“Collision course, Shawn,” he warned. “He’s got the right-of-way.”

“Screw him, he’s not racing,” muttered Shawn. White hair whipping, face pink, he looked like a demented gnome. A drop of spittle inched toward his chin. He swung his head wildly, looking for his archrival, Commodore Russo on Pegasus.

Mitch toyed with the unseamanlike thought of doing nothing. A little bump might wake up Shawn’s tired blood. But Lindy might get shaken, and he owed the old man more than passive advice. He didn’t really give a damn about Invincible, but it would be criminal to let the pretty red ketch get hurt.

“Bear off,” he growled. The bright-red boat was broad on their starboard bow, steady on her track. “Come up, Shawn, goddamn it!”

The old man ignored him. Mitch yanked the wheel away and headed the sloop into the wind. In a drumroll of fluttering dacron they slowed, clearing the ketch’s stern by three feet. Shawn jerked a horn from a cockpit rack and let loose a blast at the other boat.

A tall, spare figure stood alone at the ketch’s wheel. He regarded them sourly from under a knitted watch-cap. Then he gave them a languid finger and bulled on through the fleet.

“Asshole,” muttered Shawn. He spotted Pegasus making the starting line, grabbed the watch from Mitch, and peered at it. “Son of a bitch! He grabbed the start.”

Mitch hardly heard him. He had the binoculars on the ketch, trying to focus on the name on the sternboards. A yawl slid between them. Then he had to help Lindy trim her jibsheet and by the time he looked back, the ketch was a tiny red shape astern.

He had seen the hull-shape before. Plans for her prototype, Gundred, lay in an old crate in their basement, with an article he had cut from a wardroom edition of Yachting on a carrier twenty years ago.

The ketch was a smaller version of the formidable pilot-boats Colin Archer had built for the Norwegians in the ‘80s. You still saw the originals, Oscar Tibring and Scandia, eighty, ninety years old, plowing on forever. Sterling Hayden had owned one briefly. Probably no one could afford to build them any more.

Lindy was watching him from the lee of the deckhouse, where she sheltered when she was forced to race. Bundled in his ancient Navy jacket, peering from the fur-lined olive hood, she looked as young as she had at eighteen, a brown squirrel peeping from foliage. She nodded after the ketch.

“Did you know that guy?”

“No.”

“You look as if you’d just seen Jesus.”

He grinned. He felt suddenly lighter. A solid cruising boat could do that to him, sometimes, sparking the abandoned, secret dream. “His boat, I liked his boat.”

She studied his face. “You’re cute,” she decided. She had gold-flecked, hazel eyes. They were wide and clear and quite easy to look into. “Why that particular boat, so much?”