Word: cyrano
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...summer of 1975, William F. Buckley Jr. made an Atlantic crossing - chronicled in his book Airborne - aboard his 60-ft. cutter Cyrano. Says Buckley: "All adventure is now reactionary." With loran, radar, autopilot and vintage wines, Buckley was not exactly blown across the ocean on a naked raft. Even the most venturesome solitary sailors today - men like Sir Francis Chichester, who circumnavigated the globe in 1966-67 in his 53-ft. boat Gipsy Moth IV - have the advantage of sophisticated hull and sail design. Says Tristan Jones, a small, bearded Welsh sailor who has circumnavigated the globe three times, crossed...
...summer of 1975, Buckley, his son, sister-in-law, assorted friends and paid hands sailed to Spain aboard Buckley's 60-ft. cutter Cyrano. Ashore, ships of state were foundering and inflation was making even rubber ducks a luxury item. Buckley's landlubbing wife Pat was waiting apprehensively ("If he comes through this alive, I'll kill him"). But with Europe finally visible to port and Africa looming to starboard, Buckley brought his crew content past changeless Gibraltar...
...Barracuda-class named Sweet Isolation, in honor of his father's political views. Much later there were ocean-going yachts bearing such names as The Panic (in honor of the Great Depression?) and Suzy Wong (in honor of the world's oldest laissez-faire enterprise?). Cyrano, in fact, might have been named Loophole. Buckley charters the boat for much of the year, making him eligible for depreciation allowances on it, deductible expenses, etc. He alludes to such arrangements but spares the details. The reader is envious enough...
Airborne is both an immensely pleasurable, digressionary account of an Atlantic crossing and an unashamed celebration of the good life in anything but the best of times. (One of the crew aboard Cyrano even had to leave the idyl to attend the dissolution of his failed business.) About himself and his class of sailing friends, Buckley writes: "We never fancied ourselves as 'everlasting children of the mysterious sea. Rather as a different generation of 'successors,' anticipated by Joseph Conrad as 'the grown-up children of a discontented earth...
...Cyrano's Atlantic crossing, the whims of wind and water were taken in experienced strides; the works of man, however, caused considerable difficulty. Sophisticated electronic equipment mysteriously refused to operate. Partly in consequence, Buckley fills his pages with freshets of information about ocean cruising. He makes a useful distinction between "expertise" and "expertness." In the spirit of 19th century British intellectual noblesse oblige, he simply and clearly explains marine navigation. As skipper he is heavy on object lessons, especially in matters of boat safety. Two people lost their lives while sailing Cyrano under charter: a scuba diver died...