Itaska's Master Sails The World
Deep in the engine room of his ocean-going yacht Itaska, with his hands working an oil can and his eyes, large behind thick glasses, matching the blue of twin 1,200-horsepower engines, William E. Simon, former Treasury Secretary of the United States, made it plain: "I go into jungles."
He might have been speaking about the one on Wall Street, where he cut a swathe with Salomon Brothers in the 1960s, or the denser one in Washington, where he headed Richard Nixon's Federal Energy Office even as his boss was sinking in the Watergate swamp. Treasury Secretary Simon hacked at the budgetary vines under President Gerald Ford, and, after leaving Government, set a fast pace through the uncharted wilds of commercial banking.
But what Mr. Simon meant in the engine room on Saturday were real jungles, on South Pacific islands, where he once went searching - "in an amateur way" - for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's plane. He never found it.
World Traveler
Mr. Simon has at least two things in common with the vanished pilot. For one, he likes to travel and explore the world. He's circled it twice. Second, the Itaska, which was given the name by a previous owner, happens to have the same name as a ship that made an early search for the flier.
The yacht, which has been anchored outside Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton for much of the summer, will set out on a three-year circumnavigation of the globe on Oct. 1.
There is no place he'd rather be than on board, Mr. Simon confessed while guiding two visitors through the 175-foot renovated ocean tug. "Whenever I leave on a trip, it's the happiest day of my life."
Money Lubricates
He does have choices. Mr. Simon has owned a house in East Hampton since the late 1960s, and has a mansion on Maui, a ranch house in Santa Barbara, an apartment in New York City, and then some. "I'm a buyer of houses. Sometimes I buy them fast and furious," he said as a matter of fact, not of bravado.
The former Treasury Secretary is a man of means. He is said to be one of the wealthiest in the world. But it's as if money were engine oil, to hear him talk, a lubricant that permits exploration and adventure, a substance that should be as exciting to make as it is to spend, certainly not something to collect for its own sake.
No surprise, then, that after exploring the world for nine years aboard Freedom, a 125-foot ketch, Mr. Simon made the switch to power with an un-gaudy vessel, Itaska is extremely seaworthy, Dutch-built, and was christened Thames in 1961.
She is not a cocktail yacht, as he put it, but a boat outfitted for adventure.
Waterman
"I have been a man of the water my whole life," he said while steering Itaska's Zodiac tender out through the harbor jetties. He first felt the pull of the sea, literally, as a lifeguard at Bay Head, N.J., he said, near his family home in Spring Lake. He remembered body surfing in the swells that preceded the big hurricane of 1942.
"When the boys went off [to war] in 1942, they needed lifeguards. I was 13 at the time and a good swimmer."
Later, when his family began to grow - Mr. Simon and his late wife, Carol, raised 12 children - "I taught them and their friends how to surf. They had to earn a green belt in surfing. I'd wait for a really big day. They'd all do it, and I'd go to an Army-Navy store and get a dozen green cartridge belts. Those were the green belts. We were always a close family. Vacationed together."
His daughter Julie, who visited the yacht over the weekend, admitted she would slip away from school on occasion to meet her father's yacht in places like Bali, or Sidney, Australia.
Northwest Passage
Mr. Simon saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time while in the Army after World War II, stationed in Hawaii. "It was quite an experience for a guy who had never been west of Spring Lake."
The Pacific remains his favorite ocean. "They've killed most of the reefs in the Caribbean," he said sadly. The Pacific is where he spent almost 2,000 hours scuba diving from the Freedom, "down 150 to 175 feet every day for two or three months."
Allen Journing, a native of the Channel Islands in England, has been with Mr. Simon since the days of Freedom, and will be, he said, "until [Mr. Simon] swallows the anchor." He is Itaska's captain.
Most of the yacht's 12-member crew were along for its 23-day journey through the Northwest Passage in 1994, and four months later through Drake's Passage en route to Antarctica, "stopping by East Hampton," Mr. Si mon said, "long enough to thaw out."
Siberia On The Left
The Northwest Passage was navigated west to east and tested the mettle of yacht and crew.
"I knew the chances. We always prepare very carefully for our trips. There is only one season when this was possible. I told the crew, 'You can expect some hairy moments, but we won't turn back. You only get one bite of the apple.'"
The bite was taken, but not without the promised hairy moments, including a storm at the very start, "right before the Bering Strait, with Siberia on the left, Alaska on the right. It tore a steel panel off the deck and me into a TV set," Mr. Simon said.
The short, violent flight was repeated a few months later in Drake's Passage at the bottom of South America, where Itaska met 70-knot winds and 70-foot seas. "I was sound asleep at 3 p.m. and hit the bulkhead on the fly," Mr. Simon laughed.
Ordered To Retreat
The weather closed in behind Itaska almost immediately on the Northwest Passage trip. Mr. Simon said he and the captain heeded the advice of one who had gone before. The crew did not try to outguess the weather, and the yacht did not pull into shelter, "because we'd never come out."
The boat did get trapped in ice six days out. She was lifted so that her single screw was out of the water. "The Canadian Coast Guard came from 50 miles south and pulled us out, but said they wanted us to go back.
" 'I'm ordering you to go back,'" said the cutter's commanding officer.
" 'No, with all due respect. These are international waters,'" Mr. Simon answered.
" 'I'll report you to Ottawa,'" said the Canadian.
" 'Okay, but tell [Prime Minister Jean] Chretien that it's Bill Simon trying to make it.'"
"In three days we got a wire wishing us good luck."
Unexplored Islands
As they approached Greenland at the eastern end of the passage, Mr. Simon ordered up a helicopter, whose pilot had to fly north for six days to reach the landing pad on the Itaska's back deck.
The copter took on fuel from 55-gallon drums placed at intervals in the frozen wastes to accommodate aircraft heading to and from the weather station at Eureka, in the northernmost part of Canada's Northwest Territories.
"The idea was to land on islands people had never been to," Mr. Simon said, and visit places where, for example, members of the doomed Franklin expedition had ventured in the mid-1800s. They never returned.
"We saw graves."
The Itaskans nearly dug their own.
The satellite trips were made, but Mr. Simon and Captain Journing said they narrowly escaped a mountain and certain death aboard the chopper in an Arctic storm on the way back to Itaska.
As though rewarded for surviving their 23-day expedition, the crew was treated to a six-hour display of Northern Lights when the yacht finally made Greenland.
It was thought the Itaska might try the passage across Russia's northern territories, but Mr. Simon said the lawless nature of the area could find them pirated or worse.
Around The World
On various legs of the yacht's forthcoming round-the-world cruise, the owner plans to charter her. She will revisit Antarctica first, then head for the Baltic, followed by a cruise of the Mediterranean.
She will turn down the east coast of Africa, arriving at Cape Town by May of 1998. Itaska plans to make Seychelles by June, Bombay by the following January, Indonesia by March 1999, Hong Kong by April, Fiji by July, and New Zealand by October, in plenty of time for the America's Cup race in March of 2000.
But it was off to Main Beach in East Hampton for the former Treasury Secretary on Saturday afternoon to meet with Tony, his wife of 14 months, and to build sand castles with his grandchildren. He has 22 in all.
"There's nothing better than grandchildren," he said.