She tried to protest, but the wind crammed her voice down her throat. He waited for the next wave, which half-drowned her, suddenly unsnapped her safety belt and slid the hatch open. With enormous strength, he lifted her and deposited her halfway down the companionway ladder.

“Quick!” he yelled.

She did not want to leave him and waited too long. The hatch was still open when the next wave hit. It poured down the ladder around her, inundating the galley and flooding forward into the main salon.

She heard the hatch slam and lock above her. She was suddenly in another world. Two inches of solid mahogany muted the tempest topside. Here she heard only the groan of Linda Lee as she wrestled with the seas, and the slosh of her bilges. She saw her pillow, carried forward by the flood, come to rest in a pool of swirling water over a floorboard drain. Wearily, she opened a seacock and began to stroke the bilge-pump.

Since he didn’t want her topside, she might as well work below. There was, if they should survive, a dim hope gleaming.

She would never sail again.

He huddled, tied behind the binnacle, for hours after he stuffed Lindy below. The wheel was lashed. He had no need to steer, no reason for being there, no inkling of why he was waiting it out uselessly topside. He simply preferred to keep an eye on the maelstrom.

Linda Lee took the seas like a fighter jogging in place. At each gust, the helm, hard down, forced her into the wind. Her tiny iron-hard jib would tremble, luff, and then she would pay off. She slopped ahead imperceptibly, still avoiding the sternway which would fold her rudder back on itself and destroy it and leave them truly helpless.

Their leeway to starboard was tremendous. He was worried about hitting Maupiti to the west. He could not pinpoint their position within ten miles. Everything beyond 100 yards was a white froth of water. If the winds blew them onto the Maupiti reef, it was simply fate. There was nothing he could do about anything except sit and wait.

The telltales on his shrouds had blown away. Only when the wind slackened could he guess its speed. Forty knots, he guessed, in lulls, perhaps sixty in the gusts.

He half-rose, staring. A mountain of heaving water rushed down on their port bow. He clung to the binnacle, trying to estimate its wave-height. It split the difference between masthead and yardarm: thirty feet high. It broke twenty-five yards off the port bow. Linda Lee, logging one knot, caught it slamming down from above and stopped with a mighty crash. White water cascaded over the port bulwark and filled the cockpit; he felt it slosh over the top of his boots and pour down his legs to his toes.