He braced his buttocks against the leeward bulkhead, to go back to sleep. He could not. He had to urinate.

He could go topside and chance a dash of warm spray or he could struggle with the toilet in the head. The toilet trip meant handing his way forward through the main cabin, which was heeling twenty degrees. Squeezing into the head, he would then have to flick on the light. The toilet was below the waterline, and they kept the sea-valves closed when cruising, fearing flooding through the bowl. So he would have to kneel to twist open the seacocks. Then he would have to regain his feet, adjust his trajectory for the list, the roll, and the pitch, and let fly. The problems of train and elevation were considerable.

And if Lindy, forward, was asleep, the snuffling of the pump when he flushed the toilet would awaken her. Pumping the john sounded, up forward, like a flood in a mine tunnel.

He decided to pee topside instead. He rolled from the bunk, handed himself along grab-rails in the overhead like a commuter on a lurching subway. He slid open the main hatch and climbed the companionway ladder. Ducking from the canvas doghouse into the moist night, he ignored a tug of guilt as he brushed past his web-nylon safety belt without putting it on. The belts had snap-shackles you clipped to the rigging. He had made her promise him, and had promised her, always to wear one topside at night, but it was a lot of trouble just to take a leak, and if you were nude, the webbing rubbed at your belly. Since Jean-Paul, such promises did not seem to matter, and he had ignored his own rule.

Unbelted, he stepped to the scuppers. Clinging to a mizzen shroud, he voided over the rail. He watched his phosporescent trail slide astern. He re-estimated their speed at five knots. He stepped down into the cockpit. Reluctant to return to his stuffy bunk, troubled vaguely now by something wrong, he inspected the self-steering vane hanging aft.

It stood rock-steady in the unchanging wind. Irwin, as Lindy had christened it, was steering with his customary precision. Mitch flipped on the binnacle light and checked the tension in Irwin’s sinews, thin steel cables leading aft to the small auxiliary rudder. The cables were tight and the little rudder was swinging slavishly, hard-port to hard-starboard, obeying the tug of Irwin’s arms as they followed the nudge of the wind on the vane. To watch Irwin too long always made him tired, and a little guilty, as if they should feed him or keep him in booze.

He was still uneasy. Aft of Irwin, a mizzen-sheet block was fouled on the sternlight. Hanging tightly to a mizzen shroud, he kicked it loose. For a moment he gazed astern at the living green wake they laid.