Armed with screwdriver, pliers, and crescent wrench, stung by spray, he attacked the fittings one by one, setting taut a stay, easing a shroud, twanging at another like a giant guitar string, craning his neck to check the curve of the mast. He had tuned the old boy’s boat for years, before each Transpac. He knew which turnbuckles would resist and which would surrender, liked some and disliked others.

When he had finished, he found that Shawn, more heavy-handed on the helm each year, had somehow sailed them under the southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. The old man was no judge of the results of the tuning, so Mitch took the wheel to test her feel. They headed home with a failing breeze and a fierce outgoing tide. In golden light, with the first wisps of evening fog racing toward the apartments on the crest of Pacific Heights, he paralleled the jetty and steered for the old granite lighthouse at the end of the yacht club quay. Sunday strollers on the breakwater stopped to look. The yacht would seem beautiful from the shore. He should be carrying a larger jenny in the light breeze. The hell with it.

He glanced up at the hills. On the crest he could see the pink-stucco tower where he had lived in his teens. He even spotted his bedroom window in the penthouse on top. With the view he had taken for granted, the rent now must be astronomical.

A cloud shadowed the sun. San Francisco sunlight seemed less bright than he remembered it from the days on the hill. As he watched, it erased the pink spire of his childhood. He felt sad.

They were abeam the Club, a rambling tile-and-stucco structure almost fifty years old. Its bay-window eyes stared dully at the tides sucking through the Gate. Behind it lay the cramped, rock-sided yacht basin he had haunted as a child. It seemed to have shrunk with the years.

He eased the sloop toward the bouldered seawall, where the tide was weaker. Yacht club members began to wander from the bar to the front porch, watching the boat and probably hoping that he would shave the seawall too closely and give them something to talk about over dominoes. Perversely, he brought her in further.

He was badly bored. His life was one long déjà vu. Every day was a rerun. The prospect of skippering one more Hawaiian race for Shawn wearied him in advance.

A hundred yards away he saw Commodore Russo leaning his belly on the railing of the porch. He wondered what the Commodore thought, now that the suit was over. He was standing with a young yacht-bum who bossed his foredeck crew. The kid pointed to their shortened jib: derisively, Mitch imagined. They were carrying barely enough foresail to overcome the tide. Mitch could anticipate the effect of the gesture on Shawn, framed in the hatchway below and adjusting his yachting cap for the gallery.