A Mile Down (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It does suck,” I said.

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

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

“What boat?” Nancy asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cheers, mate.”

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

“Well shit-o,” Nick said.

“Indeed,” I said.

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

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

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

“Oh great.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Can we take a look at the ram?”

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

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

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

“And how long was it off?”

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