When he could move again, he moved swiftly. Sometimes when it was stuffy below, she slept topside on the dinghy’s plywood sea-top, her belt clipped to a tie-down line. He slid open the forward hatch, just in time to catch a warm splash of spray. He scrambled topside, too frantic to close the hatch, and lunged for the dinghy.

He could see by moonlight that it was bare. He continued aft, slipping in the scupper and skinning his knee on the nonskid deck. Astern, he worked automatically. The strobe lamp, horseshoe buoy, its little drogue, and the man-overboard pole were all connected by a line, ready for action on the rail. He hurled the lot into the wake. He found himself sobbing quietly but working out the drill, not sure why he was dropping it all here when she could be hours away astern, simply doing it anyway.

The floating lamp, weighted to bob erect, tumbled upright and began to flash its strobe: one lightning-blink, visible for miles, every five seconds or so, so long as its battery lived. Its first flash froze the man-overboard pole, weighted and buoyed to tilt upright, with its orange flag caught in midflutter. The yellow horseshoe buoy sat nearby. The second flash silhouetted the flag just peeping over the crest of the next swell. By the third flash the thirteen-foot pole and buoy had dropped out of sight in a trough.

He still could not believe that she was gone. He flicked on the spreader-lights, illuminating everything on deck and halfway up the mast. She might not be overboard at all: she could have come topside, fallen, be lying unconscious in the scuppers.

So he ranged the rail, port and starboard, handing himself from lifelines to shrouds to stays, stooping to keep his center of gravity low against the constant roll. She was nowhere topside. OK, she might have washed over and be dragging half-drowned from her safety-line: he would pull her aboard and revive her and they would laugh about it tomorrow.

Feet on the rail, hands clinging to shrouds, ass over the water, he swung far out to port, then scrambled to starboard, peering fore and aft.

Nothing. He turned off the spreader-lights, which had already wrecked his night-vision, and spun to disengage Irwin. He reversed course in a slamming, flapping panic of sails and sheets, so shaken that he found difficulty in adding 180 degrees to their heading of 160 to find the reciprocal. Finally, without the answer, he simply began a turn toward the winking light. When it was dead ahead he tried the sum again.

He squinted into the binnacle. The compass, level as the encircling horizon, seemed to have gone crazy. It tossed and twisted, blurred under the ruddy little light. He managed to steady it at last on 340, almost NNW. In three minutes he was close abeam the strobe. The search was starting now.