Atlantic High Read Free Page B

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?
    Negative. And so we slipped out of Key West, and up the northwest channel toward the departure point for Dry Tortugas, the air conditioner in perfect working order, the crew flaunting its sea legs, the sky turned prussian blue. We dropped the anchor and cooked dinner, the stars coming out, a profusion of diamonds on a jeweler’s velvet, and a fresh wind came down from the northeast. At ten we set out for Dry Tortugas, due west sixty miles, the spinnaker up, coming in at dawn to the gloomy, isolated fort, most famous for having infamously detained the wretched Doctor Mudd to whose house, craving medical attention, the crippled, anonymous assassin hobbled haphazardly a few hours after firing a bullet into the head of Abraham Lincoln.
    From Dry Tortugas to Mujeres Island on the northeast of the Yucatan Peninsula the distance is, as I say, only 290 miles, the course 226 degrees. But in order to pursue this route, it would be required that you head directly into the Gulf Stream, which races up the Yucatan Channel and eases northeast, swirling around Cape San Antonio at the western tip of Cuba. Accordingly, it is advisable to cut your losses and sail south, say toward Bahía Honda, 100 miles away. From there to Mujeres Island it is about 220 miles, so that you have gone thirty miles out of your way but you avoid (at seven knots) a set (that is, a geographical slide) of as much as 100 miles. It is unfortunate that the winds are characteristically from the northeast so that you can’t even count, as a reward, on gliding home after working your way there; indeed, on the return passage
Cyrano
had miserable northeasterlies, with squalls and winds up to fifty miles an hour, heavy rains, and entirely too much togetherness with supertankers coming down in the opposite direction.
    Twenty-three hours after sailing our leisurely way from Tortugas, we descried the mountain tops of the western Sierra range. During the day we groped against the current in a windless overcast, straining by a radar that worked only intermittently to define the Cuban coastline. That night, still without wind, the radar suddenly elected to work brilliantly, and I put
Cyrano
on autopilot and, with my son, went forward into the huge, sybaritic cockpit and lay back on the settee that sprawls over half the area when the dining table is down, the autopilot controls in my hand.
    Outside it continued to drizzle. Inside it was dry, the radar blip-ping the little clusters of rain squalls, and with the autopilot we did what we could to maneuver around them, like a jet pilot operating in extreme slow motion, at 1/100th a jet’s speed. Occasionally, responding to the pressure of my thumb, the boat would turn left provocatively toward Cuba, and we would watch the radiais studiously; just before hitting twelve miles, with a switch of pressure the boat would turn east, even as the jaws