Delivery Trip

The Adriatic · Before the apps · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

Oleg bought the boat in Greece the way some men propose marriage: quickly, publicly, and with enormous confidence about the future. She was eighteen metres of white fibreglass, twin diesels, a flybridge, cream leather that still smelled of the factory, and a name on the stern that Oleg meant to change the moment she reached Monaco. He showed me the photographs over lunch, one after another, the way other men show you their children. I said the right things. I even meant most of them.

“We could have her delivered,” Oleg said. “There are companies. Two professionals, a week, a fee I refuse to say out loud.” He put the phone face down on the tablecloth. “Or we could deliver her ourselves.”

I pointed out, reasonably, that he had never delivered a boat. He pointed out, just as reasonably, that I had very little experience of passages either, so we would be learning together, which was cheaper and much more fun. There was a flaw in this logic somewhere. I looked for it all through dessert, and I want you to know I looked hard. I did not find it in time.

There were no apps then. The weather lived on a website that refreshed once a day, around noon, like a newspaper nobody delivered. On the morning we were meant to leave, we sat in a café in Corfu with a laptop and a very slow connection and waited for twelve o’clock as if for an oracle. When the page finally loaded, there it was: a purple swirl over the sea to the west, the shape a child draws when you ask for a bad mood. “It’s not coming at us,” Oleg said, tracing its path with a finger that left a smudge on the screen. “It’s going there. We are going here. We slip through behind it.” I studied the arrows for a long time. The arrows agreed with Oleg. Arrows usually do, at noon.

We left in sunshine. For the first hours the sea was the colour of the Greek flag and the boat behaved like a brochure. Oleg stood on the flybridge in sunglasses and a new cap with the builder’s logo on it and said things like “feel how she handles”. I made coffee in the galley and felt how she handled, which was beautifully, and I allowed myself a thought I have since learned to distrust: that sometimes the cheap plan and the good plan are the same plan.

Around five the colour changed. Not suddenly, which would have been easier to take seriously, but the way a face changes in a meeting when the numbers are worse than expected. Blue went to grey, grey went to slate, and the wind came round from exactly where the website had promised it would not. I noticed that Oleg had stopped talking about handling. By the time we were in the mouth of the Adriatic, Italy somewhere ahead, Greece somewhere behind, neither of them visible, the swell had stopped being scenery and started being an argument.

Then it was dark, properly dark, the kind that does not exist on land. Rain came sideways. Lightning showed us the sea in single photographs, each one worse than the last: a wall of water, a trough, another wall. For years I told people the waves were ten metres. Eventually I looked up the records, which was a mistake, because they had been three, perhaps four. I have decided the records are wrong. At the time they were the size of buildings, and the boat climbed each one slowly, hung at the top as if considering its options, and then fell.

Oleg was sick first, then me, then Oleg again, with a kind of competitive thoroughness. We hardly spoke. We were making a few knots, sometimes less, and the only thing in the universe that mattered was the sound of the two engines beneath us. I have never listened to anything so carefully in my life. Not a contract, not a speech, not music. Every change of pitch went straight to my stomach. When a propeller lifted clear on a crest and the engine raced, we both stopped breathing until it bit again. At one point I caught myself bargaining with a diesel engine. Quietly, but in full sentences.

Somewhere in there a forward hatch began to leak, a thin, steady, insolent stream across the cabin floor. I wedged towels against it and held them there with my foot, a technique no sailing school teaches. Oleg tried the VHF. “Any station, any station.” He gave our position, or what we believed was our position. The radio answered with static, patient and enormous. He tried again. The static was the only voice out there, and it had nothing to say to us. Then Oleg said, very quietly, with his hand still on the microphone, “I’m frightened.” I was grateful. It saved me the trouble of saying it first.

We did not know if we would make it. That was the plain fact, and there was nobody to argue with it. We took turns at the lower helm, one steering into the dark, one watching the gauges, and we talked about stupid things to stop the fear filling the cabin: the best lunch either of us had ever eaten, what Oleg would rename her, whether a cap with a logo could be returned. I kept one hand on a grab rail and the other on the edge of the chart table, and I felt the hull shudder through my palms every time she came down. She was new. Nobody knew yet what she was made of. Not the builder, not the owner, and certainly not the two men inside her.

At three in the morning, in the bottom of a trough that went on longer than the others, a red light came on beside the port engine gauge and an alarm began, a thin electronic wail, exactly the note of something expensive about to stop. Oleg looked at me. I looked at the light. I remember thinking, with great clarity, that I had never finished my coffee from the afternoon and now never would. Then the lightning came again and we saw the next wave, taller than the rest, grey and unhurried, and the boat, one engine screaming and the other still turning, began to climb.

What held: the harbour master's word for a boat, the surgeon's for a vein?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.