Atlantic High Read Free Page A

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