A Mile Down (11 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We will see what we have,” he said.

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

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

“I have no rudder,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to let go of the radio again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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