Atlantic High

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  “What time was it in Greenwich, England, at the time you took your sight?”

  Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the anchor time with reference to which the positions of the sun and the planets are given. If, for instance, the sun is at ooo°, it is directly over the meridian that runs through Greenwich. If it is at 180°, it is halfway across the globe while at Greenwich it’s midnight. All navigational tables are based on GMT. Inasmuch as the sun moves 15 degrees in one hour (in navigation, the earth is visualized as static; everything else “moves”), if you live in New York (longitude 74 degrees) you live in Zone 5, and in order to calculate GMT, you must add five hours to your local watch hour (LWH).

  The machine’s question mark indicates its desire to know the time at which you recorded your sextant sight. That time was written down by a friendly member of the crew when you called out, “Mark!”

  You punch in the time—16 58 37 (4:58 P.M., plus 37 seconds) — and depress the key marked R/S, which is the activating key. Whereupon you see:

  “HS?”

  That means, “What was the angle at which you caught the sun?”

  (“H” stands for “Height;” “S” for “Sextant.”) You punch out 59 (degrees) 52 (minutes). Whereupon you see: “UPP? YES =I”

  The machine is asking you whether you measured from the horizon to the bottom or to the top of the sun. Most navigators measure to the bottom of the sun but the tables allow for either—sometimes the bottom is clouded over, not so the top; in which case you will go for the latter. The machine assumes you went for the bottom, but if the answer to the question “Did you go for the upper?” is “YES,” then you are directed to depress the numeral I, advising the machine it must make the appropriate alterations. Since you did not go for the upper, you bypass by pushing, once again, R/S.

  “LAT? S=“

  The machine wishes to know what is your assumed latitude. All celestial navigation is based, as elsewhere explained, on the process of exclusion: i.e., you figure out where you are by the process of figuring out where you are not.1 You take as your assumed latitude the most convenient point from which to plot—a good round number. In this case, a flat 37 degrees. But wait—”s=“: this is to remind you that if you are sailing in the southern hemisphere, you must record your latitude and then follow it by the minus sign for the computer, which is CHS (for “Change Sign”). But you are north, so you ignore this, entering merely 37 00. You activate the machine and now see:

  “LONG? E=“

  The machine of course needs also your assumed longitude, in this case a round 43 degrees. The “E=“ is to ask whether you are sailing in the eastern hemisphere, in which event once again you will need to follow your entry with the minus sign (CHS). You enter the longitude and activate, and see:

  “YEAR?”

  This needs very little translation. The answer is “1980.”

  “MONTH?”

  Months are given numerically, and June is the sixth month of the year so you depress 6….

  “DAY?”

  It happened to be the thirteenth. 13….

  “H.EYE?”

  The angle of the observed body is obviously going to change, depending on whether you are one foot above the water when you take your sight or one thousand feet (the higher up, the larger the angle). You figure, standing alongside the cockpit, you are approximately ten feet up from the water: 10.

  Now Hewlett-Packard provides what looks like a tiny seagull. It makes its way fitfully across the viewing screen. Its exclusive function is to tell you that the machine is hard at work for you, assimilating all the data you have given it. Most machines (the Almighty Plath—see below—included) merely give you a blank while you await the result of the calculation. Giving you the flying bird is the equivalent of giving you recorded music when you call United Airlines and a voice says, “All the reservation lines are busy. Kindly stay on the line, and an operator will be with you shortly.” Followed by music. You are reminded, as long as you hear the music, that you haven’t been cut off. In seconds, the bird reaches its destination, and now the display reads:

  “ZN 250.1”

  That means that you must go to your assumed position, which was Latitude 37° North, Longitude 44° West, and strike out in the direction of 250°—child’s play with a protractor or a parallel rule. By way of orientation, you will recall that 180 degrees is due south, 270 degrees is due west. But, you ask, head 250° for how long? Depress your trusty activator, R/S:

  “15.8 AWAY”

  “AWAY“ means that your pencil must travel in the opposite direction of 250 degrees (i.e., 70 degrees. The “reciprocal” of any azimuth is that azimuth plus 180 degrees. If by adding 180 degrees you break the bank, defined as going past 360 degrees, then instead of adding 180 degrees, you subtract 180 degrees). You know now not only the exact direction you must travel, but how far: namely, 15.8 miles. Call it 16 miles. Measure (with a divider) sixteen miles and put a dot on the line extending from your assumed position northeast at 70 degrees. Then draw a line perpendicular to where that dot sits on the line you have drawn. That new line is your Line of Position (LOP).

  All celestial navigation is based on the accumulation of Lines of Position. When they intersect, you know your position exactly. If, for instance, as often is the case, the moon is also discernible, depress the button that brings in the moon on your computer and repeat the procedure above. You have two lines of position intersecting.

  Hugh Kenner’s program includes all the navigational stars, and these are of course (assuming no overcast) simultaneously visible against the horizon for about ten minutes beginning forty minutes before dawn, and for about ten minutes beginning about thirty minutes after sunset. Set the LOPs for two stars, and you have your position.

  It’s difficult to convey the kind of excitement a celestial navigator experiences with such a machine in hand (later, as I say, a machine in some respects more advanced is described, the Plath Navicomp). I attempted in an earlier book (Airborne) to use a metaphor to describe the pleasure of celestial navigation without almanac and tables, but even that recently the instrument (the HP-65) was preposterously primitive alongside the 41C, whose Nav-Pac by H-P’s Ken Newcomer will be available when these words are printed. I can only say that if you are one of the millions who kiss your wife, open the front door in the country, walk out, take your car out of the garage, park it at the station, take the train to Grand Central, take the subway downtown, and walk into your office on lower Broadway one hour and twenty minutes later, you would need to conceive of kissing your wife, opening your front door, and finding yourself in your office on lower Broadway to conceive the liberation from tedium given to the navigator by the calculator. With such an instrument as the HP-41C I would undertake to teach celestial navigation to Laurel and Hardy in fifteen minutes.

  The great moment came, my first use at sea of the 41C, and as I had coached Danny, serving as assistant navigator, on It’s use, I asked him to bring it up. Five minutes later (for Danny, five minutes is a geological age—in five minutes he can prepare a meal, eat it, and clean up the mess) he arrived at the cockpit, forlorn.

  “What’s the matter?” I knew it had to be grave.

  “It doesn’t work. It just plain won’t turn on.”

  I had him fetch up Hugh’s instructions, as unambiguous as a draft notice. I read them out loud. It was as simple as that when Danny pushed the “on” button, nothing happened. I knew that if we removed the memory module, the program would be lost forever. I called for Reggie, he took the machine in hand and started gently poking. His finger brushed the “alpha” key—and the display signal instantly blazoned out: “SUN.” It worked perfectly ever after, but I came close to growing old during those moments.

  Other problems did not yield to Reggie’s numinous fingers, nor yet to the solid, patient, seductive ministrations of Allen Jouning who—the nearest anyone ever came to hearing Allen yield to exasperation—muttered to me, through the half-dozen nuts, bolts, screws, between
his teeth, “Had more problems, pahst coupla days, than pahst six months!” Characteristically, Allen said this rather joyfully than complainingly, as though to be greeted at 6 A.M., as that same day he had been, with the news that both the central toilets were stuck with an evening’s accumulated evacuations was a perfect (Oh man! A problem to solve!) way to begin the day.

  It requires only one weighted sentence to communicate the gravity of a nonfunctioning radiotelephone. The radio is the means by which, in extremis, one electrifies the impalpable but omnipresent ocean grid to one’s distress. Our phone worked once, two nights out. A call from me to my wife. As a collective social occasion the call, when it finally came through, caused me considerable personal amusement, recalling the high moment of personal mortification in my adult life. For reasons no one professionally engaged in the engineering of radiotelephones has ever given me, telephones aboard yachts are megaphones. I cannot understand why the signal from the telephone can’t come in via earset, so that the conversation, to the extent it is overheard by the crew, mightn’t at least give some privacy, as in:

  “Hello, darling. OVER.” (audible)

  “Don’t hello-darling me, you bastard. I know all about Flo. OVER.” (inaudible)

  “Oh, well what do you know! How is my goddaughter?” (audible)

  “Who the hell do you think you’re fooling? Goddaughter—sheeyit; I suppose you’re having a good time. How many girls do you have aboard your ‘men-only’ cruise?” (inaudible)

  “Ho ho ho! That’s wonderful. Well, do give her my love also. Oh-oh, have to cut out—trouble with the …line …hello, hello? …This is Whiskey Oscar George 9842, Whiskey Oscar George 9842, signing off. Thank you operator.”

  Nothing, of course, went that way. But when the radiotelephone is situated at or near the center of the boat, as is usually the case, there is no such thing as a private conversation. No public conversation is, really, emotionally satisfactory. “Try to get me on Flight one-oh-one on the twenty-ninth, Iberia, Marbella-New York” is okay; nothing much tenderer than that. Still, you document that you are alive.

  Finally I reached my wife. After the two-hour effort to make the connection on the deteriorating radio, I counted eleven sets of ears that could, and necessarily did, overhear our conversation, which accordingly took the form of Basic Social Exchange (“Christopher is fine. And how is Van?”).

  Eight years earlier I was at the South Pole. What was I doing at the South Pole? No answer to that question, really, satisfies any reasonable curiosity. The fact is, I was there, at the solitary Russian outpost. (In the treaty, “they” drew Magnetic South Pole, “we” drew True South Pole, 1,700 miles away.) And, fifteen minutes after festivities (caviar, vodka) had begun in the Russians’ central igloo, Senator Barry Goldwater, premier virtuoso of the ham radio community, walked in, dressed in the swaddling clothes of the Antarctic. He was on the wagon, and so was not distracted by the general jollity in that tiny frozen little encampment of thirteen souls who hadn’t had visitors for six months, visitors whose airplane’s motors you could hear even in the ice cellar because the propellers continued to turn—one daren’t turn the motors off, lest in the 50° below zero cold they should fail to start up again when the time came, ninety minutes later, to return to headquarters at McMurdo Base. Goldwater turned to me, all smiles.

  “Just talked to Peggy.”

  “You don’t mean it?”

  “Want to talk to Pat?”

  “You mean I can call Pat from here?”

  “Follow me,” said Barry, while the toasting proliferated, and beckoning to two other members of the party we slunk out, through the cold and the squeaky snow, to the private little igloo, fifty feet away, of a young American scientist whose avocation was also ham radio. He spent the day measuring the isotopes 29,000 feet below the earth, or whatever else it is one finds interesting at 29,000 feet below the earth, and the evenings patching in ham telephone calls to his wife and little daughter. Would he ring my wife?

  “Sure try, Mr. Buckley.”

  An incredible six minutes later, in that padded little ice station, with the scientist, Senator Goldwater, one admiral, the Secretary of the Navy, and one warrant officer present, I heard the telephone ring.

  “Hello …”

  “Is this Mrs. William Buckley?”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “I’m patching a call from Orange Kalamazoo Igloo Zingping. Will you accept a collect call from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from Mr. Buckley?”

  “Mr. Buckley isn’t in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He is off somewhere in the Antarctic.”

  “I know, ma’am. I’m patching in the call. All you have to pay for is Harrisburg-Connecticut. Will you accept the call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go ahead, Orange Kalamazoo Igloo Zingping. Come in, Mr. Buckley.”

  “Hello darling!” I said trying to imagine how Bertie Wooster would try to sound under the circumstances.

  “Do you realize what time it is?”

  “I’m calling from the South Pole!”

  “It is four o’clock in the morning. When you go to the South Pole, do you need to go at four o’clock in the morning?”

  “Ho ho ho”—I looked around, and the senator, and the admiral, and the secretary, and the radio operator, and the warrant officer, were making valiant efforts to affect total ignorance of an exchange they could not have avoided hearing unless stone deaf. “Well, darling, just wanted to say hello. The connection is awful, so I’ll have to sign off. Thank you, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania”—I thrust the receiver into the hands of the scientist, who completed the formalities.

  Grant, then, that conversations of an intimate nature are encumbered in small vessels crossing the seas. But there would be nothing intimate about such a message as: “MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY. This is the yacht Sealestial. We are on fire and sinking. Request all assistance from ships at sea. Our estimated position is Latitude 32 degrees 30 minutes north, Longitude 64 degrees 10 minutes west” (you repeat this, over and over again, pausing every two minutes for thirty seconds, hoping desperately to hear an acknowledgment).

  In any event, the radiotelephone, after that one conversation to my wife, simply didn’t work, and the pooled talents of Reggie, Allen, Dick, and Tony were insufficient to put it back together again. There is a little curtain—gossamer-stuff, but a curtain nonetheless—that closes when your boat loses all radio contact. The flywheel within you that has gone along chirpily, well lubricated, works now with a sense of contingency that brings to every problem the slight edge of crisis. In the mind of every sailor there is an automatic table by which the escalation, or, more accurately, the graduation, of crisis is processed. When you are plowing through the seas and they are a menacing gray, fleeced with altar-boy white lace, the knot meter registering 9.5, every twelfth wave ripping down the lee deck like the flick of a whip over a mule team, you know, without ratiocination, that Man Overboard is Man Lost. When the radiophone doesn’t work, you know that certain kinds of emergencies at sea—a fire, most prominently; a capsize, of course—are more menacing in their terrifying reaches. We did have aboard—part of Reggie’s mandatory safety equipment—a contraption designed for life rafts which is guaranteed to emit, for seventeen hours, signals that would reach the radios of passing aircraft over an area of 400 square miles. Such a device would easily work to permit triangulation on an object in distress; and, of course, the device could be activated not necessarily from a life raft, but from a disabled 71-foot ketch—one whose mast, let us say, had been toppled, and whose engine had been swamped…. So travels the imagination; and, at sea, one doesn’t incline—far from it—to gallows-talk, though there was spirited discussion, this time, on the tortured experience of the yachts that had participated in the previous summer’s Fastnet Race. Fifteen drownings, twenty-four yachts lost. Late at night, once or twice on this run, the waves roared by like express trains, leaving you (even after thirty years of sailing) with that surrealistic sensation of immunity. Th
e juggernaut has failed to topple you. Like the nightmare, a pleasant nightmare, in which you traverse the speedway down which the racing cars are hurtling, and—somehow—you walk casually, without particular plan, right across the track, this one just failing to hit you from behind, the other just failing to knock you in the stomach as you make your way nonchalantly through. But in such situations, every now and then you find yourself rehearsing, either in your mind or in conversations with such as Van—he likes to know everything—Just What Would We Do If…. It is engrossing, the more so if the radiotelephone is withdrawn as a contingent resource.

  In his journal, Dick made perfunctory note of our radiotelephone problem. This was sheer stoicism on his part, since he is given to spending significant parts of the day on the telephone. He weathered, even, the Weathermax crisis. This one was, primarily, a crisis of pride. Dr. Papo had said, at the beginning of our negotiations, that he would not think of dispatching his beautiful $650,000 ketch across the Atlantic without the advantages of a Weathermax, which after all was now available at something on the order of five thousand dollars.

  A Weathermax is a most remarkable instrument, the only problem being that, in my experience, it seldom works. My sailing is usually done on the relatively indigent side of the track, and in my own boats I never dreamed of such luxuries as Weathermax, or Omega navigation. But in 1977, sailing from the Dominican Republic to New York on the Argentinian cadet ship Libertad, a magnificent 360-foot three-masted schooner, I was introduced for the first time to the Weathermax, which proudly puffed out a four-foot-square silver-paper isobar map of the entire Atlantic Ocean indicating exactly where the highs and lows were, and inviting attention to those little telltale signs of hurricanes abrewing—especially interesting at the end of August, which was both hurricane season and the period during which the Libertad sailed north on this leg of its six-month journey. The problem was that, after that first demonstration, the Weathermax didn’t work again. Nor, as a matter of fact, did the Omega navigation system, although the admiral was wonderfully proud of having it on board, and enjoyed greatly telling you what it would do when it did work.