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.

Tourists bored them both, but it was their own fault. They were becoming boat-bound and xenophobic. They could hardly carry on a conversation except with other sailors. Mitch’s interests had shifted from tort and equity to varnish, diesels, and hull stability. Lindy, despite herself, was too involved in the care and feeding of eggs at sea to read about Watergate.

They touched at Raiatea. They rowed the dinghy up the river Faaroa, where the ancestors of the New Zealand Maoris had lived. She plucked hibiscus from the banks, feeling like a model in a National Geographic feature, as Mitch paddled lazily. They touched at Tahaa, and then, having saved the most beautiful French island for last, headed toward the craggy peak they could see only a few miles to the west, the jagged summit of Bora Bora, Michener’s Bali Hai.

Mitch, trolling under power across the mirror-calm channel in the lee of Raiatea, caught a wahoo-roroa, the Tahitians called it. He cleaned it and hung it by its tail from the clew of the mizzen-boom, and it swung there as they shot the wide Bora Bora pass, steering on the range-marks.