Grundy scowled, his jaw hanging open, while she did her best badass catwalk over to the trash can to pick strands of spaghetti off herself.

If nothing else, she felt inordinately grateful that her team had backed her up.

The next day was their first attempt at a fun little evolution call surf passage. It started with getting softened up by an hour or so of four-count lunges while holding an inflatable rubber raft over her boat team’s heads, plus push-ups, flutter kicks, and a lot of screaming in her face.

Then she and her teammates ran out into the surf, jumped in their boat, and commenced trying to paddle it out past the surf line where tall waves broke over them, knocked guys out of boats, and overturned boats outright.

Sherri took a critical look at her crew. All the strong guys were on the port side of the boat. Not good. She shouted, “Smitty, trade places with me.”

She knew from playing this game in the Atlantic Ocean at Camp Jarvis that the strength of the paddlers had to be evenly distributed, or the boat would get slightly sideways of a wave and tip over. She jumped to her new side of the boat in the nick of time.

She timed the approaching wave and shouted, “Dig in with your paddles…now!”

They made it over the wave, but the guy in the very front of the boat, Jabrowski, got flipped out and sailed overhead to land in the surf beside her. Sherri thrust her paddle at him. “Grab on!”

Fortunately, he was one of the strongest guys on the crew, and he managed to snag her paddle as the surf pulled at him. With the help of two other guys, she hauled him over to the raft. Instructors yelled at them from shore to quit fucking around and paddle.

Sherri helped grab Jabrowski’s belt and pull him back into the boat. Another wave broke over the boat, inundating them all. She coughed up seawater with the rest of her boatmates.

She commenced singing a song Griffin had called a sea shanty. Its rhythm helped all the guys paddle in unison. They picked up the chant and roared the song as another wave smashed into them, sending their boat’s prow vertical. They all leaned forward, digging in with their paddles, smashing through another wave face and slamming down on the back of it. Boat upright, everyone inside.

“A win for the Smurfs!” she crowed. Her teammates cheered as the instructors waved them back in to shore. They were spared remedial physical training as a result of their performance and were released to head up to the chow hall for lunch ahead of the other hapless teams, most of whom were floating in the surf, tossed out of their overturned boats.