A disastrous career at sea leads (of course) to shipwreck

I’ve witnessed a few shipwrecks. They were painful to watch, but not nearly as excruciating as reading A Mile Down.
The title foreshadows the book’s ending, not that any reader with an ounce of common sense or knowledge of boats needs that help. It is obvious from the first chapter that the author, heedless of the warnings flashing all around him, is bound for disaster. Reading his story is an experience akin to observing a vessel sailing inexorably toward a deadly but prominent reef. You know something awful is going to happen, but like watching a grisly accident develop, you can’t avert your eyes. David Vann, a teacher of creative writing, writes a fluid, coherent narrative, so you keep turning the pages, watching with macabre fascination as the descent to ruin unfolds.
Credit Vann and his publisher with truth in packaging. The subtitle, “The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea,” is spot on, at least the “disastrous” part.
Vann, 30 years old, is vacationing in Turkey when he’s shown an unfinished 90-foot long, 20-foot high welded steel sailboat hull. He decides he has to have it. No matter that he’s already mortgaged to his teeth on a 48-foot sailboat. “I wanted to free myself from the working world and have to time to write,” he explains. “Grendel (his 48-foot boat) could never free me, but this boat could.”
Freedom will come by having the boat finished and putting it into service as a floating university classroom for people who want to take courses taught by Vann and guest lecturers while sailing in exotic locales. Fees will be substantial. Vann calculates he will net $300,000 with only 20 weeks of work.
The hull was made by Turkish welders of uncertain skills. There is no mention of a designer. Finishing is to be handled by Seref, the fellow who introduced the author to the boat. His chief qualification as a shipbuilding contractor is that he is president of the Chamber of Commerce of the Turkish city of Bodrum. He promises to recruit only the best local welders, carpenters, electricians and laborers for the project. By now you know where this going. That’s right, a mile down.
The boat gets finished, more or less, but the litany of failures that follows is as long as it is predictable: engines corrupted by siphoning sea water, paint falling off the hull, poorly caulked decks leaking, corrosion festering beneath the cheap material used to finish the interior, a hydraulic steering ram failing, the rudder falling off, the hull cracking.
The last two fall in the catastrophic category. Losing steerage leads Vann to abandon the boat off Casablanca in favor of a life raft. He and his crew are rescued by a Moroccan Coast Guard helicopter. The boat is rescued by salvagers, the crew of a German freighter that muffed (suspiciously, Vann thinks) an attempt to tow the boat. Vann eventually gets the boat back, a process requiring large expenditures of cash and aggravation. Through its telling readers may be tempted to pull for salvagers, if only to forestall further disasters.
Among those is the ultimate disaster—sinking, the result of hull failure that, given the shoddiness of so much about the boat, should not have come as a shock. The author assures us nonetheless that the hull was built of top-quality steel and passed an inspection. “I hadn’t really counted on cracks in the hull,” he writes.
It seems he loves his 100-ton ketch. I can relate to that. He wouldn’t be the first sailor to fall so hard for the sailboat of his dreams that he loses the ability to think clearly. Vann is a smart guy (we know because he tells us so in the book, pointing out that he was high school valedictorian and a prodigious winner of awards at Stanford University) who holds a 200-ton U.S. Coast Guard master’s license and has sailed more than 40,000 miles, and should be an appealing character. We’d like to root for him in his quest to sail his boat away from the shackles of the working world to a free life of seafaring and writing. But readers are likely to find that the more he tells of his story, the more they want to hold their applause.
Vann is loath to take responsibility for his problems, which besides the aforementioned low points, include repeated hassles with customs officials, bankruptcy and threatened charges of criminal fraud. He distributes blame far and wide to, in no particular order: the freighter captain who he thinks tricked him into abandoning his boat; the Moroccan Coast Guard for sending a helicopter to rescue him instead of a towboat; venal customs agents; an obtuse California deputy attorney general who insists on prosecuting him for refusing to refund charterers’ payments; an employee who
didn’t pay bills properly; a boss who didn’t meet his expectations during a temporary stint in the dreaded working life; draconian credit card bill collectors and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Readers sympathetic to his plight may want to abandon ship themselves when they get to the part where he ridicules the seamanship of the Coast Guardsmen called out in foul conditions to get him and his benighted boat out of yet another scrape.
Vann may not come across as very likable in the book, but he must be irresistible in person, with charm and charisma to burn. He persuades friends, mainly folks who took his educational charters, to loan him hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance his folly. He confides that his story “became a kind of spiel as I learned that these people—sometimes without my even asking—were willing to loan me money.” One couple gives him $250,000. His mother pitches in with $60,000, In all, he raises $600,000 in private loans. Most of his lenders are stiffed when he declares bankruptcy. “Bankruptcy law is very generous to the debtor,” he notes.
This is one of the few books that actually generates sympathy for credit card companies. Vann treats credit cards as gift cards, the idea of paying for the purchases for which they’re used apparently a foreign concept. He maxes out four American Express cards to the tune of almost six figures, then seems surprised to have to report, “They wanted everything paid in full.” As the book ends, he notes he “racked up more than $60,000 on my wife’s credit cards, which would probably force her into bankruptcy.”
Well, it could have been worse for her. Obviously a brave and adventuresome woman, she is at her husband’s side when the boat sinks near the Virgin Islands. They watch it disappear from a dinghy. Vann writes, “There was an odd sense of relief.” For readers too, no doubt.
The relief, alas, is short lived. On the final page, Vann reveals he’s building another boat, a 90-foot aluminum catamaran. The disastrous career at sea continues.