Not all books about sailing on the sea need read as though they were written by stereotypical, devoted yachties. Nobody really wants to read books written by folk besotted with their own jargon (''reefing the Cunningham eye'' and such like), pre-occupied with how much money their hobby is wasting, or determined to turn into an obsessive bossy-boots the moment they leave shore. Even the limitless, bottomless, endless tedium of the sea can yield a few memorable stories.

Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, may be 174 years old, but still seems fresh and vivid. Eric Newby's The Last Grain Race, a mere 58 years young, can make the last voyage of a four-masted steel barque seem like a distinctive, worthy rite of passage. Great expectations may therefore be held for David Vann's factual account of his troubles and travails at sea. Vann has written two edgy, gritty novels (Caribou Island and Goat Mountain); horrible, sudden surprises at sea would seem well within his literary repertoire. A specialist at placing his characters under acute, bizarre forms of stress should be able to account for nautical pressures on himself.

Much of A Mile Down is just as good as might be hoped, as Vann chronicles his attempts to cope with debts, disappointments, larcenous contractors, fear of failure, then - once out on the water - with leaks, storms, waves, broken parts and interminable repairs, until he finally encounters a lethal counter-clockwise, cyclonic movement in the Caribbean. In his ridiculously boring film All Is Lost, Robert Redford dealt with only a small share of Vann's cascade of woes before abandoning ship. Vann is made of sterner, and more stubborn, stuff. He does not depict himself as a particularly admirable yachtie. He is always grizzling, he bears grudges, he excoriates his enemies (whether a California accountant or a Gibraltar chandlery), and he is consistently strict about those who let him down. That last is a depressingly long list. Vann seems belatedly to have absorbed some of the simple lessons taught by this book, those ones about not necessarily buying a boat under construction, not purchasing one well beyond your budget, and not rolling over excessive loans. Those may not be particularly romantic or exotic points to note, but doing so early on could have made Vann's life immeasurably easier.

Any fan of Vann's novels (and I am certainly one) would expect him to deal crisply with scenes of action, to ratchet up suspense, to milk incidents for drama and sometimes melodrama too, and to focus only on the most telling features in his characters' make-up. All those tricks Vann performs well. The storms (literal and emotional) which Vann confronts may not contain the punch of Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, but they are remarkably recalled and deeply scary to boot. Vann might have longed even for dry land as perilously queasy as that on Caribou Island or up Goat Mountain.

Unhappily, yachtie gobbledegook is allowed to intrude at a few critical moments. Those less enraptured by yachting than Vann might be mystified at his descriptions of caulking the screws, arranging twin notches on the lower spreaders, adjusting for siphon breaks in the engine, fretting about bringing faring down low enough, or trying to rectify a teak platform on a steel bowsprit that has been blown off its bolts. Surely lay terms can tell a reader about bits of wood, steel and aluminium?

A Mile Down does include occasional, lyrical digressions, when Vann observes the light beige and pink of Malta at sunrise, or the beauty of Lycian tombs on the rocky bluff of Tlos. That is not enough, however, to compensate for the horrors recounted in this book. A reader might be tempted to abandon David Vann for Derek Walcott, a writer with a deep and abiding love of the sea, but one who often observes rocks and waves and tides and swells from a safe vantage point on land.