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Atlantic High
 About the Book
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Preview
Book One
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.
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