Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  I need sun. Not to darken my skin, because in fact the doctor says that sun is the enemy of fair skin and I must use something called Total Eclipse #15. I need the sun, and the time, to discover which way to point in order to effect a rendezvous at the Azores. If in this matter I should fail, the reader may deduce, two weeks hence, that I am absent without leave. The moon is getting lean right now, but will flower again; and when it is half-bright, it gives you a horizon, and on some magical moments you can combine that horizon with the north star, and before you know it, you have your latitude, even as Columbus had that, and only that, having little idea of the time, and yet managed to discover our wonderful country.

  The chances, then, are overwhelming that, like MacArthur, I shall return. In the meantime, the Republic is on probation.

  8

  The following leg was uneventful, if you take into account only the weather. The most drastic literary compression of external conditions and social circumstances was Van’s formal entry, “3 days perfect sailing, 7 days winds 0-10, powering 75 percent of the time. No casualties. Many dolphins. Much swimming. Radiotelephone, no work. Occupations, varied.”

  I lean, for a little while, on Tony Leggett’s journal.

  Tony’s posture toward his journal is at all times dutiful. Clearly he considers it a matter of personal honor to confess to his journal when he is feeling less than …whole. (“For the next three or four days I was a little unsteady.”)

  During the first few days, when we had the fine sailing wind, Tony took leisurely thought to compare the experience of the helmsman, on duty and off, in a boat the size of Sealestial by contrast with the racing boat, only a little more than half Sealestial’s length, Tony had previously sailed across that Atlantic:

  On board Imp at night during a solo watch, I always got a feeling of tremendous vulnerability. Imp’s deck was absolutely flush. There was a well, about two feet deep, for your feet. The dodger over the main hatch had only one purpose, to keep spray out of the hatch when it was open in rough conditions. It was not considered a means of sheltering anyone on deck. Therefore going on watch at night was something I always had to prepare for, mentally and physically: the wind came right at you off the water, unobstructed; and the flat, open deck made one feel very exposed. The opposite—going off watch—was a tremendous joy. To see a light below through the companionway as Robert got ready to relieve me was very heartening. The passage from deck to cabin was marked. Down below, the air was still and warm. The light was usually weak, but it illuminated just enough so that the cabin felt like a cocoon. Finally to crawl into the sleeping bag and wedge myself between the bunk and the hull was bliss. The bag soon warmed up, and the water rushing past only inches away was both soothing and an indication of how fast and far we were going. I remember thinking one night how crazy it was to imagine this little cocoon of warmth and light, out there bobbing around a thousand miles from the nearest land, in an environment totally inhospitable to man.

  On Sealestial I get very little of those sorts of emotions. For one thing Sealestial is too big to seem vulnerable in the open ocean, and the cockpit and deck layout provide lots of protection from the elements. Going on watch, therefore, involves none of the trepidation of a much smaller boat. For some reason, I find the most disturbing activity at night is taking a leak. The leeward rail aft of the cockpit has sheets, backstay tails, and vang lines crisscrossing it, making secure footing very difficult. There is also the need at the end to lean far outboard to miss the wide gunwale. To do this at night with an irregular swell, pitch black, no moon, and especially the fear of going overboard with the autopilot on and no one on deck is more disconcerting to me than it logically should be.

  Going below, then, has less of the sharp contrast than it did on Imp. The cabin is warm, and well lighted, and inviting, to be sure, but it misses out on that siege mentality so evident on Imp. It is even difficult to hear the boat’s passage through the water when down in the saloon.

  All this is true. A fortiori, the passage across the Atlantic on the 16-foot Tinker belle was a closer-to-nature-experience than on Imp. Sailing aboard the Sealestial is different from sailing aboard a kayak. But it requires dormant imagination to forget that the Sealestial, for all its apparent mass, stem to stern, is only as long as eleven Tony Leggetts stretched end to end.

  What hit us, after the third day, was something very nearly like the doldrums. I think I remember that we always had the mainsail up, but that is easy to do if you sheet it down tight so that there is no lateral movement whatever in the boom, and vang it down to discourage floppiness in the sail itself. But it was only every now and again that there was wind enough to justify hoisting the genoa. The days crawled by. Van deduced that the chances now were very nearly gone that we would reach the Azores in time to make his connection to Switzerland for the conference he had contingently agreed to attend.

  So what?

  “We haven’t made the expected time, and the conference in Switzerland looks doubtful. Tant pis and as Agnew said, if you’ve seen one conference you’ve seen ’em all.” Van is by temperament impatient, by philosophical discipline, stoical. How to pass the time on watch? “I had the 2400 to 0400 watch with Danny last night and we played double-ended Ghost which allows for adding a letter before as well as after the word. The four hours were absorbed very quickly and I recommend it to all semiliterate mariners in search of a time killer when reading is impossible.”

  Van permitted his thoughts to roam. He got around to describing a typical day in the doldrums. “The Muses rarely lyricize over the empty bowel, but they should. My diet of roughage has paid off, crapwise. Our routine has become routine. Everyone flops around, above or below, in the morning after breakfast reading or writing. Not too much chatter. Then Swim Time. Gregarious lunch in the after cockpit, naps in the afternoon. More reading. Swim. Read. And cocktails at 1900, dinner at 1930, talk escalates and then fades. Night night.” He acknowledged the special problems that disadvantaged us during those languorous hours: “In the Problems-of-the-Idle-Rich-Department: Reg and I keep bumping into each other while swimming which leads to comments like, ‘This ocean is just not big enough for the two of us,’ or, ‘The water is refreshing but there are just too many people.’ “

  What were the aggravations, excitements, irritations, fantasies? Tony addressed himself to these. For instance, there was the aesthetically distressing matter of Danny’s indescribably unattractive cap, his teddy bear:

  Danny has a horrid, dirty, once-white plastic and acetate visor baseball cap which says Something White Water on the front. Bill was desperate to get Danny to stop wearing it. The first solution obviously was to give him another hat to wear, but Bill was shocked for two days when he realized he couldn’t find the five hats which Pat had so carefully packed for him: a) because they were such useful hats, and b) because he could not therefore give Danny a substitute. [Yesterday] Bill came on deck in the late afternoon, triumphantly bearing his five hats: a blue Greek sailor hat, a brown Greek sailor hat, a Black Diamond Sou’Wester, and two strange Australian sun hats. Danny got the brown Greek sailor hat and I hope we don’t see his white baseball cap again. Bill’s first attempt had been a plaintive [Tony meant, “seductive”] innocent ‘Danny, let me look at what size your hat is,’ but I guess he (Danny) had heard that tone of voice before and all Bill got was a ‘Oh-no-you-don’t-Bill.’ “

  Tony is too young to have taken in the street wisdom of the soldier, and knew not the dangers of volunteering:

  As well as ship spotter I have another shipboard task. I found the tapes in tremendous disarray, and decided to rectify the situation. Since there are at least sixty tapes and they were all confused, it took me a goodly long time to straighten things out. I arranged them chronologically with Bach getting a big drawer all to himself. In gratitude for my meritorious service, the Master appointed me the keeper of the tapes. Now this position involves some selection also. Problems arose immediately. I put on some Strauss waltzes whic
h I thought were perfectly appropriate for a coolish midafternoon listening session down below. While I was on deck for just a moment Bill switched it hastily to something a little more baroque [Tony meant, “a little less awful”]. Come on, everybody knows that Bach is O.K. for the evening, but not for midafternoon.”

  But then I am not everybody, as from time to time I was required, by example, to remind Tony and such other philistines as didn’t know it already.

  Probably a single volume—the novel The Shipkiller—was most immediately responsible for such surrounding sense of spookdom as there was weighing on us—that and the shark sighted a few minutes after (or was it before?) one of our daily swims. The novel went the rounds and I think everyone (myself excepted) read it. It is an apparently engrossing story in which a huge freighter runs over a little sloop innocently cruising across the Atlantic, killing the wife but leaving the husband alive to plan—Grrrr!—a galvanizing and satisfying revenge. The story gripped the imagination….

  With all this talk of supertankers [Tony later wrote about a ship’s party] running down sailboats, it seemed funny for us all to be sitting down below in the late afternoon, with the hatches closed, and no one keeping watch but the autopilot. How would that have sounded at the admiral’s inquest? “Well, Mr. Buckley, where were you and your entire crew at the time of the collision?” [Tony had the admiral leading with his chin, because the inescapable response would have been, “Where were you, admiral, and your entire bloody navy that’s supposed to maintain the freedom of the seas?”]

  Halfway to Faial, yielding to the entreaties of Christopher, we took immense pains to empty the Zodiac, fill it with air, lower it into the water, winch down the outboard motor onto it: all this in order to photograph the Sealestial at sea. It happened that during the operation a range of clouds descended to the south, occluding our view. The creaky motor was energetically primed, and in a few moments Christopher, David and I (I had in hand the idiot-proof moving picture camera, entrusted to me by Mark with solemn instructions to film our vessel from a remote distance) were ready to cast off—when the evanescent mist suddenly became dimly transparent, so that we could descry through it, five miles off, a freighter traveling roughly in the opposite direction. Van quickly improvised a scenario: David and Christopher should proceed at full speed with the Zodiac, through the cloud, toward the freighter. I would follow in bathing trunks, towed on water skis, sextant in hand, held tightly to the eye. We would zoom past the stern of the freighter, I would momentarily drop my arm, look up pointing in the direction we were traveling, and shout out, “Azores?” If memory serves, Christopher took a picture of us reacting to Van’s proposed safari …

  Inevitably the end came, and analytical wits, unused for so long, devoted themselves to contriving the means of deciding which was the likeliest moment of landfall. A day or so earlier I had meditated that to pull in at Faial at four or five in the morning would be thoughtlessly—aggressively—antisocial; and so made appropriate adjustments, duly recorded by Tony.

  Another brilliant, cloudless, airless day. After lunch, with the noon position in mind, and wanting to arrive in Horta at a nice reasonable hour, Bill decided to goose the engine a bit. From the usual 1,750, we put it up to 2,000. After hardly a minute, Allen appeared in the hatchway and casually looked at the knot meter, the sails, and the engine rev counter. “Skipper ask for an increase?” We nodded yes. He smiled and went back below. Three minutes later David came up and repeated the procedure. What a conscientious and careful crew Sealestial has.

  And then, the final suspense on this leg, the details faithfully recorded by Tony:

  Everything focused a bit at lunchtime because we all put in our figures for the pool. The central group of the Azores is an interesting landfall because you can see the island of Pico for such a long time. With its height of 7,600 feet it can be seen theoretically for 103 miles. How long did it take us, and how many computers and inputs from Reg to figure that one out! So, sitting there at lunch about 80 miles out, we should have been able to see it. This process gets pretty interesting now. Bill will give an approximate position (I mean a fix, I guess) and everyone does their figuring. I thought it was a pretty useless exercise, because our sighting of Pico depended entirely on the humidity in the atmosphere since there weren’t any clouds to speak of. So, I just advanced the ETL (estimate time of landfall) a few hours from the time right then. I felt pretty outclassed by some of the problem-solving I learned [about] later. Bill was counting on the fact that the mountain would not be observed until sunset, and then we would only see it at the extreme range of the lights listed on the chart, say fifteen to nineteen miles. Pretty smart! But talk about sophistication. Reg asked the Navicomp what sunset would be at our position and then got an ETL by taking the time when the sun would provide the maximum horizontal illumination which would reflect back from the mountain at us. I can dig it. After that, I wouldn’t trust anybody else’s calculations.

  So, we scribbled down our ETL on bits of paper napkins and on the clothes clips which had been holding the tablecloth. Our official pool tip sheet was a bunch of bits of napkin with four laundry clips holding them together.

  Mine was 1600, which meant that it extended to 1730, because Chris’s time was 1900. After my watch was over, I slapped on some Total Eclipse and treaded up to my perch on the spreaders. I tried lots of different positions, and kept myself aimed by looking around. There was a surprising amount of plastic containers and floating polypro line and other stuff, but goddam, there wasn’t any sign of Pico. People were egging me on and asking questions like, “Have you seen anything yet, Tony?” Did they think I’d just sit and keep a sighting of Pico all to myself?

  I came down a little disgruntled with the whole deal, and enjoyed watching Chris pace the deck while his appointed hour flew by. The ranting and raving seems so futile, even ludicrous, to everyone but the person who knows that the sighting will show up then.

  Chris resigned himself to defeat and exactly two minutes later, Allen came running back from the bow to the cockpit, “There it is! There it is!” And sure enough, in one of the breaks in the clouds, something that could only be a mountain peak stood right up. I’m sure that I had been looking right at it many times while I was up the mast; it’s just that I had been concentrating on the horizon, rather than 10 degrees off it.

  Chris was pissed off. To lose the pool wasn’t bad, since five people had to lose it, but to lose it by two minutes, and knowing that it must have been in view before that, but worst of all, to lose by two minutes to Reggie! Reg laughed, commiserated, and acted as if he had known exactly when it was coming up. Horizontal beams from the sun lighting it up? My ass. It was just sitting there, right up above the clouds.

  Danny’s demeanor, during the first days out from Bermuda, was unchanged. His log entries continued to specify, and to vibrate. “Missed moon sight today—was in bunk reading Shipkiller, just now getting interesting. Feel very clumsy, off balance kind of thing.” Or, “Log 1614.0 Course 096 degrees. Speed 7.2. Wind 10 knots from 150 degrees. So much perfect conditions it makes you sick.” Again Danny, au naturel: “Since 24.00 I’ve eaten three apples, two candy bars, three glasses of water and one juice; two cereals and one beer. And I still have one hour 45 minutes left.” The next entry read, “Add one cup coffee to above. Do not eat soggy steaks. Reg, if the moon shows itself, sight it please. Also the sun.”

  The party was today. The day before, Diane had asked me when might one safely say that we had come halfway from our point of departure in the Virgins to our destination in Spain, and I said, Tomorrow: June 13, Friday. The preparations were extensive. They included the decoration of the entire saloon, party hats, fake noses, whiskers, noisemakers—the whole bit. A picture of the animated grotesquerie not only survives, it was published in People magazine about a month later. That was the reticulated excitement: the third act, entirely unprogrammed, would be produced by Danny, who had announced exuberantly that to reciprocate the crew’s party, h
e was giving Judy, the chef, a night off. He would himself cook steak for us all on a broiler slung over the sea astern, dangling from lines attached to a dinghy davit.

  Danny is a born gourmet. I know no one who, with so little formal training, reacts more exultantly to choice food and wine; and on this night, midway from America to Europe, he was resolved to make the meal truly memorable, the more so since (gently in conversation, ardently in his journal) he had registered misgivings about the quotidian fare. After finally succeeding in lighting the waterlogged coals, which achievement came an hour or so after virtually the whole ship’s company had been well lit at the party, Danny approached me—I was below in my stateroom, snatching afew minutes of Henry James’s The American (which I gave up on at about page 150—could ever the social pace have been so slow as to countenance the attractions, so excruciatingly recalcitrant, of the American?). Danny said he wanted to talk to me “about something.” Danny is chronically reluctant to impose. “If you have time, I mean.” Manifestly, time was what I had most of that day, and the succeeding fourteen days. I said, to my son Christopher’s oldest friend and to my own dear friend, of course; and he replied that perhaps right after dinner would be ideal, because right now he would be needing to tend his steaks continuously.