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

PART THREE

THE BOAT DID not look good. The paint job was even worse than I remembered, and rust stains were everywhere. The stern ladder was not out, so we had to board the stern of the next boat and climb over at midships. Standing on my own deck, I was filled with despair. The deck was stained with rust and all of the wood on the huge pilothouse was gray and warped. The wooden rails were completely dried and cracked.

Michael stood on the deck of the other boat, handing our luggage over, and he shook his head. “I don’t know, David,” he said. “Maybe we should just fly back home.”

The feeling of regret was overwhelming. Everything I had done to go back into business. Four months of arrangements. I had already paid almost $30,000 to the marina and the lawyers, and I had signed the new promissory notes.

But the deal was not quite final. The sale and registration had to go through one last office in Gibraltar, so if I was willing to take the $30,000 loss, I could get out of it. I would need to think about this.

In the pilothouse, the loveliest part of the boat, we could see that some of the varnish had been preserved. But not all of it, even on the inside. For a year and four months, salt spray had blown over the breakwater behind us into the pilothouse and down below into the main salon. The throttles and engine panels were rusted and pitted, and both tables, including the beautiful one for sixteen, were weathered gray. Even up high, on the inside of the ceiling, salt crystals had chewed into the varnish. All of this wood would need to be sanded bare and revarnished. Some of it would need to be screwed down and planed where it was warping.

Down below, in the main salon, a damp salt grime coated everything. In every stateroom, too. Lots of mildew. But at least the varnish was okay in the staterooms. And they were beautiful, big staterooms, all solid mahogany.

The engine room was the most depressing. The marina had not kept the water pumped as they had promised, and it was about three feet deep, just reaching the bottoms of the engines. The water had not reached the starters and alternators, luckily, but my two electric discharge pumps — big expensive pumps — were completely submerged, as was the pump for the saltwater toilet system. And it wasn’t just saltwater in here. Somehow oil had spilled, leaving thick black sludge three feet deep throughout the entire engine room, which was twenty feet wide and fifteen feet long, with steel stringers that had many surfaces, every inch of which would need to be cleaned.

Michael and I began a truly awful month, a month in which I hated every minute of every day and we worked without taking any time off. He was doing this without any compensation, just as a favor to me. And he stuck with me through all of it and even remained cheerful.

In his early fifties and well-off after a lifetime of hard work, Michael had to endure what became a series of privations. We couldn’t use the toilets, since the saltwater pump for flushing needed to be replaced. We did have running water, but only a limited supply. We had no heating, and it was cold at night. We had no blankets. We had very little electrical power, since I was still cleaning and drying out the entire system before switching it on.

While we worked, Nick Bushnell was helping set up an appointment at El Rodeo, a marina in Algeciras, across the bay from Gibraltar. The boat needed to be hauled out for rudder modification, bottom cleaning, and new bottom paint. Like Michael, Nick wasn’t charging me for his help. He said he just wanted to see it work out for me this time. True generosity. He also found a guy named Stan who would work on the engine room and bilges, and two women to do laundry and clean the staterooms.

Cleaning the engine room was the worst job. Because oil scum floats, most of the water underneath could be pumped out. But that still left about a foot of sludge and all the scum on the walls going up to the three-foot mark. Stan and I went down into it with buckets and mops, filling container after container.

We were covered in black slime. Our tennis shoes were slipping in it, and we had it on our faces and in our hair. The batteries were low, so the lighting was dim, and the water was cold. We mopped and sponged all the angles and surfaces of far too many steel stringers and ribs for about ten hours straight, and when we were through, nothing was clean yet, but the thick sludge was gone.

The next day we used Jif, a household cleaning product that cuts through grease and oil like nothing I’ve ever witnessed. But it also has ammonia in it, and our engine room blowers weren’t working, so the fumes were intense. We suffered from dizziness and headaches throughout the day.

Both sailboats I’ve owned have probably shortened my lifespan. I may have some significant problems later in life from all the particles and fumes I’ve inhaled. But each time, I’ve felt I had to just keep going, because of money and deadlines. I had to get this boat ready to sail across the Atlantic in less than a month. The broker in Florida had just booked another charter for us, at the end of July. Nancy and I would be running this charter less than a week after our wedding.

The day after Stan and I finished cleaning the engine room, he began cleaning the aft bilge area and I dismantled the two big discharge pumps that had been submerged. I brought them up on deck, onto the large table, and Michael, when he was done installing his ham radio, took them apart, piece by piece, and tried to clean them out. Every day I brought him a new item. The two discharge pumps, the two engine room blowers, the saltwater toilet pump, the two extra alternators. All needed drying and cleaning, which meant taking apart and putting back together. Most of them would also need repair in a shop in Gibraltar.

After a week a slip opened up and I was able to move the boat from Sotogrande to Gibraltar. We made slow time toward the eastern side of the Rock, our bottom and props covered with a year and a half of growth, the props most likely encrusted with barnacles. The steering was difficult. But in Gibraltar the facilities were better and now we could get our work done. Fred the Perkins dealer inspected the engines first thing the next morning, finding what looked like toothpaste in the port transmission. A lot of saltwater had gotten into the oil somehow, and it had congealed over time. This was mysterious, because I had checked the transmission oil when the problem first occurred, and the mechanics who had tested the engine over the next week had all checked and somehow the problem hadn’t been visible. I still don’t understand.

The good news was that it was a cheap and easy repair. I had budgeted $3,000 for engine repair, but changing the transmission oil a few times was only going to cost about $25. It might also solve my rudder problem. If the transmission was engaging and disengaging randomly because of saltwater in its oil, that could throw off the steering.

I also found a shop that looked at my discharge pumps and engine room blowers and other electric-motor problems. All of the equipment was fried because of the salt.

In the rush to get the boat ready on time, many things did not go smoothly. Stan, for instance, the laborer I had hired, overheard me one day when I complained about him to Michael.

“Nothing ever gets done unless I’m here to make sure it gets done,” I told Michael. “It’s always been like that, in every country. I go out for a few hours to take care of pumps and see the lawyers and buy some engine spares, and when I come back, Stan has been wasting his time, doing stupid shit I didn’t ask him to do. When he’s finished with one project, he doesn’t think. He doesn’t remember what I asked him to do next.”

Right about then, I heard Stan clear his throat from down in stateroom number three. He had overheard everything I had just said. I was so tired and frustrated and ashamed, I couldn’t even do the right thing and apologize. Instead, I took off and ran some more errands.

When I returned, Stan was gone and Michael said I should try to find him in one of the waterfront bars. I went looking but couldn’t find him, so I just went back to work. Then, after I had installed the manual bilge pump and was on my way to see Fred, I ran into Michael and Stan sitting at a café. I sat down with them and apologized.

Stan was gracious about it. He was in his late fifties, a guy with bad teeth and a weathered face who had known a series of failures all his life and needed a job but didn’t need to be insulted. He leaned back in his chair, smoking, and told me, “It’s all right. I appreciate the apology, but it’s all right. I can be thick-headed sometimes, and I didn’t remember what you had asked for.”

“No,” I said. “It really is my fault. You work hard, and you do good work.”

“Well thank you,” he said. “I know how it is. Usually you’d hire a couple of Moroccans to do this sort of work, I know that. Working for this pay. But I pride myself on trying to do a good job anyway, and I like to feel at the end of the day that I’m someone, too.”

I felt awful. His disgusting racist comments aside, he still didn’t need to be treated like this by me. I treated him and Michael to a good dinner and some beers, but I felt like human garbage. Stan was living on an old twenty-foot boat in the worst marina in town. At the moment his boat was chained to the dock, impounded for overdue marina fees. And here I was insulting him. The whole situation was lousy, and I didn’t know how to fix it. Stan continued working for me, and I was careful never to insult him again, but the damage had been done.

I also began to feel ashamed of the boat. New megayachts were pulling up every day, many of them heading for a big Italian boat show, and we were tied to the back of their dock, an embarrassment with orange streaks down our hull, galvanized rigging that was completely rusted, and warped gray wood on the pilothouse. I was insulting everyone, rich and poor alike.

The work was getting done, however. I was leaving all cosmetic work for Trinidad, despite the embarrassment, but I was completing the functional work now, before the crossing.

Our last week was busy. We had four volunteer crew arriving, and they all worked hard. We installed the new rigging wires, inspected the sails, stenciled the new name on the stern, cleaned and organized the galley, took care of plumbing problems, mounted new pumps, and even bought a washer/dryer and stowed it in the engine room.

Five more crew members arrived at the end, including my uncle Doug. I was excited to have Doug on board. We had been out of touch for more than ten years after my father’s death, but had since reconciled. Now I really enjoyed seeing him, and this was our chance to spend some time together. I was also hoping to hear more about my father’s commercial fishing venture, since Doug had been his crew.

The night before we left I didn’t sleep well. I was thinking about my decision to go back into business, to try the boat a second time. The bankruptcy had separated me from any liability; I could have walked away. I had chosen to try a second time because I didn’t want to leave my lenders in the lurch and because I thought everything could work out. It was a simpler business, and I had much easier financing. But now that I was here, working on the boat, about to sail across the Atlantic, I didn’t feel the dream. The boat and the business were recoverable, but not the dream.

WE SET SAIL on May 2, on a sunny morning with light winds. We unfurled our jib right away, setting the tone for a trip we hoped would be more sailing than motoring. The channel was much calmer than during my previous attempts, and we made it past the final lighthouse on the Moroccan coast without incident.

That night, however, in about the same position where I had lost my rudder a year and a half earlier, the wind and waves came up and slapped us around. Then we heard a loud metallic booming sound in our stern area.

“Not again,” I said. Everyone woke up and came on deck, and we began checking. We weren’t spinning, so we still had a rudder.

“It could be the port transmission,” I said. “If it has saltwater in it again and slipped. Or maybe we hit something. I don’t really know.”

My crew stayed calm, and we checked everything. It was the middle of the night, no moon, and the wind and seas were building. I checked the oil in the port transmission, felt for heat on the shaft glands, listened from the aft stateroom for sounds of a bent shaft as we turned at various revolutions, checked the hydraulic ram under the bed, tried the handling and speed and gauges at the helm. But everything checked out fine.

“We must have just hit a big piece of wood or something,” I told the crew.

I went back to bed, but it was too weird. To have the same type of sound at the same time of night in the same place in the ocean, a year and a half later. I sometimes felt like Oedipus, running and running and escaping nothing.

We continued on to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands without any problems. The three and a half days underway were entirely pleasant. And we had a good time in Las Palmas. There are several long stretches of beach with hotels and restaurants built along a boardwalk, and one night we all became pleasantly lost in the twists and turns between bays and beaches. We had a feast at one of the restaurants, confusing each other’s orders, gorging on tapas and pizzas and entrees. We had too much wine and were talking too loud and poking fun at each other. Then we got lost again and straggled back to the boat.

There were also some interesting people to meet on the dock. My uncle Doug and I were busy the first day just cleaning up the engine room, because during the trip a fitting on the copper return line for one of the diesels had leaked and diesel had sprayed everywhere. Our many trips to the waste disposal took us past an old wooden schooner that was being restored, and we met an interesting captain. He had restored almost a dozen of these old boats. By the time we left, he had lent us a drill bit (which we broke and replaced with bottles of wine), we had swapped navigation books, and I had tried unsuccessfully to steal his best carpenter. All in good fun.

Leaving Las Palmas, we were sailing. The wind was good. But that night it increased significantly.

We furled our genoa first and headed into the wind. We let the main halyard go, but the sail stuck high in the track. Seref had attached the track in two pieces, and the place where the two tracks joined sometimes jammed the cars. So here I was at night in seas and wind, the sail whipping wildly, making sounds like pistol shots, and it wouldn’t come down.

I tried pulling the sail from the aft end, which meant climbing onto the roof of the pilothouse, a dangerous spot in the wind and seas. Two of my crew were at the halyard, pulling it up then releasing it, over and over, but that wasn’t doing any good either. Finally I went forward to the main mast and climbed fifteen feet off the deck, to where I could grab onto a fold of the sail. I held on with both hands, let my feet dangle above the deck, and started yanking downward with all my body weight and strength while my crew kept tightening and releasing the halyard.

Even as I was doing this, I realized it was unsafe. The deck was rolling, it was dark, we were being blasted with saltwater and howling wind, and I was dangling above the deck, yanking on something that would eventually give way. There were winches and other metal fittings I might hit on the way down, a lot of things to land on that weren’t soft. But I just did it, frustrated with the stupidity of having a main sail that wouldn’t come down.

And then the sail fell, all in an instant, and I fell fast and hard, clipping my knee on a stainless fitting on the mast. I rolled on the deck, threw out my arms to find something to hold onto, and found a bulwark for the forward seating area. I paused, wondering how hard I had hit, and then stood up. The knee was sore, but I could stand and walk, so I was okay. But I look back and cringe at how stupid I was, taking that risk.

A day and a half later, in predawn darkness, we slowed and waited in a large channel outside our port in the Cape Verde Islands. This was Africa. I had passed within sight of several African ports on my way across the Mediterranean eighteen months earlier, but this was going to be my first time actually landing in an African country. The guidebooks all warned to stop for fuel and nothing more. The crime rate, especially theft from visiting yachts, was supposed to be horrific.

The wind made it cold out in the channel. The waves were up, too, as they always are in channels, and the crew was ready for a break from the rolling, even if only for a few hours. We continued to wait, though, because I didn’t want to enter this unfamiliar port at night. The charts for it were not good, and I had no other knowledge to draw on.

The sky went from black to a very dark blue, then gradually lightened. We began to see the outline of mountains, the eastern sky behind them a paler blue. And then we could see land masses around the lights of the port, a large rock in the center of the bay and, as we approached slowly, the long line of a breakwater down low.

I tried the VHF, but no one responded. It was early on a Saturday. We crept closer and found ourselves in a little bay that was shallowing, with no fuel dock in sight and a few rocks just sticking up randomly, unmarked, so I turned us around, back toward the commercial docks, and decided to tie up next to the ships.

A man came jogging down the dock, waving for us to pull alongside. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, so he was just a local guy looking for a tip, but I was willing to take whatever help I could find.

We docked in a strong surge, greeted with a lot of words that were in English but difficult to understand, and I went ashore with my new guide and our passports and boat papers.

This town looked like a Mexican port town, the nearby hills sharp and dry, a desert with banded rock. Along the waterfront was the main road and boardwalk, with some palm trees. The town itself very sleepy. A few historical buildings and shops that were painted but most of the rest needing some work. A lot of concrete. What was different, of course, was the entirely black population, and all the details of their daily lives, from the stands at each corner selling thimblefuls of a local alcohol that looked thick and sweet to the vendors from other African countries spreading their wares on the sidewalks. Carved animals and rough iron products. I followed my guide but was distracted all along the way, wanting to soak up as much of this new place as I possibly could in a few hours.

My guide did not have a high reputation in the town. At the first stand we passed, he tried to get one cigarette, since cigarettes were sold individually rather than by the pack, and he pointed to me as credit but still was refused. I didn’t intervene. I was going to pay him $20 at the end of the day, which was more than the local wages for a week’s work, and that was good enough. I didn’t want to become entangled in any local dealings.

It was hard not to, though. My guide was telling me his life story and introducing me to people, and the government offices weren’t open yet, so we had some time to kill. We went into a large market building, where several dozen women stood at their stalls selling grains and vegetables, local honey and nuts and fruit and the local alcohol. Several tried to get me to try this stuff, and I kept resisting, but finally one woman basically poured a shot-glass of it into my mouth, which annoyed me considerably. The drink was both sugary and very high proof.

The fruit and vegetables were beautiful and strange, things I had never seen. The women were beautiful, too. One in particular I must have stared at twice, when I first walked in and when I walked out. She looked at me in a very hostile way that seemed to double as an invitation. It was something I didn’t know how to read.

I did get back on track for finding the diesel. My guide had acquired several things by now, a small bottle of the alcohol and some nuts and a few cigarettes, trading on what I would pay him in the afternoon, and he was not letting up on the stories, either, most of which I didn’t understand. I did understand that he was not living with either of the two women he had married, and that he had several children and wanted to do great things for them. He had also gone to sea, working on a small local freighter that was in constant danger of capsizing. He spoke of crooked politicians and a murder that had taken place on the docks, and he spoke of the lush, green tropical mountains that were just beyond the ones we could see from the town. I would have to come back, he said, and he would take me into these mountains. They were beautiful, not dry and barren like the ones I could see.

I came to like my guide, not for anything he had done, since he was obviously of low repute and a bit shifty, with a life that had been in ruin for years, but because he was a reminder that we are constantly inventing and reinventing ourselves, and he put no limits on how good or generous he could be in other circumstances. I believed him in this. I, too, had dreams of being generous, of giving to my family and friends if I ever made it, of helping people who needed help. But I was always behind budget and struggling financially, the business always not making it, so at this point I’m sure most people regarded me warily. I wanted to prove them wrong. I wanted to be a good and generous man, and I think this man, my guide, wanted the same things. Probably neither of us would ever realize the dream, but that didn’t make the dreaming any less pure.

The open mid-Atlantic was not quite what any of us had expected. Overcast and muggy, with very little breeze. We kept our sails out almost the entire eleven days, but we also had one engine on.

Every night, the sky cleared and the stars were brilliant. But then every morning, the haze moved in again and the skies became overcast. The seas were also monotonous, never calm but never rough, holding at no more than ten feet.

The enjoyable part of the trip for me was spending time with my uncle. At first this was while playing cards and during mealtimes and watches at the helm. But then, halfway through the trip, we began sanding the outside of the pilothouse, getting a jump on all the work to be done in Trinidad. I led with a beltsander, tearing down through old varnish, gray wood, and warped seams with rough, fifty-grit belts. My uncle followed using an orbital sander with eighty-grit disks, the first step toward smoothing the surface.

We baked in the sun, covered in reddish dust, and discussed the possibilities for the business. Schools of flying fish skimmed the water. The haze sometimes cleared away later in the afternoon, leaving a sky deep blue and enormous. It was the way we had first known each other, when I was a child and we had hunted or fished with my father, out in a wild land so beautiful, whether it was Alaska or California. We had fished for king salmon or stood at the tops of ridges scanning for bucks or wild boar. This would become one of those times.

But now we understood each other better. This business was my chance to escape wage labor and never getting ahead. Doug had seen my father try making a living on the water, too, had worked alongside him, and though it hadn’t panned out in the end, Doug considered the venture a success because of the experiences they had shared. It had been wonderful and strange.

One night in the Bering Sea, their compass and electronics had shown them spinning in a slow circle, though the rudder was dead center and they were making way on what should have been a straight course. There was no explanation for it. They tried the helm and the rudder was working, but they were slowly being pulled into a vortex. The only possible explanations, it seemed, were supernatural. It was night, of course, and they were a hundred miles from land and the seas were building. That’s always the case when something goes wrong with a boat.

Finally my uncle went out on deck, just to see, though he had no idea what he was looking for. He staggered back and forth in the rain and seas and then saw one of the stabilizers pulled out at a sharp angle, the entire boat heeling that way. They were snagged on something, out in the deep ocean.

Imagination suggested sea monsters and lost cities, but when my father stopped the engines and the boat slowed, they found the stabilizer caught on a large buoy that had dragged them in circles. It was a navigational buoy that had come loose and was drifting. Now it all made sense, but those minutes of not knowing had been unforgettable. Mystery in the world. The two of them out there alone, wondering if their lives would soon be ended.

What I enjoyed most was the new portrait of my father that was emerging. For at least fifteen years after his suicide, I had been very angry at him, hating him for abandoning us and for killing himself in such a dirty, shameful way, blowing his own head off. But now, after my bankruptcy and all of my other smaller frustrations and failures in this business, I could see a man struggling, a man who had been almost exactly my age, who had shared a similar dream of wanting to be able to invent his own life, instead of going every day to a job he hated, a man drawn to the same frontier.

My uncle had also been angry at my father, and for the first ten or fifteen years after my father’s suicide, he fought constant depression. But now he could appreciate the times he’d shared with my father and see him in a more generous light.

My uncle was also able to see me more generously. When I was growing up, he resented that my mother and sister and I had a bit more money than he did, and since my mother didn’t make me work during high school, he felt I never learned to work hard. But now he could see I did know how to work hard. And he could see that we enjoyed the same sense of adventure. One morning we worked for hours on an unusual cooling problem in one of the engines and finally found the inexplicable, a piece of seaweed so large it could not have traveled through all the various strainers to where we found it. Yet there it was. Laughing with him at the absurdity of this, I could have been crew on my father’s boat twenty-five years earlier.

This voyage was easy. A scoop of ice cream each night in the big pilothouse, card games and dice, reading, great conversation, music. But easy as it was, by the time we neared Trinidad, everyone was ready for land. I spotted Tobago in the distance at daybreak. Lush mountains, colorful homes, a tropical paradise. We continued on until Trinidad came into view, and then we cruised along its northern coast. Very rugged and mountainous, like the northern coast of Kauai. There were thousands of small jellyfish in the water, and one of our crew, Mary Helen, who was a marine biologist, told us about drift science.

The most famous “experiment” in drift science involved tennis shoes. A cargo ship had accidentally dumped thousands of new tennis shoes overboard, and for many months afterward, as these tennis shoes traveled the world, managing for the most part to stay together, scientists followed them. The tennis shoes were not strong swimmers, and they were not known to communicate with each other or to have any organizational structure, so they were a good model for studying jellyfish migration. They stayed together unbelievably well, despite storms and currents and everything else.

Several of us accused Mary Helen of making this up, but she insisted it was true. She did admit, however, that jellyfish were, in the final analysis, more complicated in their migrations than tennis shoes. They didn’t drift only with the surface current. Around bays, for instance, they could descend to a level where current would bring them back in after they had drifted out. They could seek salinity or temperature or current bands. They were able, in response to a will even more opaque than our own, to control their drift.

ALWAYS A STRANGE experience, riding a boat twenty-five feet above land, seeming to fly, and stranger still for our destination. Sand everywhere, a small Sahara, the blasters and painters in full suits with hoods, a toxic waste crew wandering this industrial desert endlessly. Downwind of us, toward the water, was nothing nice. Some huge round cement containers, an abandoned field, then industrial docks. I hadn’t thought much about blasting before, even when I had decided to do it, but I realized now it would send up a constant cloud of epoxy filler, paint, and steel mixed in with the sand. My uncle and I had prepared all of this wood for varnishing, but I could see now we weren’t going to be doing any varnishing until we left the blasting yard.

Before we could blast, we had to remove the wooden railing from the boat. This was not easy; the rails were glued down as well as bolted. Ducky, the foreman of the blasting company, decided we needed hydraulic jacks, and he drove me toward Port of Spain, the capital, in his beat-up little car. We passed roadside markets, like corner stores, made of brightly painted plywood and concrete. Trinidad looked much more third-world than I had expected. I asked Ducky how much the houses cost and he whistled and said they had gone way up. Almost 300,000 TT now for one of the nicer homes. That was a bit less than $50,000 U.S. I tried to explain that a small three-bedroom house where I was from, on the peninsula south of San Francisco, now cost about $800,000 U.S., but it sounded so crazy he didn’t believe me. He asked how much money I could make in the U.S., and when I told him I had made $27,000 a year teaching full-time at Stanford, he didn’t believe that, either.

“That mean you have no way of buying a house,” he said.

I told him that was true. That was part of the point of my trying this whole boating business. If I didn’t try something other than being a lecturer, I’d be renting overpriced apartments until I died, and I would never save a penny. I told him a one-person apartment cost more than $1,500 per month, but I could tell he didn’t quite believe this, either. The world I came from was, in fact, insane. Here in Trinidad, Ducky could make the equivalent of $15,000 U.S. a year, working very hard, and buy a good house for the equivalent of $50,000. His life made sense.

We stopped at a shop for auto parts, where I bought three small hydraulic jacks, then returned to the boat.

Seref had glued these rails never to come off, which didn’t make sense, since he hadn’t bothered to properly coat the steel beneath. When we finally made it to the aft rails on our second day of work, there was only primer beneath, if even that. Seref had done nothing to protect the steel. Just slapped the wood on and lied to me.

Ducky and one of his crew suited up at dawn the next morning, wearing hoods that had air blowing in through a small hose. This created a positive pressure seal from inside and was the only way to keep out sand, epoxy, and paint. They wore heavy gloves and boots, but the high pressure air and sand coming out of the blasting hose was capable of cutting through a boot almost instantly.

Sand blasting is truly industrial. The sound of these hoses was like the roar of jet engines, and the dust billowed out in clouds for hundreds of feet. I was up on deck when they began blasting, and I had every incentive to get my work done quickly. Even with a respirator and earplugs and goggles, the sand and epoxy dust and sound were getting in.

When I finally climbed the twenty-five feet down to the ground, two hours later, I could see their progress. Gray tracks across the red-painted underbody. Ducky held the hose in both hands and clamped it with his legs. He used short up-and-down movements to work away at the paint. The toughest areas were the ones with deep epoxy filler; the filler makes the sand bounce.

Bare steel is gray and porous, super dry and capable of quickly soaking up any moisture. The biggest challenge for a good blasting job is the weather. If it rains, the steel immediately rusts and has to be reblasted. Even too much humidity can start the rust. And this was almost the beginning of the rainy season. We were right on the edge. It could start raining any day and not let up for weeks.

I was negotiating with KNJ, the yard’s painting company, over the paint job, and this went on and on. I tried hard to keep the negotiations friendly. I wanted to enjoy the business this time. During my year of working for the dot-com, I missed Turkey and all the other places I’d been, and I wished I’d relaxed and enjoyed all of it more. I had been tense the entire summer in Turkey while the boat was being finished and launched. There had been a lot of problems, and I had let them get to me instead of enjoying that magnificent place and the adventure of what I was doing. I wanted this time to be different.

KNJ slowly came around. Nigel, the painter, looked at the job again, knowing I wasn’t going to pay the price he’d quoted, and agreed to a lower amount. So once the blasting, priming, epoxy, and bottom paint were finished, the travelift picked up the boat again, and I sailed over the dusty sea to Nigel’s trailer in a corner of Peake’s yard. Scaffolding went up immediately, which Nigel tried to get me to pay for, since it was rented from the yard. I said no, annoyed that he was already trying to nickel-and-dime me, and he just smiled. I hoped this kind of thing wouldn’t continue.

Nigel had a partner, Davey, and a crew of about ten other guys. They began with microballoons, which are microscopic glass bubbles mixed in an epoxy paste. The microballoons form a super hard shell over the steel, almost like another hull, which can be sanded down for a more even surface. This was what the faring was all about. Trying to turn my patchwork of welding seams into something smooth, “like an egg,” as Seref had said.

I wouldn’t get to know this crew the way I had gotten to know Ducky’s crew. I had a long list of things to fix or buy while in Trinidad. And the wood my uncle and I had sanded had turned from light red to dark gray in just one week. The sun was so hot that raw wood darkened noticeably in a single day.

I was in the Internet cafés every evening, keeping in touch with our clearinghouse in the Virgin Islands and the broker in Florida. The broker sold another trip for us in November, and another in February, bringing the total to five charters. If I could just get the boat fixed up and delivered on time, we were going to do well. We’d pay off most of our credit cards by January, and we’d have another full year before starting monthly payments to our lienholders. This was a pleasant change, having a business with a bright future.

But at the moment cash was tight and I was trying to get deals on everything while Nancy, back in California, was working and applying for more credit cards. I did a lot of negotiating, playing at least three local vendors off each other for every large item, working the price lower and lower, hoofing back and forth, pissing off a few people but staying on budget.

Each night I dragged a mattress up to sleep on deck amid the epoxy and paint dust, hoping the toxins weren’t taking years off my life. It was hot as hell, and muggy. There were mosquitos, so I had to put a sheet over and sleep in an oven. It was bright from the yard lights and noisy from traffic passing on the road. One of my neighbors liked to play Soca music most nights between 2 A.M. and 4 A.M., and prostitutes yelled up at me from the other side of the yard’s fence. So I didn’t sleep very well. I used the yard showers and bathrooms, ordered sandwiches from the local restaurant, and peed off the deck into the yard.

Nancy joined me for the last two weeks of June and the first week of July, a welcome relief even though we were both working full time on the varnish. We were about to be married, and it was a wonderful time to be together, even in an industrial wasteland.

We hired two of the painters after-hours and weekends to help us, and one of them, Stephen, we came to like and trust enormously. We hired him as crew to sail to the Virgin Islands and run our first two charters, and he started to tell us the truth about what Nigel and Davey were doing on the paint job. Davey was his friend, and a good guy, but Nigel was starting to cut corners.

Nigel was running out of money for materials. He had the paint already, but he was running short on filler for the final stages of faring. He claimed this was because he had underquoted the job, and the painting company backed him up on this, but one afternoon I saw him installing a new stereo system in his car, and it looked to me as if he had just spent too much of the money. I had paid the full bill up front. Stephen kept telling me this had been a mistake, that you never pay more than half up front in Trinidad if you want the job done, but I hadn’t had a choice because of some very touchy financial arrangements.

My relationship with Nigel deteriorated quickly. He reminded me more and more of Seref. He was cavalier about problems that he said would be fixed later, such as the white dots all over my teak deck and windlass from overspray. I was seeing a lot of big jobs being saved for later, and later was drawing near.

Nancy and I had originally planned a few weekends to tour Trinidad, but as it turned out, we took only one day off, a Sunday to watch Stephen play cricket. He kept urging me to take a day off, since I hadn’t had one in over three months. “You too stressed,” he told me. “Pressure, boy, pressure.”

Stephen picked us up in the morning. He had promised I would be able to play today, which I was excited about, though I could see I wasn’t properly dressed. Everyone wore white jerseys and white slacks.

Just before the game began, I was invited into a concrete room underneath the stands with Stephen’s team. The men stood in a circle, and the team captain welcomed me as a friend of Stephen’s. He talked about the importance of today’s match, which was against a fierce rival, and went through a prayer and proceeded to give a lot of mixed messages about it being just a game, for fun, but also being gravely important and revealing something about who they were as people and as a community and whether they’d be able to continue to hold their heads high after this day when they walked around their neighborhood. I was starting to realize that cricket is a serious sport in Trinidad, and I wasn’t surprised to hear at the end of the speech that I would be well-represented on the field by Stephen, which was a lovely, diplomatic way of saying there was no way the captain was going to let some newcomer screw up this important match.

So Nancy and I sat and watched for hours. Cricket is not an exciting spectator sport. Friends of Stephen’s did explain the rules, so we could know what was going on, and Stephen played well, and in what was apparently an exciting match by cricket standards, his team prevailed.

When the game ended, after something like five hours, the speeches resumed and continued until long after dark. I have never encountered another culture so fond of speech-making. Each team had at least five or six men who made speeches. The second speech, by Stephen’s team captain, accepting the victory and the trophy, praised the good fortune given by God and praised individual players for various feats of heroism and went into a long, spiraling history of the team and the opposing team and how they were really the same team, sharing some players over the years, and how basically everyone here in Trinidad and maybe on God’s green earth was all part of the same team, though this particular team, on this particular day, had shown its mettle and gained a great victory, which would be remembered, etc., and then, as he was wrapping up, he mentioned that we were all very honored today to have celebrities among us, who had honored us all by coming to watch today’s game. He pointed up into the stands behind us, and we were very excited, turning around to find these celebrities. But there was no one behind us. We were the celebrities. We finally stood, since that was what they expected, and waved.

KNOWING NOW THAT we were celebrities, it was hard to go back to the same old crap in Peake’s yard. Nigel was careless about overspray, he was running short on materials, and he still hadn’t started the bowsprit. Nancy flew home to take care of final arrangements for our July 21 wedding in California, and I tried to get the boat finished. I needed to sail to the Virgin Islands very soon.

This last week pushed me close to the edge. My friend Galen flew in from Hawaii to help. He had offered me a choice of this or coming to my wedding. But there was still too much to do. Oil changes late at night, working on pumps and valves and lights, getting ready to go back into the water. I was also scrambling to finish the varnish, with help from Stephen. I was almost completely out of cash. But what was taking up too much of my time was the paint job.

In addition to overspray and materials problems, Nigel was trying to cheat me on the top coats. To save time and material, he sprayed two thin coats on the starboard side on the same day, rather than on two consecutive days with a light scuff between. This left dry patches and drip marks. Stephen pointed them out to me, after hours, and said I should insist Nigel respray that side. And on the other side of the boat, Nigel hadn’t brought the faring down low enough. I had pointed it out to him many times, but he didn’t catch on until too late. Then he tried to argue that the two stripes at the waterline weren’t included in the price, and he drew one of them with a large sag.

To mark the waterline of a hull and its boot-stripes, long pieces of tape are pulled. A man stands on scaffolding and brings his hand across sideways, keeping it level, so that the tape naturally conforms to the curve of the hull at the same height. Nigel claimed to be a master at drawing a waterline, and he had a guy named Michael working for him who was also supposed to be a master, but when I looked at the bow from a hundred yards away, I could see clearly that the line on the starboard side had a long dip to it, about twenty feet long.

I pointed this out to Nigel, and he ignored me, so I pointed it out to Michael, then Davey, then went to KNJ. It was very frustrating. I remember standing out in the yard with Nigel, showing it to him. The sag so obviously there, and Nigel beside me telling me I’m seeing things, that it’s just a trick of light on the curve of the hull. He held up his two hands, one of them the smooth side of my boat, the other feeling this surface. “The hull come out, but your eye get tricked. Your eye think the hull go in.”

Under pressure from KNJ he was forced to redraw the line, but he drew it again with the same sag. I was forced to accept it because I had no more time.

Then the blasting company came to finish painting the bulwarks and forward seating area, but the crew was young and didn’t tape properly. They left drops of paint all over the teak deck.

My friend Galen was much calmer about all of this than I was, until one day he felt I was ordering him around too much. He finally blew up, basically telling me that our friendship was more important than this paint job and I needed to work on how I was addressing him.

“No,” I told him. “You’re wrong. You don’t get to feel upset. You don’t get the luxury of yelling at me or making me think about your feelings. You haven’t been working all day every fucking day for months to get this boat ready. You haven’t invested $100,000 this year. You didn’t sail across the ocean. You’re not responsible for anything. It’s not your neck if this boat doesn’t arrive in the Virgin Islands on time. And I don’t have time to deal with your feelings. I have too much other shit to deal with. If you don’t like it, fly home.”

I was losing it, obviously. Galen and I had grown up together. He was the first person to whom I had been able to tell the truth about my father (I told everyone at school he’d died of cancer). But now I had to get the boat done, and I just didn’t have even five minutes to discuss Galen’s feelings. I felt completely overwhelmed and incapable of being a good person.

Later that day, Galen actually apologized to me, which was amazing. Most people would have called me an asshole and left.

It’s difficult to express the chaos of the last days in the yard. It just went on and on.

We went back in the water on a Friday afternoon so we could spend the weekend in the “well,” as they call the water underneath the travelift. We were still bolting the rails, stanchions, and other fittings, and we still had a lot of work to do on the varnish.

The teak rails were actually iroko, similar to teak, and it turns out I’m extremely allergic to iroko dust. My eyes and lips puffed up from the sanding and I had red rashes all over my chest and neck, which was a nice addition to how I felt about everything.

The next morning, I went to customs and immigration to clear us out. We were going to sail the following day, Sunday, July 15. That would get us to the Virgin Islands by the eighteenth, a day before my flight home to get married. But when the large man at the immigration counter looked over my paperwork, he said I needed my former crew to appear in person to be removed from the boat’s entrance papers.

“They’re gone,” I said. “I apologize, but I didn’t know they had to come here before they left the country. They cleared immigration and customs at the airport.”

“Every crew member need to clear out before the vessel can leave.”

“They did clear out, but at the airport.”

“They need to clear out here first, to be removed from your paperwork.”

“I didn’t know this,” I said.

“You know this. We tellin’ everyone when they clears in.”

“But I wasn’t told. I really wasn’t. I’m very careful about these things.”

“You cannot clear out until all of these crew members present themselves.”

“But they’re all in the U.S. now.”

The man paused. He was a very large black man with glasses. He looked hassled. I was trying to be polite, but I needed him to let me leave. “You can pay the fine that’s $2,500 U.S. per person,” he said. “Or you can provide proof that they left the country, by givin’ me their flight numbers and dates, then I need to confirm those clearances with the central office.”

“But I need to leave tomorrow,” I told him. “I’m getting married. I’ll miss my own wedding if I can’t leave.”

“I tellin’ you the two options, sir. Your crew need to clear out before they leave.”

“But no one told me. Are you really going to make me do this?”

“I tellin’ you already.”

“I can’t pay the fines,” I said. “I honestly don’t have the money. I really don’t. I spent everything here getting work done. And now I need to leave.”

He just looked at me, unwilling to budge.

“Okay,” I said. “If I make calls right now and get you the flight numbers, how long will it take to verify with the central office?”

“They not open ’til Monday, and then it take three or four hours.”

“Monday!” I said. “I can’t leave Monday. I’ll miss my own wedding. And I came in here yesterday to clear, on a weekday, a Friday, just in case there were any problems, and I was told to come back today, Saturday, because a clearance can’t be done more than twenty-four hours in advance.”

“That’s correct.”

“But don’t you see, I’ve been caught in a trap. No one told me about the regulation when I cleared in. Then, when I tried to clear out early, on a weekday, I wasn’t allowed to clear. Now, it’s a weekend, and the office isn’t open. So I need you to help me find a solution. I need to leave tomorrow.”

This man just looked down at his nails, which were long and painted purple. They were so long they curled. Strange with an immigration uniform. He wanted me to go away, but he wasn’t willing to sign my form.

Another customer came in then, a European man in his fifties. The guy behind the counter switched his attention to this new man and took his papers. I waited politely, and after about fifteen minutes, when they were done, I tried again.

“Please,” I said. “I’m very sorry that my former crew didn’t follow the regulations, but we honestly didn’t know. And I’m sorry if I’ve offended you in any other way. I certainly haven’t meant to. Please let me clear out. I really have to leave.”

“Eight A.M. Monday morning,” he told me.

Galen and Stephen and our other new crew member, Donna, were sitting in folding chairs behind me, listening to all of this. None of them could do anything to help. The Trinis, as Trinidadians call themselves, were of course afraid of their own immigration and customs officials.

We left and went immediately to an Internet café a few doors down. “If I can’t get this info on time,” I told Galen and Stephen and Donna, “we’re just leaving anyway. And you might as well go back to the boat now. I might be awhile.”

After I’d sent e-mails and made calls, I walked back to the boat and seriously considered just leaving. To hell with Trinidad. I would never be able to come back into this country, but maybe that was okay. By the time I reached the boat, however, I had calmed down, and I reassured the crew that I wouldn’t leave until I had clearance. Stephen and Donna looked relieved.

I tried to put the immigration fiasco behind me. We would use our extra days to good advantage, to get more work done, especially on the wood in the forward seating area and on the rails, and as long as I left by around noon on Monday, I could make it to the Virgin Islands just in time, arriving the morning of the day I would fly.

Monday morning, however, presented a new problem. During my entire seven weeks in Trinidad, the wind had been calm in the early morning. But not this morning. It was blowing at over thirty knots and coming from an unusual direction, which happened to be exactly the worst direction possible. I needed to back out of the well, which had high concrete dock on each side, then there were pilings on my port side extending another several hundred feet. The wind would be blowing me directly onto them.

I talked with the crane operator about this. He was not happy.

“You leavin’ now, ya. I got other boats.” He was white, with long curly blond hair, but he had grown up here.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know there are boats waiting to be hauled out. But I can’t safely leave the dock in this wind. If I try to leave, I will most likely take out your pilings and the big motoryacht behind them. Every other early morning the wind has been low. But this morning, it’s high for some reason.”

“You leavin’,” he said. I could tell he was getting pissed off.

“Please,” I said. “As a licensed captain, I can’t do something that I know will endanger my boat and other boats. I’m really sorry, but I just can’t.”

This stand-off kept me from going to immigration and customs. We waited for the wind to die down, but it kept blowing hard. Peake’s office called me in, charged me an extra fifty bucks for my time in the well, and demanded I leave.

Finally, another captain offered to help by pushing my bow away from the pilings with his dinghy while I backed, so I agreed to try. When the captain in the dingy and the marina guys on the dock were ready, I shouted “Okay!” and put both engines in hard reverse. The heavy steel hull started sliding back right away, the engines strong, and the bow line and stern lines were loosed, but then a guy on the upwind stern line, on the dock, wrapped the end of the line around a cleat. He may have thought he was helping me swing my stern out, but what he did was disastrous.

The stern line went tight and yanked my stern upwind. My bow swung down fast, about to bash hard against the concrete dock and crush the dinghy underneath, but luckily the guys on the dock with the bow line saw what was going on and rushed to wrap the end of their line just in time to make the bow bounce. Then the stern line snapped in half and my stern was free, so I had to go. I threw the port engine in reverse again and yelled and waved for the bow to be let go. It was, just in time, and Galen and Stephen were hauling in the lines as I gunned the engines in full reverse, smoke in the air. It was my only chance, to just go as hard and fast as possible. I was also swinging the helm, trying to straighten us out. I could hear a guy on the big powerboat behind the pilings to our port side yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” If I didn’t get out of there fast, I was going to destroy his yacht.

We cleared the pilings and then I threw the engines into forward, to stop our momentum, and spun the wheel. There was a crowd of boats anchored right behind us, and I missed one by less than ten feet. I got us out of there, through the crowd to the outer harbor, then I put the engines in neutral and just shook my head. Such a brilliant decision, going back into the boating business.

Four hours later, I finally had my paperwork from immigration and customs. We raised anchor and motored toward “the mouth of the dragon,” the narrow channel where we’d leave the island and encounter the ocean. It was after 5:30 P.M., the sun low on the horizon, and we had almost nothing stowed. We weren’t ready for a passage. Stephen was putting tools away in boxes, trying to clear the pilothouse, and Galen was stowing the fenders. Donna was not really doing anything except standing around awkwardly.

We reached the mouth in about ten minutes, the big rollers coming in, spray hitting the rocks on the western side. We weren’t ready for this. So I turned around, back into calmer water, and did circles for about twenty minutes while I helped stow.

I have never left for sea so unprepared. We had our basic items stowed, and I had completed all of the maintenance and systems checks in previous days, and Donna had bought provisions, and we had enough diesel and water. So it was safe to leave, and we were seaworthy, but it was almost dark, none of my crew had ever been on a passage or at sea at night, we still had various little items inside and out that weren’t organized or stowed very well, and we were all exhausted. Not a good way to begin almost three days at sea.

And the seas hit us right away, then built through the night, the wind howling. We were blasting into large waves, the spray covering the entire boat each time. Everyone except me was seasick, so I had to pull double watches at the helm and be on call the entire time. It was a long night.

The daytime was easier for the crew, and we were making almost ten knots, which is what we needed. We had to average at least 8.5 knots for me to catch my flight to California. If anything went wrong or we didn’t steer well or the seas increased, I would miss my flight and wouldn’t be able to catch another flight until the next day, so I’d miss the rehearsal dinner. But if I couldn’t get on that flight the next day, if there were no seats available through standby, I’d miss the wedding.

As soon as it was dark again, though, Stephen and Donna couldn’t steer. Donna would stand there at the helm looking calm and poised. And she’d be sixty degrees off course, taking us to Europe. Stephen was even worse. He tried hard, and I spent a lot of time tutoring him, but he kept getting disoriented. He would see the compass dial start to spin to the left, so he would turn to the right. This was backward. He did it over and over, spinning us in a circle each time.

I tried to make it simple. “Steer to our heading,” I said. “Forget about how the dial is moving. Find 250 degrees. That’s our course. Just steer toward it. Just like lining up a car on the road.”

But it didn’t work. He kept steering exactly the wrong way. Instead of making almost ten knots on course, we were now averaging only 7.5 knots, which meant I would miss my wedding.

So Galen and I took over. No more Stephen or Donna at the helm. I didn’t have an autopilot, and this meant Galen and I would have to steer around the clock for the next day and a half, alternating with ninety-minute watches. I also needed to check all the boat systems, so I wouldn’t sleep more than half an hour at a time. I had done it before, on other passages, but I hadn’t begun those trips so tired.

Everything went fine, however. The seas and wind died down, we stayed on course and made good time, and it looked like we were just going to make it.

THE DARK MASSES of the small islands around us, cut out against the stars and lights on Tortola, were a pirate’s landscape, and the night air was moist and warm, tropical but not stifling like Trinidad. It was cooler here, with a fresher breeze. I had a beautiful ninety-foot yacht, a promising business, and the freedom to cruise these islands with Nancy for as many years as we wished. It was a good feeling.

I crossed through the pass and the channel and slowly entered the bay at Roadtown. There were a lot of lights, and everything was unfamiliar. Avoiding reefs, shallow water, and boats at anchor, I found the small entrance into the marinas, but once we were in, there seemed to be almost no room, especially after being at sea.

A ninety-foot boat with a 21.5-foot beam and nine-foot draft in a small harbor at night feels very large, like a great whale come into a pond. The harbor was actually capable of accommodating larger boats, of course, but it felt like I had almost no room to maneuver. I found Village Cay Marina to my port side, made a ninety-degree turn, and proceeded cautiously into a slip on the inside of their fuel dock. It was about 4:30 A.M., and I was going to be able to attend my rehearsal dinner and wedding.

We were married by one of my lenders, a Dominican friar. I’m not Catholic, but Nancy is. The chapel was part of a monastery, rarely used for weddings, the high-backed pews facing inward toward the aisle, their dark wood ornately carved.

Dave, the friar and also my friend, was funny during the ceremony. He said he wouldn’t presume to tell us about storms at sea but carried on with his metaphor anyway. The entire event was much more emotional than I had imagined. Somehow I had thought I would just breeze through it, but the truth is I had difficulty not sobbing at various points, especially when we left the altar to greet our parents and my mother whispered in my ear, “Your father and I are both very proud of you.” Bringing my father into this, especially with my uncle Doug standing there beside my mother, was overwhelming. One of the saddest parts of my father’s death has always been the thought of all that he has missed. Twenty-one years of experience and memories. And each time I thought of him during some important event such as this, my wedding day, his absence hurt just as much as the first day I had lost him. I was thirteen again and didn’t have a father.

In the limo, Nancy and I both admitted surprise at how emotional the ceremony had been, but then we moved on to the reception and just had fun.

The next day we opened presents at Nancy’s parents’ house, with a lot of relatives and friends in attendance. Then we were packing three seventy-pound boxes, right at the baggage size and weight limit, because I was flying back to the Virgin Islands that evening. We packed all those sheets and towels, small carpets, appliances, bar guides and cookbooks, everything we’d need for charter. Nancy would be flying a day later and also bringing three boxes.

Our guests for the first charter had written on their preference sheets from the broker, “WE ARE HEAVY DRINKERS.” They had a list of ten or fifteen special mixed drinks they wanted in quantity, so we bought liquor at four different shops (to find specialty items such as Grey Goose Orange) and groceries from more than half a dozen stores. Eleven adults plus four crew for five days. We were grateful to have charters. Most boats were having a lousy year because of the recession. We were the rising stars, the new boat with no direct competition because of the number of staterooms. It was gratifying to see all of my hassles in Turkey, Spain, Gibraltar, and Trinidad finally paying off.

This first charter group was easy, which was good because we didn’t do everything perfectly. I wasn’t really a bartender yet, so Bobby, the man who was paying for the charter and had invited his friends to help him celebrate his fiftieth birthday, made the drinks with great flair. I kept the bottles and ice and glasses coming and watched closely. Captains are expected to be good bartenders.

We also had a rigging problem, and again the guests were gracious. We had a lovely sail one morning across the channel on a beam reach from the Baths to Marina Cay, but when it came time to furl the sail, there was a lot of resistance. During the paint job, we had removed the headstay and let it hang to the side, and apparently this had broken one of the connections. It had been hidden by the sail wrapped around it, so the problem had not been visible, and we hadn’t tested the sail on our way from Trinidad because we had only motored. I couldn’t repair it now, with the sail out, underway, and guests aboard, and I was worried that we wouldn’t get the sail furled or that we might rip it.

As I was distracted by this, standing above the winch to look over the pilothouse at the foil, holding the line in my left hand, a large gust of wind filled the sail, and the line, which I was holding too high above the winch, came free. I grabbed for it, instinctively, but this was not a good instinct, especially while wearing fingerless gloves. The rope burn across four fingers of my left hand was extreme. Only a few patches of skin were completely missing down to bleeding, exposed flesh, but all four fingers looked like deformed wax. They were white, especially after I dunked my hand into a bucket of ice, and the pain was intense. I did get the sail furled, and brought us safely into an anchorage, but that was all I could do. I felt awful for the guests. It was a putzy bit of sailing we had just done.

By the end of the five-day charter, my fingers were healing, despite my fears that they’d be permanently deformed, and the trip was considered a great success. Bobby gave us a $2,000 tip, wrote us a lovely card, and gave glowing reviews to the broker, who sent a note of praise to the clearinghouse, who then passed the note on to other brokers. I was embarrassed about our problems with the roller furling, but we were well on our way to a successful business.

There had been one small conversation with Bobby, however, that I would never forget. It was late in the trip, after he had asked about my business and plans, and he was wishing me well. He was a handsome man, likeable in every way, and he meant only the best, didn’t mean to insult me, certainly, but he said, comparing my desires to succeed in this business to his own desires years before as he was starting his own business, “I know what it’s like. You’re nobody, and you want to become somebody.”

This comment made sense in terms of the business. It was a new business, even if it was my second go. It was true that I hadn’t made a lot of money yet, even to pay off my debts, and that I was new to the brokered charter industry. But he wasn’t talking only about the business, he was talking about me, about who I was, about my worth as a person. And I objected to being limited to this business and this role as captain. I had taught at Stanford and Cornell. I had been published in the Atlantic Monthly.

I didn’t share these thoughts with Bobby, of course. But I realized that even if I succeeded wildly in this business, it still fundamentally wouldn’t mean anything to me except financial freedom. It wasn’t how I measured who I was, and it never would be. I would always feel somewhat alienated in this role of captain or small business owner. I was a writer and a teacher. That’s who I was. I needed to start writing again soon.

The second charter was easy, a fun ten days. I practiced my skills as a bartender, enjoying it, and the kids performed skits at night on the large aft deck area, their parents lounging on the cushioned poop deck. Everyone called me “Captain Dave.” It didn’t feel like a job at all.

Immediately after this charter, however, when we went into the clearinghouse office in Roadtown to pick up our mail and news, we learned that a hurricane was headed our way. It would probably pass south of us, but it could swing north.

This presented an uncomfortable situation. We were too late to run away from it, and we didn’t have good options for weathering a hurricane in the Virgin Islands.

I finally decided to anchor in North Sound on Virgin Gorda. The sound is expansive and almost fully enclosed, like a big lake, most of it forty-five to sixty feet deep. We’d be completely exposed to wind, but we’d be protected from big waves, and we could drag on our anchor all over that bay and not hit anything.

As it turned out, the hurricane tracked far south of us and we never had wind more than thirty knots. We would have been fine anywhere in the Virgin Islands. But the experience drove home the fact that we were exposed up here during hurricane season. Nancy and I talked it over and decided to head south. We would island-hop through the Antilles for a month, spend another month in Trinidad working, then sail back up in time for the November charter shows. We had wanted to take a break and relax in the Virgin Islands for these months, but worrying about hurricanes did not promise to be very relaxing.

We returned to Road Town to make some arrangements and take on food, water, and diesel, then set off for Nevis, our first stop. It would be the longest leg, about eighteen hours. We passed between Peter Island and Dead Chest Island just after sunset and were blasted by thirty knots of wind, heavy rain, and swells about twelve feet, leftovers from the hurricane that had passed farther south. If we continued on to Nevis, we’d be pounding directly into this the entire time.

I decided this suffering was pointless. We weren’t on a schedule. I turned around and anchored for the night in Great Harbour. We left at noon the next day, the conditions much improved, and made Nevis the next morning. A spectacular volcanic mountain rising from the water, its slopes dense jungle. We anchored in light blue water just down from the Four Seasons. Our view was of undeveloped beach, then several miles of palm trees, then jungle leading up to the volcanic cone. It was our honeymoon, finally.

We zipped ashore in our new dinghy and walked a few boardwalks to have ice cream and window shop. Then a driver took Nancy and Stephen and me halfway around the island, showing us landmarks, monkeys, mangoes, and jungle. We stopped at several plantations that are now bed-and-breakfasts. Nancy and I fell in love, at least for the day, with gingerbread architecture.

Late that afternoon, after we had changed at the boat, Stephen dropped us off on the beach with the dinghy and we walked into the Four Seasons. We joined the other honeymooners in the pools and hot tubs and took in the gorgeous sunset. It was one of our favorite things to do, crashing resorts, and this was a coup.

The next day we cruised the western shores of Dominica and Guadeloupe (lovely as long as we didn’t look too closely), and then it was on to Martinique and St. Lucia. Stephen left us to fly home to Trinidad, as planned, and we found out we had a new charter from Ed Hamilton, the most important broker in the market. If we ran a good charter for Ed, we were set. We would fill our twenty weeks every year with no problem. And it was a short, easy charter, for the Young Presidents’ Association. Ed didn’t tell us who the group of ten men were, but we found out, and we felt flattered they had picked us over the seven-million-dollar, eighty-five-foot performance catamaran they had been on the year before. The charter was coming up soon, at the end of October, just before the charter show, and we were looking forward to it.

We were also enjoying our honeymoon on St. Lucia. We spent almost a week there, just taking a break. I began writing, for two hours every morning, for the first time in five years. I started with a pirate novel but quickly set it aside and began this memoir. It would be titled The Afterlife of Ruin, about how everything had worked out after it had seemed all was lost. A story of the American Dream. It would also be about how my father hadn’t been able to see the possibility of continuing on in some new way, and about finally escaping his legacy, after shame, guilt, anger, ten years of insomnia, and more than twenty years of being fairly sure I was doomed to kill myself. It wouldn’t get bogged down in too much about my father, and it would be fundamentally hopeful and cheery, unlike my previous book, Legend of a Suicide, which every agent had said lacked redemption and was too depressing. This one wouldn’t be fancy, either, just an easy read.

After writing each morning, I had lunch with Nancy and we zipped off in our dinghy to enjoy the beach or snorkeling or hiking, or we’d just kayak from the boat. Nancy went back to her days of floating on air mattresses, a skill she had first perfected along the Turkish Coast. At sunset we’d be on the aft deck with an alcoholic concoction, usually involving ice cream, or in the pool or hot tub of the resort.

We talked a lot about our future together. We were in love, and not just with each other. Our yacht was a spectacular home, a stand-out in every harbor, and the Caribbean is a beautiful place. But what we loved most was our freedom. We would work no more than twenty weeks per year, and we would have the rest of the year to do anything we wanted. Travel was high on our list. We wanted to see most of the world. But we were surprised at the other things.

I wanted to go back to the university, for instance. Being a captain and running a business lacked dignity and engagement, I had realized, even if I made a lot of money. “And we don’t have any friends out here,” I told Nancy. “And it’s not as if there are great literary gatherings on St. Lucia.”

“You should do it,” she said. “Become a medievalist. And keep writing every day, too. It’s all you’ve talked about the whole time I’ve known you, even though you haven’t written a word until now. Mr. Big Mouth.”

“Thanks.”

“If we decide to spend more time back in the Bay Area, I’m going to one of the dance places — maybe the Metronome — to take their instructor series. Or culinary school. I’m not sure. Maybe both.”

“Freedom is what it’s about,” I said. “Eventually hand over the boat to a few crew and not even work the twenty weeks. A Ph.D. or ballroom dance or just cruise around the Med in a little powerboat, go up all the canals through France.”

“Italy,” Nancy said. “More time in Italy.”

“Well, the sun’s down. Off to the hot tub?”

“How about something with Midori first?”

Freedom in the islands always has to come with a warning, however, about the legacies of slavery and colonialism and enduring poverty. Every day at least one or two and sometimes as many as five different local guys came by in their little boats to sell food and trinkets. I finally tried to save one of them the wasted effort. He had a boat that looked like a grass hut, with banana leaves up the side and on the roof. He was the most enterprising.

“I feel bad that you keep spending the gas to come out here,” I told him. I was leaning on the wide, varnished rail that came up about three feet off our aft deck. He was ten feet below me, peering up through the fronds. “Really, we’re never going to buy anything.”

“You never gonna buy?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“You got to eat,” he said. “Where you get your food?”

“We’re already fully stocked. We stock up at supermarkets, to save money.”

“You got money to buy a gift for your wife.”

“No, I don’t. I really don’t. I know you’re not going to believe me, because no one here ever believes me once they see the boat, but I really don’t have any extra cash right now.”

“I know you got cash. I know the owner of this big boat give you cash.”

“I’m the owner,” I said. “And I don’t have extra cash. This boat is a business. We’re just starting up. So we had to put a lot of money into it, and we still have more work to do in Trinidad, but we haven’t gotten any money out of it yet.” I was giving this man a ridiculous amount of my personal information, but I was tired of our shitty interactions. I wanted something better.

“You not the owner,” he told me finally.

“I’m the owner.”

“You not the owner.” And then he started his outboard again and turned his boat around to leave. He smiled up at me and waved one finger in the air. “You not the owner. That not your boat.”

I stormed back into the pilothouse, where Nancy was sitting and had been listening.

“There’s no way to get along,” she said. “Unless we just hand them money for nothing every day. That’s the only way we can have peace, and even that’s not peace, because then they want to sell us more.”

“There is the whole history of the slave trade,” I said. “And I guess we look like the latest wave in colonization. And really we are. We’re using their home for our own economic gain through selling charters, and we’re not sharing the profits with them. It’s still the first world taking away their wealth.”

“But it still sucks,” she said, and I had to agree. There is just no way around differences in wealth, even apparent wealth. Money rules us all. I hope someday the islands federalize and claim their resources and make visiting yachts and cruise ships pay, but until then it will still be uneasy in the islands.

On our way down the west coast of St. Lucia the next day, before crossing to St. Vincent, we cruised in close to the Pitons, which are truly magnificent: two very sharp, green, volcanic mountains rising thousands of feet straight from the water’s edge. It’s probably one of the most spectacular views in the world, with a lovely bay at the Pitons’ feet and palm trees all along the shoreline.

Our next stop was Bequia, just south of St. Vincent, the beginning of the Grenadines. Nancy and I loved Bequia. A friendly town with flowers lining the walkways, an abundance of book stores and restaurants, beautiful beaches. It was a place to rest, a perfect place for a honeymoon. We stayed for almost a week.

From Bequia we worked our way through the rest of the Grenadines. Our favorites were the Tobago Cays. An enormous horseshoe-shaped reef several miles long and fifty yards wide protecting three tiny islands with perfect beaches. The snorkeling was by far the best we’d ever experienced, rated as one of the top three sites in the world. Clean, clear water, bright sun, and miles of living coral reef in every color with thousands of fish. We followed whole schools, saw new species, felt the warm water on our skin, the light current and waves rocking us gently. I’ve loved tropical fish all my life, at one point in junior high had eight aquariums spread throughout the house. For years, even in upstate New York, in grad school, I had gazed at fish every night, watched how they fluttered, imagined myself suspended in warm water with them, so this was heaven for me, to spend a little quality time with the fish.

On September 14 we reached Grenada, our jumping-off point for the final passage to Trinidad. We went to an Internet café to check e-mail for the first time in over a week and saw news on Yahoo that was difficult to believe. Terrorists flying passenger planes into the twin towers in New York. We felt extremely disconnected, finding out about this event three days late. On the television in the café, leaders from all the Caribbean countries were condemning the attacks and offering their sadness and support to the U.S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We hung and the boat fell to the side, everything crashing. I could hear our wedding gifts, which had been stored in cupboards in the galley, hitting the cabinet doors so hard they broke open and everything fell twenty feet across the main salon to the port side. Other heavy thuds and bangs throughout the boat, things breaking. And then our bow plowed into the next wave with such force that our teak platform on the steel bowsprit was blown off its bolts. Our bow went deep into solid water, and that wave turned us ninety degrees. We tipped left in the trough, broadside now to the waves, and the next wave hit the side of our hull so hard we were picked up out of the water and dropped again. Everything from the main salon crashed back into the galley.

I gunned the engines and brought us around to port, spinning the spoked wooden helm a full eleven turns, so that we took the next wave on the bow, though I was worried about its integrity. What was left of the heavy teak platform and its stainless steel railing was loose and banging. I was afraid the force of that wood flying up would catch the underside of our roller furler and break our headstay. If that happened, our heavy wooden masts could come down backward right on top of us.

These were the worst seas I had ever been in. It was likely we would lose our lives. No help was available, and the conditions were so bad we wouldn’t be able to get into our liferaft.

Nancy remained calm. She helped assess the damage. “Everything from under the stern platform is out on deck. Both dinghies still attached. Galley, everything has opened and fallen. Do you want me to check more below?”

A lot of hard objects were flying back and forth across the main salon, but our Inmarsat station was down there and we needed weather information. “We have to find out what we’re in. It could be a hurricane, but I don’t think it is, because it couldn’t have formed so fast and it feels too cold. I think it has to be a cold storm from north of us that collided with a tropical system.”

Nancy went below to the chart table.

“Tell them we have more than sixty knots of wind,” I yelled. The storm and engines were very loud. “Seas over thirty feet, with some bigger waves mixed in, and no report for this area. Tell them please send a report. And be careful. Hold on.”

It was dark now. I couldn’t see the bowsprit anymore, but I could see the steaming light halfway up our main mast lighting the headstay, which was swinging wildly back and forth, several feet to either side. I was afraid it would go. After each concussion, I looked up to check.

I couldn’t see the waves now, couldn’t see what was coming. I focused on the compass, keeping us on a heading between zero and thirty degrees, using more throttle on the engines whenever we threatened to fall off course. The wind was so loud I kept thinking I was hearing things: other boats, whistling in our engines, Nancy’s voice, songs as if a radio were playing, though I had turned off the Walkman. Nancy said she thought she could hear songs, too, now and then.

There was no predicting when the hardest hits would come. But it was never more than five or ten seconds before another wave would stop our bow and the shock would reverberate through the boat. Then solid water would crash over the foredeck, the windows underwater, then clear except for spray that pelted them in flurries.

I was beyond caring about the wedding gifts and equipment and other things that were being destroyed. We had worked hard to prepare for our charter, and the boat had looked beautiful only the day before, and this damage would set us back, but all I wanted was for us to survive. For that to happen, the headstay needed to remain attached, the rudder and steering had to hold, and the engines needed to keep running. And I had to keep us from getting rolled over and buried.

The experience felt similar, in its grimness, to the time I had steered with only the engines and no rudder for ten hours off the Moroccan coast. But these seas were far worse. Even with a working rudder, these were more dangerous because they were so sharp and irregular. They were straight walls, some of them, with water breaking down onto us, and each one hit us from a different angle. I steered into them for hours, not able to see but trying to guess where they were. Everything done by feel and by the compass. Nancy stopped trying to go below or to tie anything down and we just braced ourselves and waited. I found myself saying, “Please, please,” over and over in my head, though I’m not religious and don’t pray. It’s impossible not to beg for help, even if you have no one to beg.

I wanted it to end, but it went on for a long time, about six hours. Living second by second in darkness and fear makes six hours an exquisitely long time.

But the wind and waves did finally die down, to forty knots and fifteen feet, then thirty to thirty-five knots and ten or twelve feet, and finally twenty-five knots and ten or twelve feet, which was manageable. It was near midnight when I asked Nancy to take the helm for an hour so I could inspect the boat and take a nap.

In the engine room, I found water and sediment in the diesel filters. Water is deadly to a diesel engine. If the water filled these and the other filters and made it to the injectors, the engines would stop.

The steel walls between the diesel and waste water tanks must have ruptured from the force of the waves. This was unheard of, but it must have happened to both tanks because they were isolated from each other by valves and yet both had taken in water and sediment. We had been hit hard.

I turned off the port engine, bled water and sediment from its tank and then its filter, and restarted it, then repeated for the other engine. I was drenched in sweat and dizzy from all the diesel fumes, naked except for my shorts, with diesel on my hands and feet. I climbed back up to the helm and turned on the starboard engine. It raced and fell a bit but held.

“There’s so much crap in them right now,” I told Nancy. “So much that must be getting through those dirty filters. Especially the starboard engine, since I did it last. I should probably bleed it underway, to try to blow some of the crap out of the injectors.”

I went below again and stood over the starboard diesel loosening and retightening the caps on each injector, one at a time. The engine could run temporarily on just five cylinders instead of its full six. When uncovered, the injectors spat out diesel mist at high pressure, covering me head to toe, but they also spat out some bubbles, which were air, and I saw round clear drops of water slide down the side of the engine like fat.

The only thing I wanted now was sleep. We had been underway for almost two days, just the two of us alternating at the helm, ninety minutes each, and then I had taken the helm for six hours in the storm. But there were more problems before I could rest.

In the aft bilge, water was rushing from side to side like a river as we rolled in the waves, hitting the underside of the aft stateroom floors with such force it was coming up along the walls, in every small carpenter’s gap. The mahogany was swollen and was going to warp.

I opened the small hatch for the bilge. The water ran unchecked now, over both varnished floors, back and forth from one room to the other as we rolled. I grabbed a small plastic bucket, opened a porthole, and started bailing.

On one bailing trip, as I took the few steps from the bilge toward the porthole with my full bucket, we hit a large wave and I slipped on the wet varnished floor and went straight up. I was about five feet off the floor, horizontal in the air, holding the bucket of water. Then gravity kicked in and I was dropped on my back onto the wood and the bucket.

I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. The boat was still rocking and bucking, the water running back and forth, hitting the underside of the floor hard and also sloshing me from above, and I was sliding around, my head hitting against the foot of the bed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he said.

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

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

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

“Oh great,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Roger that.”

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

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

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

“Tell him to turn hard to port.”

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

“Hold on!” I yelled to Nancy. “We might capsize.”

Our boat yanked suddenly to starboard, tipping over, and I heard a ripping sound of the line coming up through the water then whacking the side of our ninety-foot hull like a piano string. We went fast backward and sideways through the water, I fell down on the deck, grabbed onto the kayak that was tied, and then we went level again, the bow flung around and yanked forward.

“Holy shit,” Nancy said.

I got back up and joined her at the helm. I called the cutter on the radio. “We’re okay, I think,” I said. “And the line’s clear. But that was dangerous and ridiculous. That was the closest I’ve ever come to capsizing.”

No response. So we waited. Then, finally, “Roger that. Line is clear.” Then he asked that we not stop again for chafing. He said he preferred to take the chance of it severing. So I said fine and went to drain the diesel tanks and pump the aft bilge.

After pumping the aft bilge, I used my flashlight to examine the area, as I had several other times, and this time I found a hairline crack, an actual crack in our hull. It was about six inches long, a foot forward of the rudder stock and slightly off centerline to port. I could see water coming up under pressure. I couldn’t help but think of submarine movies after the depth charge hits.

I reported this crack to the cutter helmsman. He said to monitor it and let him know if it worsened. I asked whether I should try caulking it with something, though I didn’t think I had anything that would cure on a wet surface. He said sure, try it.

So I went through our supplies and found 3M 4200, a caulking compound I knew would not cure and would not be up to the job. That was all I had, and it wasn’t worth trying. I hadn’t really counted on cracks in the hull. I had assumed that the integrity of the steel hull, as long as I kept it coated to prevent corrosion, would be the one thing on this boat I could always count on. It was ABS Marine Grade A steel, the best steel you can use for a boat, welded using proper techniques and equipment, and inspected by Bureau Veritas, an international classification society. If you can’t count on that, why bother with any of the rest? All the other work I had done on the boat didn’t really make sense if the hull wasn’t going to stay in one piece.

I tried to reassure Nancy, because she looked worried. I guess being fifty miles from land in thousands of feet of water at night in stormy conditions being yanked through the water at nine knots by a group of incompetents while we had a crack in our hull somehow gave her cause for concern.

“Steel doesn’t really tear,” I said. “Not like how a crack could open up in a cement, wood, or fiberglass hull. The molecules are flexible, you know, like how you can melt a metal into a liquid. I remember this from chemistry. The cell walls in wood are rigid and can crack, but steel shouldn’t do that. So it should be okay to have a crack, and it shouldn’t be able to rip apart any of the rest of the hull.”

This explanation was incoherent, and certainly desperate and inaccurate, but Nancy seemed willing to accept it, at least for now, since there wasn’t much other encouragement I could offer.

By around 4 A.M., we could see the lights of St. Croix, and by daybreak we were being towed into a big bay protected from waves. We anchored, then began a long search by radio for yards that could repair us. We finally found St. Croix Marine, a boatyard on the other side of the island. They agreed to an emergency haulout, so Nancy and I picked up anchor and found that we could steer fine in calm conditions. But then, when we were halfway there, cruising along the northern coast, St. Croix Marine canceled the haul because their railway had rust and they were afraid our hundred-ton boat might break it.

I was feeling desperate, since we were now underway, leaking with a crack in our hull, and had nowhere to go for repairs. Nancy came up from below looking oddly happy with her mop and bucket, getting the boat all cleaned up for our charter, keeping the aft bilge water low, and I hated to tell her the news.

“How can they do that?” she asked. “Don’t they know we have a crack in our hull?”

“I know,” I said. “I’m trying to find other options.”

“Well what are the other options?”

“I don’t have any yet.”

“Oh great,” she said, and went back below to pump the bilge again.

After many more calls on the radio, I found one last option, a salvage diver in the British Virgin Islands who had a good reputation and lots of experience and would have underwater epoxy ready. He had done underwater rudder repair for many boats, including removing a rudder, taking it to the shop, then reinstalling it. So I turned to port, my beam to the waves, and motored away from St. Croix.

The steering was easy, but I tried to baby the rudder as much as possible, not putting any force on it. It was a beautiful day, sunny and bright, only a few scattered squalls, none of them in our path. The seas built to five or six feet, so that we rolled slightly in the troughs, but it wasn’t bad.

After about two hours, Nancy reported that the water from the crack was coming in at an increased rate, so I went below to check. The water was sloshing back and forth, as it had before, since we were rolling a bit. The pump was still faster than the leak, but not by a lot. I reported this on the radio. I was still in touch with the Coast Guard. We were an hour and a half from our rendezvous point.

I returned to the helm. “I’m glad we’re meeting the diver soon,” I told Nancy.

Then we heard a loud metallic sound in the stern and the boat went into a spin. I turned the helm but there was no response. I pulled back on the throttles.

“There’s water in the hallway,” Nancy said from down in the main salon. “There’s too much water for the pump.”

I went below for a quick look. The hallway was flooding, already a few feet deep. I knew from our spinning that we had lost our rudder. And I knew from this water suddenly in the hallway that the rudder had taken a piece of our hull with it.

“Grab our ditch bag,” I told Nancy. “And get our important papers from the desk. We’re abandoning ship.” I went for the radio.

“MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY,” I called on channel 16. “This is the sailing vessel Bird of Paradise, the sailing vessel Bird of Paradise. We have lost our rudder and are flooding and sinking fast. We are at 18 degrees 9.2 North, 64 degrees 39.8 West, approximately ten miles south of Norman Island. That’s one eight degrees nine decimal two North, six four degrees three nine decimal eight West, approx. ten miles south of Norman Island. We are two persons on board, two adults, David Vann and Nancy Flores. Vessel is ninety feet, white hull, two wooden masts, wooden pilothouse. This is a MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY. We are sinking fast.”

“I have your disk with your writing,” Nancy said, holding my red backup disk. “What else do you want?”

“Did you grab all the papers out of the drawer?”

“Yeah. What else?”

“Put a lifejacket on. And first, can you grab my black folding knife? I need it to cut the dinghy free.”

Virgin Islands Search and Rescue (VISAR) hailed me on the radio. They acknowledged the mayday and asked again for my position. They said they had a twenty-two-foot rescue boat responding. I gave my position again.

“Can you also raise your mainsail?” the controller asked.

“Why?” I asked.

“So the rescue boat can spot you more easily.”

This was not a good idea. Our mainsail was huge and took a long time to put up. And it would make us heel over further and also push us forward through the water, even with the boom out. And the boom would be swinging as we rolled. I couldn’t think of a worse suggestion. I didn’t want to sound rude, though, since they were coming out to rescue us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m all right!” she yelled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, sorry,” she said.

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

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

“That’s our boat,” Nancy said.

“It looks so beautiful,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well,” I said. “That was nice.”

“I couldn’t find you,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I banged my knee,” I told them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had also wanted to escape cheap apartments. They had always depressed me. But now even this would be out of my reach, because I wouldn’t be able to pass a credit check, and neither would Nancy. I would have to live with Nancy at her parents’ house for now, and I didn’t know when that would end.

But there was something more, some general, hollow ache I couldn’t name. I just felt lost. Everything had been decimated, mostly through my own blind workings but also by what felt like a powerful fate — hubris, perhaps — a force swelling like an enormous wave and crashing upon me, making me see the world would not be shaped by my will. I had run and run and escaped nothing. And what had happened could not be undone. Who I had been before could never be returned to me. The only word I could think of was ruin.

And most likely it would get worse. The insurance could refuse to pay because I had moved the boat from a harbor in St. Croix toward the British Virgin Islands in my attempt to find repair. And my lenders might sue. They could obtain judgements against me and attach my wages if I found a job.

I had already been threatened by the broker who had booked five charters for us and helped us in so many ways. He wanted his broker’s commissions on the four cancelled charters. He said he had earned these commissions, and it’s true he had worked hard for them. But he wanted to put a lien on my insurance policy. This would only delay and complicate my already difficult claim.

“These clients will want their money back, David. How are they going to be paid?”

He had their money in a trust account, which he’d have to simply return to them, so he was really talking about his commissions. I had to take a hard line. I told him the insurance would not pay for loss of business, especially a third party’s loss of business.

“So you’re telling me to stuff it. After all I’ve done for you.”

“No, I’m just saying the boat sank, I have no money and no job, and the insurance will not cover your commission.”

“After all I’ve done for you. I am ashamed of David Vann. I am ashamed of the day I first heard the name David Vann.”

“Did you hear that we lost our boat?” I asked.

“I am ashamed of the name David Vann. I am going to have to put my lawyer on you.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Your contract says right in it that you give up the right to sue under the contract.”

“Oh, so that’s how it is. After all I’ve done for you. I am ashamed of the name David Vann.”

MY FATHER KILLED himself in his new, unfurnished house in Fairbanks, Alaska, alone and suffering. It may have been a beautiful scene outside, the long stands of paper birch etched in moonlight or even the green, wavering bands of northern lights since it was winter. But what he did was bitter and small and left us with two mysteries.

One is the mystery of his life and suicide, sealed forever. The other, abiding in each of us who loved him, is the impossibility of knowing or living the life we would have had without his suicide. Would I have thrown away my academic career — and, for a time, my writing — for boats and the sea if my father had not killed himself? Have I built boats out of love or obedience? The questions are impossible to answer. My own reasons are an opaque sea, my own dreams and desires things I can never fully know. I can only hope that my entire life hasn’t been a plaything of his abrupt end.

In any case, like my father I’ve built my life around boats, and a boat builder is part of who I’ve become. Two years after the sinking, I’ve gone back into business with new partners and am nearing completion of a ninety-foot aluminum sailing catamaran, Paradiso. I’ve designed every part of Paradiso, every curve and line, and I’ve been at the warehouse every day to build it. All of that aluminum, so similar to watching my father’s boat being built.

A year ago, even before we had welded the first plates, I could see it three-dimensionally in my head, from any vantage, from within any stateroom. Its flybridge, open to the sun and stars, has teak deck and more than two hundred square feet of cushions. This is the excitement for me, the creation of something from nothing, the pre-existence of form, and the constant modification, also, the reshaping every day as I refine the design. Even metal is as malleable as a manuscript.

The boat is unique. It will be the largest sailing catamaran based in the Virgin Islands, and it is one of the largest ever built in the United States. Inspected and certified by the Coast Guard, it far exceeds even their regulations, with each hull divided into nine separate watertight compartments. There have been many hassles during construction, and no doubt these will continue, but in three weeks we will launch, and a week later I will sail with Nancy and my uncle and friends from San Francisco to Panama and then to the Virgin Islands on a ship of my own creation, a beautiful bird with wings.

A life can be like a work of art, constantly melted away and reshaped. The imagining and remaking is itself a form of satisfaction, especially when I’m dreaming together with Nancy. And this is what I wish my father had known. Many of his dreams ended in ruin, but his mistake was in not waiting for the new dreams to arrive, and in not realizing that those dreams were to be shared. He could have been nearly anything, his life reshapeable in thousands of ways, none of which he, or those of us who still love him, will ever know.