Showing posts with label Danny Merritt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Danny Merritt. Show all posts

12.23.2021

Racing Through Paradise (1987)



This book is structured a bit differently than the others. The first half is collected writing from other sails, (to Fiji, to the Galapagos, to New Brunswick) and the last half is the sail across the Pacific (from Honolulu to New Guinea.)




Everything is all very fascinating, the pictures are better than ever, and while not as neatly organized perhaps as the other sailing books, there is two or three times the amount of material. It’s like a box set, or a WFBJR triple album. It also has a nice tactile feel, the blue faux leather of the hardcover is very pleasant against your fingers. These things all combine in the Map Room of my mind like the sunlight through the staff of Ra, illuminating the journey within.





 

THE CREW



We've met everyone here before. Hello again, folks.


Plus Captain Allan Jouning and a a few crew, and chef Liz Wheeler.


They brought David Niven along, too, in the form of the tapes of his reading from his two memoirs. It's unfortunate they hadn't started the sails earlier and had David along for one of them. But alas. Bill and Van both notice a slight change in their friend's voice and identify it for what it must have been: the onset of the last stage of the disease that ended up killing him. "The dying actor, giving a great performance; an eternal theme, eternally inspiring."


At the onset, one of the crew members (Noddy) injures his hand severely enough for the boat to return to Hawaii. An ominous beginning, but no one else is seriously injured from that point on, although a variety of factors conspire against the planned itinerary. 


I haven’t spent much time on Allan Jouning, as he tends to hang back on these voyages, as any charter captain usually does. The deal with Dr. Papo is Bill was Captain, but Allan had the right of overrule for any situation where he felt Bill's decision might endanger the boat. That never happened on any of their cruises together, so they by all accounts got on well together. He captained several other megayachts (like the Elixir) and continues in the field today. I imagine if he wrote a book it'd be filled with the world's richest people and most exotic locales, but his professional integrity hinges on never uttering a word. Too bad for the rest of us!




THE OTHER SAILS





This part of the book is great, I'll spend time on only two anecdotes:


- Man did, Bill like the Azores. This is undoubtedly an outgrowth of both the natural beauty of the island chain and its association with The Big One. (See Airborne.) "Black basalt beaches, moors and pastures, cliffs and mountains, spas, geysers, still active volcanoes, and an air force base – see them now before a definitive eruption cause that haunting archipelago to sink into the vast deep." I've never been to the Azores - sounds lovely - but when I was a writing tutor at Rhode Island College, I tutored several folks from there and from Cape Verde. RI has a sizable Portuguese presence. Not much economic opportunity - sort of like Rhode Island! - but lots of natural beauty. 


A tidbit I did not know: the name of the Portuguese captain who formally claimed the islands in 1427 is unknown, as George Sand spilled ink over the chart, only copy. Pumba!


- This part is incredibly funny:


So the story is, while sailing near Craig's Point in the St. John River, they approached a landing and asked if they could use the man's property to get to the road and throw trash. The man pointedly said no, keep sailing. Bill et al. thought his attitude quite rude, so they sailed out of their way to get somewhere they could throw their trash, then went back to sea, where Bill pinned an editorial over-exaggerating the kindness of "the angel of Craig's Point" and recommending all sea travelers call upon him for his generosity. 




Well, the angel in question thought tit-for-tat was fair, so he penned a counter-article alleging all sorts of things about Bill. Not before the editors of the Cruising Guide to New England )(the edition includes New Brunswick) contacted Bill (not knowing any of the tongue-in-cheek-ness) and asked if they could include his piece in their latest edition. It all kind of escalated quickly. Good stuff, though. Years later, they were still tormenting their Craig's Point nemesis by gunkholing nearby and floating messages in emptied wine bottles ashore.


"Important... Reward... The finder of this bottle can claim a fifty-dollar reward by presenting the bottle to Aubrey Pope, Esquire, at Craig's Point, Morrisdale, New Brunswick. The reward will be payable to Mr. Pope. 'This bottle represents the gratitude of the Canada Beautiful Society Ltd. Garbage Collection Division, WF Buckley, corresponding secretary, care editor, St. John Telegraph."


 

THE PREP



The amount of South Pacific sailing prep Bill did was truly impressive. This was all pre-internet, of course - I say that a lot to denote the extra legwork such things require, but it's remarkable: I mean, we've been "post-internet" for only a handful of decades. Which means almost the entirety of the human scholarship that got us to the internet age was "pre-internet." I should find a different way of putting that.


Anyway, everything all sounds like I want it in my library: the index of back issues of Associate Members of the Seven Seas Cruising Association (Louisiana), Landfalls of Paradise by Earl Hinz, Me and His Island by Tom Neal, Westward Bound by the Schooner. Yankee by Irving Johnson. Also Alistair Maclean’s biography of Captain Cook (Got that one but never read it) and Moxie by Phil Weld. Which I did read. I agree with Bill - fascinating account, but solo sailing just doesn't hold much appeal for me. “It is as if, coming on the lone copy of an unknown sonnet of Shakespeare, one were to read and then toss it away, internalizing the pleasure, but only for the first length of time the lines stay vivid in the memory. There is none of the enduring satisfaction of the shared pleasure.” I suppose the book is the shared pleasure, but it's one step removed from the pleasure Bill received from doing it his way. To each his own. 


As per usual the pre-voyage wine tasting and food prep sounds like a blast.


Danny calculated that fifty cases of beer was about right, and I got the wine through a merchant in Honolulu (impressive wine list), all for $2525.74. Liz served approximately one thousand man-meals, so that comes down to $2.5 booze per person per meal, okay as a rough estimate, but there were seven or eight cases left over, which we ended up giving to a church at Kavieng. I note that Captain Cook provided for seventy men at sea for one year “Beer in Puncheons, 1200 gallons, Spirits 1600 gallons.” I haven’t the energy to decipher which of the two vessels, Endeavour or Sealestial, was the more vinous."

I was also amused by Bill's efforts in securing (again, pre-internet) exotic Swedish crackers and other culinary snacking for the voyage, efforts which were not duly appreciated by the younger Buckley, which precipitates some fun snarking back and forth. 




 

 

THE PACIFIC



I like the island life/ portraits very much. Most of the book is about the sailing itself, of course, or life aboard in-between the islands on an increasingly hurried dash (see title). Their first stop is Johnson Atoll – where the nerve gas is kept - but they are discouraged to discover they are not allowed to land there.




This is Bill's account (not counting the excerpts from the logs of others) so we perhaps don't see it enough from Johnson Atoll's POV. This is a military base being visited by the idle rich; it's safe to say they're under no obligation to throw their arms wide and give them a tour. Particularly if they did not exactly hammer out all the details the right way. (Bill tended to just do things. As Pat often said - and is often said of those with excess means - "the rules were only suggestions.") At the same time, it's kind of funny: Van was the ambassador to France, using their phone to call the State Department, and Bill was calling Pat to make sure everything was going okay with her hosting Nancy Reagan at their home. Kind of a brazen move on the brass of the island's part, but I assume it was all on the up-and-up. So they shoved off, having bought some fresh provisions, stretched their legs, and made some calls.

Victory at Sea by Richard Rodgers is played, with gusto, when crossing the International Date Line, thus waking up the aforementioned ambassador to France. That one's been following me around lately. I bought the vinyl recently and ever since it's been popping up everywhere I look. 




As with the others, we get some fascinating glimpses of GPS peeking through the clouds at our seafarers. The future is calling. Here it is the Trimble Loran, designed to let you know where you are at any point on the Earth's surface. “Unlike the sun it does not sleep half the time, just when you need it the most, or tease you at other times behind clouds. (It) like the Constitution or the IRS - is forever."


“When two dimensional GPS is thoroughly established (late in 1987, the three dimensional mode, designed for airplanes, is scheduled for a year later), ships at sea, or ships groping for an alien harbor – or for a cut, or for a buoy, or for a fairway marker – will know, at any moment of the day or night, where they are, give or take fifty yards. When coming into major ports they will know where they are within two or three yards. Airplanes, in the days immediately ahead, will substantially increase the running knowledge of exactly where they are, and blind landings – which not all that long featured Clark Gable with a flyer’s helmet, a wind and a prayer, and a deeply furrowed brow – will be effortless. Helicopter pilots will be able to fly sideways between palm trees at night, assuming no one has moved the palm trees during the day. Surveyors, oil drillers, dredgers, pipeline layers, cartographers, fleet owners, police, ambulances, all will depend on GPS. And not inconceivably the fancier car models of 1989 could offer, for a thousand dollars, hardware that will exactly locate your car’s position, and software, that when you grope to find 322 Beacon Street in Boston, will lead you there, quietly, authoritatively via a little screen on the dashboard directing you were to turn, or a voice synthesizer advising when you do so. I suppose Microsoft will provide a version that will describe historical curious en route. (Ed. They do - and more.)


“All the travelers in the world will smile when GPS is finally, completely, here, whether we travel on the ocean, or on land, or in the air. It would be fine to come up with with a spiritual counterpart to the GPS, but that fix will remain inscrutable, while precious little else any longer is.”


Lots of mechanical issues in this one, as recorded here:





Was any of this the fault of the owner? Perhaps a bit? Is this a message to Dr. Papo from Bill etl. al? They do charter Sealestial again for Windfall, and there's even more snark there. I think Bill had reached the end of his rope with Dr. Papo. Probably no two boat-owners can ever agree on how to maintain a boat, and it's as simple as that. 


 

THE ENDING



An uneven book and kind of crashes into the ending, which symbolically represents the trip itself perhaps. Van – typically not given to impatience or anxiety – began showing signs of both as the date of his retirement lunch with George HW. Bush in Paris grew closer, leading to a compressed itinerary that led to Christo’s remark appropriated for the title. 
I’d have liked a larger epilogue, (how did Van’s retirement party go?) Although the one that’s there is funny.




And that's it. Ocean-Three in the books. 


We started this Personal Adventures At Sea and On Land with Windfall, which is the chronologically last in the series, but there'll be one last post on the peripherals and endings. 

See you then.


12.16.2021

Atlantic High (1982)

“As the sun went down the sky turned white, then mother-of-pearl. Off to one side was a shipwrecked shrimp boat. It caught the sun, and the rusty hull turned golden. We ate the fish Reggie had caught late that afternoon, and then, with the cassette player beginning with Mozart and regressing to rock as the younger generation quietly asserted itself, 
we played poker.”

 


I guess I did Overdrive before I did this one, eh? Whoops.

The second transatlantic crossing (this time west to east, from St. Thomas to Bermuda (1000 miles), from Bermuda to the Azores (1900 miles), from the Azores to Spain (900 miles), came about after Bill saw the documentary The Endless Summer. That might be too pat – seeing the movie gave him the idea of a similar documentary about sailing, which led to a discussion with friends Van Galbraith, Dick Clurman, and others about a “symposium at sea” which eventually became sailing the Sealestial (described in Windfall) from pts. a, b, and c described above.


The documentary did not come together the way Bill envisioned. I think part of it was shot and shown on TV somewhere – it’s in the book, but I can’t remember. Neither did the symposium, at least not the way Dick Clurman envisioned. Which disappointed Dick enough to only sign on for only the first leg of the journey, a decision he’d come to regret by the time they got to Bermuda.


MEET THE CREW


Pretty much the same as the Airborne crew, except new boat/ new captain (Allan Jouning), and Tony Leggett and Christopher Little, who we (us DSO readers) met in the aforelinked Windfall but we (the proverbial first-time reader of Atlantic High) meet for the first time here.

Chairman Bill, of course. 

No Christo this time alas. The book opens with Cyrano's last cruises in the Caribbean, though,
and Christo is there for that, so he makes an appearance.


Van again agreed to serve as the voyage's meteorologist. Dick's idea of a symposium at sea ("a co-mingling of pre-eminent perspectives") might sound a little much, but anytime you gather the varied experience or intellectual firepower of such a group, that's bound to happen on its own anyway. Dick is a character - lots of fun and his book Beyond Malice is a great, important read. Definitely needs an annotated new edition to cover any/all case law since its original publication. At one point Bill mentions that Dick started The Winds of War by Herman Wouk in the morning and finished it by the next evening - it may even have been the same evening - all while carrying on a dozen other conversations, chain-smoking, and remembering every word. One of those types, then - no wonder he got along with Bill so well. 


SCENES FROM THE VOYAGE



The voyage is supplemented on all sides by the various correspondence sagas of Bill’s life at this time, as well as the just-mentioned cruise to Cozumel and negotiating Cuban territorial waters. Interesting snapshot – after eating an “utterly forgettable lunch under a thatched roof on the beach, looking out over the Yucatan Channel (to the south we see) the new resort of Cancun opening up, with its Atlantic-City-sized beach.” I love the glimpses of places before they become the Disneyworlds they become. Not that I am anti-Disneyworld, only pro-glimpses-of-marked-contrast. 

It strikes me just now that Bill was a big Evelyn Waugh fan, and Waugh's attitude re: travel and the places of the world (as expressed in works like When the Going Was Good) likely influenced him. I should keep that in mind the next time I go through his travel nonfiction. Just as a fun thing to do. (Well, "fun.") 



Just prior to leaving, there is the wine tasting, which they take very seriously. It's noted that for three or four dollars you can get, with very little effort, some of the best or worst wines in the world. (Adjusting for inflation, still true today) So they line up hundreds of candidates and have at it. This section is great and is too much to reproduce, but I liked Van’s pronouncement on a losing candidate: “This horse has diabetes.


 MORE TECH STUFF




The Plath celestial computer ie the Navicomp, and just as we did in Airborne (and as we do on each subsequent crossing) we experience vicariously the test runs and consider the problems of a pre-GPS grid. 


“This sunset-sunrise business  (i.e. the variable effects of barometric pressure on refraction are such that the almanac rounds off sunsets to the nearest minute) is the single failing in the Navicomp (other than the unfortunate neglect of Jupiter and Saturn.) Correction – there is a second, intensely annoying feature, which that notwithstanding the highly touted Polariod case, which protects the instrument and is designed to permit you to read the red figures simultaneously, in fact, you can’t do it. The sun’s brightness completely obscures them, and so you need to duck into the shade to see the numbers. The engineers should never have used LCD (black numbers on a gray background) instead of LED.”


Some of that is slightly impenetrable, but I can relate to eye sensitivity to such things. He has some interesting insights into radio frequencies with the exact time and the difficulty of getting them. (Although he’s philosophical: “these things are not published in yachting magazines, or the books of dilettantes.”) They land at the US Naval base, and Bill has to bite his lip when he discovers their chronometer is giving out the wrong time on the channel vessels use to synchronize, i.e. vital to all operations. He broods on this. “(They are off), twenty five seconds off to be exact. Four seconds equals one mile. If our ICBMS land six miles north of Red Square, I’ve got a scoop.”

There’s probably some fun in knowing the President (Reagan at the time) was going to read your book, or call and ask about your trip before it even came out. I bet that base got a call.


FOUR LAST ANECDOTES



“I belong to a club in California whose motto is “Weaving spiders, come not here.” Indeed the (quite extraordinary) Bohemian Encampment begins with a rococo ritual in which the members witness a pageant wherein wordly concerns are first corporealized, and then eliminated. It called the “Cremation of Care” and came to use right from the golden age of Victorian optimism. Bah humbug, it was at the Bohemian Grove that I first saw Ronald Reagan and George Bush pawing the ground as hey greeted each other, two years later they plighted their troth so happily. And so forth.”


Interesting he hears from Ruben Carter. I don’t know all the details of this stuff, but he had planned to meet with him before his retrial re-committed him to prison for murder. Both for Carter and another person convicted, then released, then re-incarcerated, reading his back and forth over the years (both with the folks in question and his revising his own position as things develop or retract) is fascinating. Here we catch the barest glimpse, but the full(er) story is told over all the collections (The Governor Listeth, Execution Eve and all the rest).

There is the rescue of a man at sea. I should've written more details on that. 

Which leads to another anecdote worth sharing. Bill once lent the apartment above his garage to Charlie Blair, either a CIA acquaintance or just one of those coincidences, I don't know. Blair later married the actress Maureen O'Hara. Onetime while the Buckleys were eating lunch they saw a tall man sauntering up their driveway. It was Charlie, just in town to say hello. He came in and stayed for hours, telling stories, etc. At some point he realized how much time had passed and said "I'd better go and get my wife." Which he did and then in comes Maureen O'Hara. Stuff like that must've done a number on Christo's head as a youngster. 

~


Of the sailing books this is perhaps my least favorite, but that’s only a commentary on the quality of the others. It's still a wonderful book.

Danny's recommended attire for Ocean-2.



“We had sailed 2150 nautical miles, approximately the distance between New York and Denver, and we felt just fine.”