Airborne (1976) is an account of “The Big One”, Bill et al.’s 1975 sail from Miami, FL to Gibraltar. The title confused me at first, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it - what lifts a boat's sails and propels it through the water?
I should start off with an apology - the below is not worthy of the book. This is not false modesty but just a punt up front: if I reproduced every section or explored every bit of it that was worth discussing, we'd essentially have a post longer than the book itself. Rather than blog anything about it, I should just send you a copy. As this is impractical and as I'm now three books deep in this Personal Adventures On Land and At Sea business, we'll just forge on.
All pictures taken from my phone and cropped in Paint - the usual high-tech NASA precision the world's come to expect from Dog Star Omnibus.
GETTING STARTED
As this is the first of the sailing books - which is a silly way for me to put it, really, as such was not how the author presented it or how it was received - there's an appropriate amount of background and personal history. Reproducing some previously-written pieces from Yachting and Racing World (including a hilarious stretch of when Bill first purchased Cyrano, the boat they'll take across the Atlantic) the book also utilizes the journals kept by all members of the crew.
I didn't collect too much of that - see disclaimers above - but this is the first time we meet Bill's gang, including Christo (aka Christopher Buckley, his song/ the author and editor) and Daniel Merrit (family friend and sailing life partner), whose entries provide much of the novel's charm. They are the entries of young men and contrast nicely against the perspectives of the elders of the rest of the crew: Bill (fifty years old in 1975), Van Galbraith (forty-eight), Reggie Stoops, (also fifty), and Katherine "Auntie Bill" Taylor Finucane, Bill's sister-in-law (fifty-five.) Christo's in particular (can I just call him Chris? No? Consistency matters? So it goes.) is great because his entries are of the same voice as Steaming to Bamboola, written around this time, and that's a fine-tuned voice-zone to be in. I wish they'd put that book back in print.
We met Van before and will again. Reggie is here, "soft-spoken, imperturbable Reggie," beloved by all and who has the reputation of being able to fix or jury-rig anything. He and Auntie Bill - I don't recall how she got that nickname - provide the emotional and temperamental ballast for the voyage, from all accounts.
"(Auntie) Bill was married at seventeen, honeymooned on an extensive trip around South America with her lawyer-husband, spending December 7th, 1941, in a fuel supply naval vessel at Pearl Harbor. (She) got into the habit of doing volunteer work in her husband's long absences, and continued to do so after the war after their first child was born. (...) I know her to have acted selfishly only once. She returned from The Big One (and) was astonished to find husband and daughter and friends utterly uncurious about her forty-four-hundred-mile trip across the Atlantic in a sailboat. 'The most they gave me was about two minutes,' she later told me indignantly over the phone. 'I went down to the national meeting of the Red Cross (which she headed in Vancouver), went to the door, locked it, put the key in my pocket, and said 'Nobody's going to leave this room until I tell you about my sail across the Atlantic!' I talked nonstop for one hour and five minutes." I wish she had written her talk down in the journal she was supposed to keep, and that I had it here."
THE BOATS
I didn't grab a picture of Bill (Buckley)'s first racing boat, the Panic. But his next was the Suzy Wong:
before settling on Cyrano, shown up there docked in the Azores, 60 ft long, 54 at the waterline, "with an extraordinary 18 feet of bowsprit (...) 17 1/2 feet of beam, tapering back to about thirteen feet at the transom where two stout davits hold up the tender. Acres and acres of deck space. And below, an upright piano." And that was before his renovations.
He eventually sells Cyrano, and even the one he replaced that with (Patito) years and years later. You can read the entire history of these boats here, and it's worth doing so. Airborne is as much a tribute to Cyrano as to its captain and crew.
THE ITINERARY
Miami to Bermuda to Horta (the Azores) to Gibraltar (by way of glimpsing the Portuguese coast).
SOME THINGS FROM THE TRIP
The autopilot and Buckley Entertainment System (his elaborate plan to entertain aboard with videocassettes) didn’t work.No one can figure out why. (Best guess: “the generator is producing slightly offbeat power, notwithstanding that the voltmeter, at all points of contact shows pulse, heartbeat, vital organs, sight, vision, and reflexes absolutely normal. One more mystery.”) And to think the electrical gremlins all happened in the Bermuda Triangle!
“My frustration was such that I have suggested to my companions that on arriving at Marbella we all depart instantly with our cassette-player, television, and tapes to a motel and there watch ten straight hours of Upstairs, Downstairs followed by dinner, followed by ten straight hours of War and Peace. Never mind; it was a cool idea, says Danny, grinning, as he put away the various wires for the last time."
They did have quite bad luck with electronics, though. “The radar, the autopilot, the batteries, the motor, the generator, the RDF, the loran, the chronometer, the barometer, and the sextant. * The factual errors in the instruction book for the HP-65 seemed almost a diversion. I need now only to discover a mistake in the Almanac.”
* Actually, the astigmatizer in the sextant, which is a “prism you bring down in front of the horizon mirror (of the sextant) after discovering the star you are looking for, which elongates it at a perfect right angle. Thus, when you lower it to the horizon, you can tell instantly whether your sextant is correctly situated. If so, the silver thread descends flatly onto the horizon, like the sides of a vise coming together. If your sextant is other than vertical, as is probable given the ship’s motion, you need only adjust it until the lines, clearly drawn, come together.
They amuse themselves by placing in every bottle of wine emptied an anti-communist messages in them and throw them overboard, “The discipline is that no message may repeat one that has gone before. This will prove exhausting before the trip is over. Someone contributed, since we were out of reach of Senator Church, Congressman Pike, Anthony Lewis, and Harriet Van Horne, “CIA will guarantee (1) free assassination upon retrieving this message.” “Attention Komarad Kapitan SS Lenin subski (on special detail): please stop fucking up our electronic gear; if not, we will invite you on board and corrupt your morals.” Etc. Good stuff.
Buckley reads Moby Dick for the first time on this trip, a detail I like muchly. We don't get much of his impressions of it, although that it gave him pleasure (and that it gave Christo pleasure to have given him a book that he likes; Christo, meanwhile, reads a bio of Henry Kissinger) comes across. I should look through some Firing Lines and see if Moby Dick ever came up after 1975.
SOME SAILING STUFF
I know zilch about sailing. I get seasick in the bathtub, pretty much, I'm horrible on the water. As a kid I spent every Block Island ferry ride throwing up. As an adult I once spent an entire anniversary cruise on Lake Michigan unable to eat, dance, or move. Fun times. I love reading about the subject, though, and you can't open up any of Buckley's sailing pieces without learning a great deal - if only temporarily - about the ancient art of navigation.
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| How to tack. |
“While maneuvering to heave to, you are fine-tuning right-left oscillations in the heading of the boat to the point of rendering them nugatory. It is as though you brought your right and left hands steadily toward each other, with a swinging pendulum in between making its strokes shorter and shorter, causing, ultimately, immobility. (…) You hoist only enough canvas (made of the toughest materials) as is, on the one hand, necessary to dictate the boat’s movement, not so much as to challenge the storm’s machismo. (…) If the wind is too strong to allow you to keep even them up, then you do something most appropriately named – you “run” with the wind. Downwind. Always in a storm your objective is to reduce your speed in the water; the bobbing-cork idea is the objective.”
There's a famous (perhaps infamous) chapter in here on celestial navigation chapter. More on this sort of thing in posts to come.
As mentioned, one of the pleasures of these books is the emergence of new technology and the impressions of men well-situated to appreciate them. It's amusing to read Bill explaining the extraordinary applications of something like GPS or the internet, back before most people on earth even knew these things (or knew them exclusively from sci-fi.) Or sat-phones.
“I left the piano and put on the cassette-player, a late Beethoven piano sonata, as we sat down for a dinner of turkey and stuffing, wine, cheese, fruit, and coffee. I thought I would try – just a flyer – to say something about the difference between the late and early Beethoven, a subject concerning which I once got involved in an extensive published controversy. I learned for the one thousandth time that the kind of music that overwhelms me, simply means nothing – nothing at all – to most people; nothing at all to anybody aboard that boat. Occasionally the evangelist in me will push aside the impacted despair of a generation of trying and I will say, “By God that’s beautiful, isn’t it!” – and Bill, dear Bill, will agree; and Van will be agreeable, and also Danny and Christopher. But somehow you suspect that the effect is as if you suddenly stopped, between turkey wings, and began hypnotically to recite a sonnet from Shakespeare, thereupon demanding instant acclamation on the subject of the joys of poetry.
"(Danny and Christo) need music and one night at sea was devoted to a most earnest effort, by me and Van Bill, to track the lyrics of some of the classics of the Rock and Roll age that engross them. I could tell that there was quality there, but I couldn’t tell much else. I am told by Captain Campagna that some of the people who charter Cyrano, although the availability of my huge collection of tapes is brought to their attention, never bother even to plug in the cassette-player. This is the ultimate loneliness – to fail to communicate to others who are close to you the excitement or pleasure you take from certain experiences which are, then, left for you to enjoy alone in in the anonymous company of others who arrives as strangers to the same concert chamber; or every now and then with that odd friend who shares your enthusiasm.”
There will be a brief break to do some other posts before resuming this series with Atlantic High. See you then.
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