He set the spare jib, dragged himself below to the chart table, and found it had been drenched by the passing squall. He could barely make out his track on the chart. But if he didn’t spot the strobe by dawn, it made no difference anyway. He was near her, if she lived. So he simply charted a rough dead-reckoning and went back topside. He jammed the engine in forward and began a square-search: fifteen minutes and a ninety-degree left turn, thirty minutes and another, forty-five minutes and another, an hour and another.

The clock chimed seven bells—0330. She had been in the water over twenty-four hours. Fifty minutes, he estimated, to first light.

He went topside. He saw nothing. He wondered if the strobe had gone out, or drifted too far, or sunk:

But until daylight, it was all he had to look for.

She left Papeete with the cat because Yvonne heard they were going. Although they said goodbye quietly to Jean-Paul and Taarii and tried to slip from their moorings before dawn to avoid farewells, the waitress was there with M. le Chat before they could warp away from the quay. Yvonne’s chatter aroused the little Dutch girl, who awakened her parents, and when they actually winched out, their anchor was fouled again in Xanadu’s.

The whole scene got out of hand, with the Star of Peace kids tugging at their chain and even Kurt of Kormorant, whom they’d grown to detest, heaving in great Teutonic breaths and bursting his chest to dive without tanks to help. Mitch stayed on the windlass.

By the time they were free, it seemed to Lindy that half the waitresses and shopkeepers in town were waving from the quay. Farewells were part of island life. Natives were used to them, but she would never be, and as they pounded across to Moorea in the teeth of a strange miramu wind, she was sad for hours. She was tired of cruising, and she had wanted to stay.

They hauled and painted at Vaiare on Moorea and spent a week in Cook’s Bay and another in Robinson’s Cove, loveliest of all, where they tied stern-to a palm tree under the peaks and could step ashore from the fantail.

They cruised slowly northwest. At Huahine Island an American hotel was building a branch in a cove on a white coral beach. They anchored off it for five days. They had a few drinks at the bar, but they were not particularly welcome to the management. They returned the coolness. They had found the few American hoteliers in French Polynesia patronizing and Hollywood-phony. The hotels wanted boats anchored offshore for scenery, but they did not want the men and women who sailed them. To guests paying fifty dollars a day for a pseudo-dream, real boat-people were disturbing.