Atlantic High (2 page)

Owning boats is costly in a second sense of the word. You can’t rusticate them—as you might, say, an atelier. I have a little such studio, and when I reach Switzerland I am fifteen minutes separated from cruising speed rpm. The paints are all there, the dust on the canvases can be made to disappear in seconds. The brushes, cleaned, are good again this year and will be, a dozen years down the line. (My painting companion in Switzerland is David Niven, and today he uses the identical brushes he bought in Hollywood before the Second World War. When he told me this he rejected my flattering suggestion that perhaps they really dated back to when he had gone ‘round the world in eighty days.) Everything, put simply, is just sitting there—canvases, turpentine, linseed oil, easels, sketch pads.

Boats require constant tending. I speak now of wooden boats and steel boats, not having experienced the others, though I flatly doubt the chimera of the “maintenance-free boat” even if you stick one in hermetically sealed glass. (Beard-McKie—
“Outfitting:
Series of maintenance tasks performed on boats ashore during good-weather weekends in spring and summer months to make them ready for winter storage.”)

Foremost to worry about when owning a boat ready to go to sea is, of course, the expense. But if you seek to mitigate this burden by chartering out your boat, administrative burdens are added to economic burdens. A week seldom goes by without a problem of personnel; or another requiring a decision whether to replace this or that piece of equipment, revise that insurance policy, accept a charter that wishes to leave the boat in Haiti…. Was it worth it all?

I resolved, the summer after sailing my
Cyrano
to Spain (on an unforgettable cruise), to probe whether the same spirit that had taken us airborne across the Atlantic could be recaptured. So I reassembled most of the crew. This time I would take her to Mexico. During that trip I decided that on its completion I would experiment with a crewless boat. I would cut expenses by paying a splendid Cuban-American carpenter, who had done work on the boat in preparation for its transatlantic adventure, to spend a half day per week aboard, running the motor, turning on the lights, doing a little varnishing—that sort of thing. I would stop offering the boat for charter on a daily, weekend, or weekly basis, as I had been doing for nine years. That had required maintaining full-time a captain, cook, mate and steward. I would offer it fully staffed, but only for charters of ninety-day duration or longer. I talked to Reggie about it during the Mexican trip. We would see.

I kept a brief journal of that cruise.

There is something especially alluring in sailing to a
foreign
country. But no foreign country is finally exotic if its natives speak English: Thus a trip to Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, though there is much to be said for it, is not quite the same thing as it would be if M. Lévesque and his Parti Québécois practiced a little irredentism and recaptured Fort Louisburg. One of the charms of the Leeward Islands is the need to accommodate to a different language virtually every time you throw out your anchor. Sailing to Europe meets all the tests, but is something of an enterprise. Sailing to Yucatan is less than a transatlantic labor. Indeed, Miami-Yucatan is less than Newport-Bermuda. But you achieve the feeling of having slipped away to a remote and thoroughly foreign country, and as a matter of fact you have.

When you dwell on the distance between the Dry Tortugas (the final U.S. departure point) and Mujeres Island (the nearest Mexican point of land)—290 miles—you need to fight the feeling that your outing has been on the order of driving from San Diego to Tijuana. It is more than that for several reasons. Not the least of these is that lying in wait for you if your attention flags, just a few miles to the south, for over one half the distance, is the dragon Fafnir, guarding the forbidden treasures of Cuba. How far offshore from Cuba, I asked my friendly patron at the State Department, must I stay?

“They assert three miles of territorial sovereignty, and twelve for customs,” I was told; but it does not do to tease them in the matter, as Lloyd Bucher, commanding the
Pueblo
, did the North Koreans. On
no
account slip past the twelve-mile limit.

“What happens if you do?”

There’s the rub.
Anything
can happen. One day a little Cuban coast guard vessel will politely usher you back out of Gulag waters. But another day the same vessel will take you to port, seize your boat, and submit you to a large dose of the People’s Hospitality, for days, maybe even weeks, depending on the temperature of international relations and the caprice of the Maximum Caudillo. The mere presence of Castro over one hundred miles or so of coastline is bracing, in the morbid sense that the Berlin Wall is bracing.

Although determined that on setting out from Miami aboard my beloved
Cyrano
the ship would be totally equipped for the journey, foreknowledge that we would be passing by Key West encouraged a kind of nonchalance inappropriate to the preceding excursion one year earlier when the identical crew, save one substitute, set out from Miami bound for Marbella in Spain. This time we knew, subconsciously, that any egregious act of neglect could be corrected ninety miles down the road. I had my ritual bout with technology, which struts its imperfections with special flair aboard
Cyrano
. This year it was the single side-band radiotelephone. This wonderful machine we had used with extravagant delight going across the Atlantic. But no sooner had the vessel returned than the telephone company announced a new rate structure. The rate had been a dollar or two per call plus the local rate, so that a casual phone call from, say, Longitude
25°
to Longitude 75° was something of a bargain. No more. The item escaped our attention until, after our Christmas cruise, the telephone bill came in, which I returned to the phone company with a cheerful note suggesting they oil their computers and send us a fresh bill.

The awful news transpired by return mail. The rate is now a flat five dollars
per minute
, and that’s how much it is even if you are only just out of reach of the VHF channel, say thirty miles out of Miami. Hardly the way to encourage the diffuser graces of rhetoric. I put in a call to the vice president of AT&T in charge of extortion, and was dismayed to learn that the new rate schedule had indeed been approved by the FCC, upon presentation of the financial records that documented the loss sustained by the company on its high-seas operations. Moreover, said the telephone company official icily, the ocean telephone business is not a government-protected monopoly. Anyone can get into the act, and in fact a station in New Orleans, WLO, has set up an antenna, and we were welcome to hire
its
facilities if we wanted to, and found them cheaper. Accordingly, I had given instructions to install a WLO crystal.

By the time we finally told the technicians (there were two) who had fussed over the installation for four hours, “Never mind, please just let us begin our trip,” they had mutilated our beautiful telephone, so that a) the emergency antenna would not transmit on the crystal that goes to the Coast Guard, b) five of the crystals never worked again, and c) we never did raise WLO.

The other problem was the air conditioner. The heat in Miami in early June can be fearful, and in 1976 was.
Cyrano’s
professional captain accosted the problem by the simple expedient of telling me that the air conditioner was working just fine, putting up his hand against the grille, where the milk-warm air dribbled out, and then withdrawing it sharply, as if taking care to guard against frostbite.

A word on the subject: A passage to Yucatan in June is a passage into the hottest latitude on earth, and if you are disinclined to suffer from oppressive heat, you should either not go in that season, or else you should equip your boat with air conditioning—which isn’t that expensive these days. The idea of an air-conditioned sailboat, I judge from published comments about my previous book,
Airborne
, strikes some as indefensibly ostentatious or effete, raising the question: Why? Protection against the weather is, after food, the most elementary biological need. It is as perplexing to me that a sailor intending to spend time in the tropics should not wish to air-condition his boat as it would be should he not desire his boat to be leakproof. Sure, the generator presents a problem; but so does one’s preference for a boat that doesn’t sink. It is one thing to say that a particular sailboat is designed in such a way as to make it impossible to adapt it to air conditioning: that is good, plain, responsible talk, to which the good, plain, responsible reply is: Don’t sail in that sailboat to Yucatan, especially not in June of 1976.

One day, diligent in my pursuit of navigational precision in order to keep a safe distance from the Cuban shore, I brandished the sextant for the noon sight and found myself contorting my body in order to keep the sun on the horizon. I looked reproachfully in the direction of my son at the helm, expecting to see him chatting away while the boat (we were under power, no wind) did lazy figure eights. But he was grimly engaged in keeping his course, and I found myself examining my sextant, wondering why the sun was executing circles around the horizon mirror. That is the generic reflex, like kicking your television set when my friend Howard Cosell gets out of hand. But my eyes suddenly focused on the altitude registered on my sextant and calculated it was ninety degrees! I looked at the almanac and, indeed, the sun at that moment was—
directly overhead!
Since there was no wind, and the humidity, not unexpectedly, was high, we could lay claim, however fleetingly, to being located on the hottest latitude on earth at the hottest moment of the day. I went below, closed the hatch, turned on the air conditioner, and recorded the event.

The passage from Miami to Key West is insufficiently celebrated. It is the ideal way to prepare for an ocean voyage. What you have is about ninety miles of water protected from the ocean by a string of shoals and beaches, assuring you lakelike security from swells and waves—but a stretch of water open enough to receive the full stimulus of the wind. Since going down Hawk Channel (as they call it) the course sets off to the south, then eases off toward the west-southwest like a slow golf slice, you are nicely situated when the wind blows from the east, first to proceed close-hauled, then gradually to relax the sails. It is a dream sail, permitting you to stop anywhere, throw out the anchor, and declare this your own private, landlocked sanctuary.

We left Miami at
11:30
, ran aground smack in the middle of Stiltsville Channel at
12:15
, called the Coast Guard at
12:16
, which appeared (most obligingly as always) at
12:30
, in a large whaler under the command of a bright and energetic young man who, however, was visibly embarrassed inasmuch as, after attending to our needs, he had to call the Coast Guard himself a) on our radio, because his didn’t work, to report b) that his motor now didn’t work. We kept him company until a mother ship arrived.

There were no other problems, but when two days later we weighed anchor to pull out of Key West, we got no farther than 100 yards when a furious rain squall broke over us, cutting visibility to zero. We quickly dropped anchor and waited the forty-five minutes until it passed. Then, preparing once again to pull away, we were arrested by an electric bullhorn from a police car on shore calling my name—was “Mr. William Buckley” aboard? An emergency telephone call! A dramatic political interruption! At the pay station I learned that Ronald Reagan, running hard against Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, had in the preceding twenty-four hours been made to sound as if he proposed to send the Marines to Angola and Rhodesia. An expert on the Rhodesian situation, a friend who gave my name, had proffered his aid. Question: Is he an okay guy? Yes, I said to Reagan’s aide, cleverly concealing that what was on my mind (it is ever so at sea) was not civil war in Rhodesia, but: Would there be a succession of squalls during the night?