Topside, she looked as if the grandaddy waves of the Roaring Forties had washed her clean of fat. She had no deck-house at all. An overturned aluminum canoe was lashed to her steel flush-deck. Two immense CQR anchors were snugged head-down port and starboard, their shanks secured to solid steel stanchions. A heavy chain led through a hawsepipe to the Danforth they had wrestled with in the mud; it was set again somewhere far, he hoped, from his own. Atop the stanchions ran galvanized lifelines, all parceled and served with marline and brushed in the old way with Stockholm tar.

You tuned the shrouds with deadeyes, like a nineteenth-century clipper ship. Jean-Paul insisted they were better than turnbuckles, once you got the hang.

The masts were telephone poles, not figuratively but actually. They were unpainted, creosoted, cured, and treated with Cuprinol. Great cracks ran their length, but Jean-Paul claimed that they were stronger than the best laminated-spruce stick in the whole long line of yachts.

The masts were the only wood topside. Even the booms were steel. The decks were painted white for the tropics and the paint embedded with walnut shells for footing.

From the aft cabin protruded the only break in her deck-line, a hemispheric plexiglass bubble, turret of a World War II bomber. Below it was an auxiliary steering station. Running down the Roaring Forties single-handed, Jean-Paul had steered from there, watching the graybeards coming up astern. “Watching always, one must quarter them, each as it comes. One is hurled onward like on a surfboard.”

Jean-Paul seldom spoke of himself, though Mitch knew he had lived in Washington as a child and been a professional military officer in French Indo-China. He never bragged, except about his boat. “She lacks, you would say, ‘lines.’ She is, I think, a submarine crossed with a Sherman tank. But if I hit a berg or lost her sticks in a hurricane, I think I should grow very old before I drowned.”

Having no engine, she had no electricity or radio gear. Even at the quay Jean-Paul refused the umbilical cord of shore current, and used kerosene lanterns below. She was uncluttered and ugly as a mako shark, but in any seas or collision her water-tight compartments below would keep you afloat until you starved. She was too sterile topside for Mitch’s taste and much too bleak for Lindy’s. Steel was dead and wood alive. But below, Mitch knew, she was a different boat.

They climbed down a hatch like a manhole cover. Austerity disappeared. Everything was sheathed from bow to stern in African mahogany, picked up in Mozambique. Each plank was tongue-in-grooved, and there was not a steel frame showing. The glow of bulkhead lamps made the wood come alive. It throbbed with the sheen of hand-rubbed varnish.