They grew worried about water, despite all the emergency jugs. They cut themselves to a pint each a day, and wrote down every ounce.

Their new paint peeled from the hull. The rails, though painted glossy-white against just this problem, were hot to the touch. The decks seared bare feet. Despite the canvas cockpit canopy, they broiled at noon in vertical sunlight. She was sure, despite her care, that her skin would never be the same.

They went nude and slept topside, under liquid stars, because the cabin was a hothouse even after dark. They doubled their dosage of vitamin pills, fighting salt-water boils and heat rash.

She was certain that despite her endless swims and her salt-water bucket-baths topside, she smelled. Mitch certainly did. She got used to that, but the urine smell in the head was another matter.

The boat rolled, under greasy swells, and caused him to miss the john. Then she would have to wipe up the deck—he never seemed to notice—and it was too damned hot.

“Can’t you for God’s sake sit? I’ll never tell.”

He would nod sheepishly and forget, and next time it would be just the same.

One day they made only twelve miles, under power and sail. Another day they actually fell backward in some vagrant current.

When she honestly thought that she could bear it no longer, they were hit by a line of squalls. The breeze freshened afterwards. Then it died. The next day it rose again and, miraculously, held.

At three degrees north, 130 west, they struck the southeast trades. All morning they scooted south under a ten-knot breeze, and by that afternoon it had increased to eighteen.

The next day they crossed the Equator, and she was cooled enough by the new trades to bake a cake to celebrate her initiation into the Ancient Order of Shellbacks. Mitch sprinkled salt water ceremoniously on her forehead and they cracked their last beers.

Her moods had become puppets of the wind. Despair, boredom, peace of mind, mirth, did not come any longer from within her; she caught them from the breeze. In the blustery westerlies she had been sick and scared; in the northern trades, ecstatic; in the calms of the Doldrums, a prisoner flailing at Mitch and the heat. Now, again, she sank into the joy of trade-wind sailing.

Everything became clear-cut. Important decisions were easy, since they were a matter of life and death. If a sail began to chafe, you sewed it then and there, or you would lose it in the next blow. You replaced a whiskered halliard instantly, even if you had to stay up all night swaging the new one. More trivial problems were easy, too: you put them on a list and waited for the landfall.