty-five minutes, compared to the usual five, because my case was unusual and a bit complicated. But I had nothing to hide, and I even unintentionally entertained the crowd. Oohs and aahs as they heard about each new disaster in the business. The captain who had dumped Grendel near Guatemala, the rudder incident off Casablanca. It was certainly a story no one had heard before, and obviously I had done everything in my power to prevent the eventual failure. It still felt awful, though, to be in court skipping out on my debts. Bankruptcy may be legal, but it doesn’t feel right. I was just hoping the dot-com would succeed and I’d be able to pay everyone back.

The dot-com did well at first. We received a much larger round of funding, and no one believed that the stock crash that began in April 2000 would continue for very long. Everyone expected recovery within a year or less, including the venture capitalists. In hindsight, this was silly, but it was what people in the dot-com world, including me, believed.

Our dot-com was more traditional than most, since our industry — boating — was conservative. We had older managers and dressed at least business-casual, and we didn’t have a foosball table or any other games or wild parties. We just worked eighty-hour weeks and then hundred-hour weeks for five months straight to launch the site. And I found my way to advance within the company.

Though I was hired in business development, I became the “contract guy,” and everyone had me review legal agreements before negotiation or signing. I was interested in contracts because they revealed that business is based, finally, on nothing more than trust and hope, despite what we otherwise believe. What holds the business world together is a house of cards. We didn’t have an in-house legal department, and I was one of only a few people in the sixty-five-person company who could read carefully. So I began reporting directly to every member of our executive management.

Near the end of the summer, I was promoted to work directly under the CFO. I would be responsible for all legal agreements for the company and its subsidiaries. I would call our several law firms when I had questions, but I would do as much of the work myself as possible, to minimize our legal fees, since by this time the company was trying to reduce expenses in a difficult market. My change in position was announced at a company-wide meeting after my work was praised, and I was happy until I found out they wanted me to take on these greater responsibilities without giving me anything in return. They weren’t promoting me to director level, just changing my title to manager of contracts and business development, and they weren’t offering more pay or more stock options.

The CFO was condescending to me. He was a good boss, generally, but now he told me I needed to walk before I learned to run. I hated the clichés of business. Thinking in business is extremely lazy. If I hadn’t needed the job to repay my mother and Rand and all my other creditors, I would have given him an ultimatum, but instead I settled for additional stock options, which I knew would be worthless, and the promise that I would advance in rank and salary soon, most likely in a couple of months, after my formal review.

So I went to work even more determined to show I deserved to be raised up. I tackled a company we had acquired. Within three weeks, and after one visit up to their offices in Seattle, I showed they had more than five hundred clients not under contract, legal notices on their website that were meaningless since they had never incorporated and weren’t a legal entity, and no protocols for who would review or execute contracts. They were also breaking the law every day by copying material from other websites and encouraging their clients to do the same. It was an intellectual property nightmare, and an extreme example of mismanagement and lack of due diligence. The general manager did not understand even the basics of business law. As I pointed out the problems to him, he had difficulty understanding, and he took no responsibility.

I reported back to the CFO and he said go get ’em. With help from our law firm, I rewrote all of the company’s contracts and legal notices and instituted due diligence. I reviewed the original acquisition of the company and followed up on licensing and stock issues. By the time I was through, I had greatly reduced our liability and put through an enormous volume of legal work while at the same time reducing our monthly legal bills from $45,000 to $8,000. In my final report, though, our president asked that I soften my exposure of the general manager’s culpability. I was basically forced to do this. Instead of telling me by e-mail, which was our usual way of operating in the company, he came down and sat with me personally. He made it clear that if I didn’t soften my exposure of negligence, I might lose my job. I gathered that some of the lack of due diligence in the original acquisition of the company might have been his own fault.

So I had to change my report, and I moved on. In addition to my work with our subsidiary, I wrote every new contract the dot-com needed for various vendors, contractors, and employees. I reviewed, revised, and negotiated contracts that came in from our largest partners, from development contracts to eBay. I substituted for in-house legal, negotiating directly even with the infamous AOL. I also wrote, reviewed, and negotiated European contracts for our new European office.

At my review, I argued again that I should be promoted to the director level and given a raise. But the CFO kept putting me off. He did this by never getting around to finishing my review. These were hard times in the dot-com world, with stock prices falling ever lower, and he needed to bring in another round of funding. He was failing at this, and all of his other duties were being put on the back burner. The truth, though, is that he didn’t stick up for me. I had a lot of inside information in that company, so I knew that a few other people were getting raises because their executives were putting in a pitch for them. At these same meetings, my boss was not putting in a pitch for me. Instead, he was just relying on me to cover more and more of his work as he focused on getting new investment.

In December, we had massive layoffs and I couldn’t help but think that many good people were losing their jobs because of mismanagement by our executives. They had paid a ludicrous amount for our subsidiary, our chief strategy officer was a nincompoop who had spent hundreds of thousands on content we weren’t even using, the general manager who should have been fired was promoted instead, and the company building our website was using kids straight out of college who billed us at more than $200 per hour. These were the excesses that brought dot-coms down. The CEO of Scient, the company building our website, was reportedly making $100 million a year. I hated seeing good people lose their jobs because of these excesses.

I kept my job because I was saving the company almost $40,000 a month in legal fees, plus doing much of the executive management team’s work and running the Product Store, and I was being paid only a little more than $5,000 per month. Our CEO pretended he was in a similar situation, since he wasn’t being paid a salary, but at the same time he was scooping up entire percentage points of stock in the company, two percent here, two percent there, striking deals influenced by his position as chairman of the board and by the fact that his wife was a partner in one of the two large venture capital firms that were funding us.

I grew to truly dislike our CEO. Usually, when things are going wrong for a large group, you can’t point the finger at just a few people, but with our CEO, president, general manager, and chief strategy officer, it was not rocket science to figure out what went wrong.

The bankruptcy court had listed the boat in Spain for seven or eight months now, but it hadn’t sold. This wasn’t a surprise, really. I had told my lenders the boat would sell only if it was fixed up, with a fresh coat of varnish and a thorough cleaning, inside and out. No one buys a boat that hasn’t been maintained. I had offered to do this work for free if they paid for flights and materials, but the lenders didn’t want to spend more money. By now, the varnish would be gone, the wood warping, the galvanized rigging rusted, and there might even be corrosion inside the hull.

In mid-November, the bankruptcy trustee made a final offer to the secured creditors, an offer which was not at all in their best interests, since the role of any bankruptcy trustee is to protect unsecured creditors (those whose loans haven’t been registered as liens against the vessel). The trustee also indicated that if the secured creditors did not agree to this plan, he might just close the case and abandon the asset back to me, the debtor. So my secured creditors asked the trustee to close the case as soon as possible. Once the boat was abandoned back to me, they would still have their liens, and the unsecured creditors would be gone.

I began work right away on a new deal with my secured creditors. In return for a much lower interest rate (the minimum federal applicable rate instead of fifteen percent) and much longer term (six years instead of three, with the first two years deferred), I would repay the full principle plus interest calculated at the new rate, and give charter time, and invest all of the money needed to put the boat back into service.

I tried not to rush into this. I tried to stop and think about what I was doing. I didn’t have to go back into business, after all. I didn’t want to wreck Nancy’s life, either. But even when I would pause and try to think, it seemed that the decision had already been made. My mind would just stop, unable to go any farther. Perhaps this was the unconscious control my father’s death still had over me. Or perhaps I would have been tied to the sea even without his death. But I also couldn’t let my private lenders take a loss. And I wanted the boat and that life back again. That life, unlike this one at the dot-com, had been self-determined. It had meant something.

My plan was to charter in the Virgin Islands and nowhere else. Once I fixed up the boat and sailed across the Atlantic I would simplify and streamline the business. No more complicated licenses and permits in various countries, no office in California, no permanent employees, and no educational charters. I would charter only through brokers, who sell the boat for a week and do all of the sales and follow-up with their clients. For the first two years I would make no payments on the loans, and for the next four years I would be paying on only $185,000 in loans at the lowest legal interest rate, since Rand and Lee had agreed, in their characteristic generosity, to have their $250,000 loan paid after the other loans, beginning in six years and ending at ten years. It was a very attractive plan, a rare second chance.

The difficult part was coming up with $100,000 to put the boat back into service. I owed $20,000 to the marina in Spain and would need to pay for legal fees, a new insurance policy, a new paint job, new standing rigging, new varnish, equipment overhauls, a new dinghy and outboard, etc. It was a solid hull, made of the highest-grade steel and only two years old, but all the cosmetics would have to be redone. The dot-com had promised a bonus, and I needed to make sure I received it. I also needed to sell Grendel. Nancy and I began working on Grendel immediately, at the end of November, to have it ready for sale when the bankruptcy trustee officially closed my case. Nancy would also take out credit cards to help fund the new business.

At the dot-com, I was switching my focus. They were still jerking me around about my bonus and a promotion and raise. They had been promising all three since late July, and now it was December and my boss, the CFO, was fired along with much of the rest of the company. He was going to stay for another month, to finish a few things and because new investment is less likely if the CFO has just left, but then he’d be gone and I’d have even less chance of getting the bonus or anything else.

The entire dot-com era was an anomaly for employees. Because of stock options, employees for one of the few very narrow windows in history were able to get back more than they put in. But that was over now. Stock prices were down, and companies were treating employees with no regard whatsoever.

On the weekends, instead of working for the company, I was fixing up Grendel for sale. When I finally listed it in January 2001, a bad time of year in a worse economy, a flood of buyers came to look at it right away. I was offering a solid boat at a reasonable price. On Saturday of the first weekend, Michael and Eva Pardee came to look at it, and they fell in love. Two days later, they put in an offer for the full asking price. Michael was also interested in what I was doing with the ninety-foot boat. He volunteered to spend a month in Spain helping me get the boat ready, and to crew across the Atlantic.

Everything was going well. In addition to selling Grendel and setting up a new company in Gibraltar (I didn’t want more foreign corporations but actually didn’t have a choice in this case), I had signed on with a clearinghouse that would hold our charter calendar for brokers, and I had found a broker who would sell trips on our boat before seeing it. This was unusual. Most brokers wait until they’ve seen a boat at one of the boat shows before they’ll book it, and we wouldn’t be at the shows until November. This broker sold our two holiday charters — Christmas and New Year’s — right away, at $21,500 for each week. He was an eccentric South African in Florida, with a grand way of speaking, and though our initial negotiations were contentious — he wanted to be our clearinghouse as well as our broker, and he wanted a twenty percent commission on trips instead of the usual fifteen percent — I was firm and he finally relented. On each of these $21,500 weeks, after broker commission and the clearinghouse and operating expenses, we would net more than $15,000.

I had worked hundred-hour weeks for the dot-com to the point of physical illness, but now I used a lot of my time at work to arrange repairs for the boat, which I renamed Bird of Paradise. First I would need to fix the mysterious problems with the port engine and steering. I talked with Nick Bushnell, the surveyor in Gibraltar, fairly often now, trying to get the boat hauled out and repaired before I arrived. But the engine did not get looked at, and when the time finally came for the yard at Sotogrande to haul the boat, after a delay because their travelift needed repair, they tried but gave up. They said my boat was too heavy. Their lift had been de-rated during the repairs and wasn’t strong enough now. They had tried, and they weren’t going to try again.

Even though there were some frustrations, I was generally happy making these arrangements for the boat; I was grateful to have a second chance. It was also a happy time because I was thinking about marriage with Nancy. We were partners moving into a good future together. This was her dream now, too, and she was putting everything on the line for it. Once Grendel sold, I had the money to buy her a ring and invited her for an evening cruise on a small powerboat along the San Francisco waterfront. It was fairly warm for mid-March, and very clear and calm. I pulled up beside a small fisherman’s chapel at Fisherman’s Wharf and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and we celebrated with dinner on the wharf.

We decided to have the wedding soon, on July 21, because there were only a few small windows of time available in the first year of our charter schedule.

The next two weeks were busy with planning the wedding and making last-minute arrangements for crew and repairs and insurance, but it all went smoothly. By April 3, when I boarded the plane with Michael Pardee for Spain, everything except the hauling of the boat had worked out perfectly.