Atlantic High by William F. Buckley Jr. Page A

eastward, then south, then west, and back to the 180-degree mark so that the whole of Fiji might repose, unconfused, in the eastern hemisphere. All that bureaucratic geographical commotion was in retaliation against an ingenious Indian vendor whose shop straddled the date line and who got around the sabbath laws by selling from the eastern end of his shop on the western Sunday, and from the western end of the shop on the eastern Sunday. That is the kind of problem the UN was born to solve.
    We returned to the
Tau
undecided whether to stop by at the neighboring islands of Nggamea and Lauthala, which are owned respectively by the American tycoon Malcolm Forbes and the Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr. Everyone knows Malcolm Forbes, whose hospitality is in any case widely advertised. The closest tie any of us had to Raymond Burr is that I had patronized his hotel in the Azores during a transatlantic crossing in 1975. I pronounced this an attenuated relationship, whereupon we all decided that in any event we really did not want to visit anybody at all, so we read, and had our wines, and chatted, and listened to beautiful music from the cassette deck I had so thoughtfully provided, and went to bed in high excitement, because the very next day we would visit the fabled Wallangilala.
    Thursday
. Wallangilala even Captain Philip had never visited. It is a perfect coral crescent. More accurately, a mile-wide coral necklace, with three beads missing at the top, through which you enter. The inside is ringed with white sand, with palm trees on the eastern end. It has a voluptuarian appeal for anyone who cares at all about, or for, the sea. Its stark loneliness in the South Pacific is itself striking. The perfect protection it gives from wind or, rather, from the seas—the height of the coral is insufficient to block the wind—might have been specified by a civil defense engineer. The water is every shade of Bahamian blue; the diving and snorkeling could consume days. There was only a single other vessel there, a 45-foot ketch owned by an oil rigger who works six months of the year in the North Sea, accumulating enough money to sustain him the other six months of the year in Fiji, where he cruises with his wife and child, endlessly, from island to island, disdaining, except in extreme circumstances, the use of his engine, thus doing little to consume the mineral he is paid so handsomely to make available to others. At dinner that night we resolve that now that we have reached the easternmost part of our itinerary, we shall insist on using only the sails as we proceed south to the Lau group of islands. We retired with that vinous determination, which tends to silt away overnight, to be firm with the captain, but we dove before breakfast and this meant, by Jack’s hallowed tradition, a glass of red wine with breakfast (Vane does not permit us to eat before diving). And so, refortified in our resolve, we stipulate that
only
the sails will be used for our passage south to Mbalavu—from which Pat and I shall have to leave the party, to meet engagements in Australia more closely related in purpose to taking oil out of the North Sea than to cruising in Fiji.
    Saturday
. It was a fine sail, and I suggested to the first mate that we board the Zodiac and take photographs of the
Tau
under sail. The first part of the operation was accomplished, but at full power in the Zodiac in a choppy sea we found we could not keep up with the
Tau
, so bracing was the wind that morning and so lively the Tau’s performance, unleashed on a broad reach, even with the mainsail reefed. It was an awful exercise in frustration, attempting to communicate to the people on the boat that they must slow down in order that we might photograph them. All boats should have walkie-talkies, perfect for contact between dinghy and the mother vessel. Pat has mastered the exploitation of these, and reaches me at remote grocery stores in native villages with such importunities