Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

During our second week in the Atlantic it began to get cold. We were back in the northern latitudes and the balmy tropics were just memories. Each day we put on more clothes: from bathing suits to shirts and jeans to sweaters and then insulated jackets. I was no longer able to sit out front and write. I hung around under the dodger instead. As it got colder, the sea grew rougher. The skies were overcast most of the time, making sighting the sun for navigation impossible. We sailed for days at a time without knowing our position.

Days blended together. Each morning looked the same as the morning before. For as far as we could see, all around us, was the horizon. Every day it was the same horizon. Sailing out of sight of land reinforces the fact that we live on a ball in space. You can see the curvature of the earth. At night, if it was clear, the stars looked like they were sitting right there next to me and it seemed that we weren’t moving at all. South Sea islanders believed, as they traveled across hundreds of miles of open sea, that the boat wasn’t going anywhere. Their destination would come to them if they made the right moves. Sitting on the edge of space, alone with the stars, it was easy for me to see where that idea came from.

As we got closer to the States, we got jumpy. Bob dropped his Spanish routine. John was drinking heavily. I smoked pot, made notes in my journal, invented ever more efficient programs to run on my calculator to automate navigation calculations.

We were in common shipping lanes now. We saw as many as half a dozen ships every day, any one of which could’ve been a Coast Guard cutter. I began to think that the chances of sneaking past the Coast Guard were slight. We could hear the Coast Guard on the radio, talking to the freighters, asking them if they’d seen any unusual traffic. Small sailboats in the winter Atlantic are unusual traffic. We kept our binoculars glued on every ship we saw appear on the horizon, breathing sighs of relief when we didn’t see the big red hash stripe the Coast Guard had painted on its ships. The vigil was making us tense as snakes.

As my anxiety rose, I became more critical of John’s plan. One of my objections to his return strategy, one that I reminded him of constantly, was that he insisted we sail without our radar reflector or running lights. I argued that the radar on the Coast Guard ships could pick up the Namaste without the reflector (a skeletal metal ball made with three intersecting metal disks which showed up as a very bright spot on radar), but when we were spotted on radar, our radar print wouldn’t show the telltale bright reflection of a radar reflector on their screens. That would look suspicious as hell. Every ship at sea has radar reflectors to avoid collisions, especially little boats like ours. And, I added, at night they would see us on radar and would not only see no reflector signal, but also would see no running lights when someone looked in our direction, which would make us look doubly suspicious. I said we should look as normal as possible, just like we had on the way down. John said we should try to stay invisible—why didn’t I stop going on and on about it? It always worked before.

Four days from our ETA, we ran out of dry clothes. Endless storms had soaked all our clothes, and we couldn’t get them dry. Sitting on deck during four-hour watches was painful. No one except the man on watch came on deck. The cold wind blowing through our damp clothing chilled us to the bone. My feet got numb inside my deck boots because they’d gotten soaked when I went out to reef the jib one night and never did dry out. My notebook began to swell with schemes about moving back to the tropics if I survived this mission. I could operate a resort; I could run charter sailboats; I could live on a goddamn tropical island and eat sand flies if I had to. I never wanted to be cold again in my life.

Two days to drop-off, we started picking up stateside radio stations. We tried using them for navigation because we hadn’t had a decent sun shot for days. John had a portable radio with a rotating antenna which we could swing back and forth and get an azimuth to a broadcast source. Using the directions to several radio stations, we could get a rough triangulation of our position. When Dave called, John gave our position, said we’d be able to make the drop-off sometime between eight and eleven on the evening of the fifteenth. You could hear the excitement in Dave’s voice as he pretended to be the dispatcher of some shipping company. The shore team had been waiting for this day for over two months. Hearing Dave’s excitement made us feel good, made us feel confident that the shore team had their act together.