Still, there was the matter of the extra 200 miles, and if he found the guts, they could stop at Takaroa or Takarava and cut the trip in half. He had never seen a coral atoll.

When Lindy handed his omelette topside, he asked her to bring up the Sailing Directions.

“Cut through?” she asked, when he told her. “But Jean-Paul said—” She stopped. “Mitch! Why?"

He gave her all the reasons, and when he was through he found that he didn’t believe them himself.

At noon three days out of Nuku Hiva, she was clinging to the spreader and searching the area from broad on the starboard bow to dead ahead. It was sunny, bright, and very rough. Mitch was chasing the bounding sun with his sextant on deck below. When she looked down, she could see him dodging from one side of the mainsail to the other as she and the mast described great circles in the sky.

Abeam, a squall was flailing at the jagged horizon, but there was no sign of Takarava. “No atoll at-all,” she sang down. If he became discouraged, maybe he would backtrack, cut north to the course he had originally planned, avoid whatever dark danger lay ahead.

While he was working his starsights last night, she had read the general remarks in the Sailing Directions: “Navigation among these islands is dangerous because of the uncertain set of the currents and the still imperfectly charted reefs and islands..."

Imperfectly charted? She believed him to be an infallible navigator, but if the island itself was misplaced on the chart, they could end up like two comic-strip characters under a coconut tree, waving her panties at passing steamers. Except that here there were no steamers, not this side of Tahiti. Steamers knew better.

It was ridiculous. She swung down and faced him. He had got his observation and was heading below to work it out. She followed him and thumbed the Sailing Directions. She quoted: "’It was reported in 1950 that Takarava Atoll appeared to be incorrectly charted and should be rotated clockwise through an arc of I5 degrees about the northeastern point...’” She looked up at him. “It moves?"

“You know it doesn’t move,” he growled. He told her to simmer down, that the Sailing Directions, for plain gloom, made the Old Testament read like Winnie the Pooh.

He began to work out his sight at the chart table. He seemed unconcerned. She hoped it wasn’t an act. She read him another passage. "’Six knot current in the pass, submerged reefs line both sides,’” she chanted. “’The pass is only eighty yards wide at the seaward end...’ What’s eighty yards?”

“Two hundred and forty feet,” he murmured, busy at the chart table. “Look, I’m trying to figure out where the fuck we are. OK?”