Atlantic High Read Free

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