He began to crawl from the crosstrees. A roll to starboard flung him against the leeward rigging and a wire shroud seared his chest. He continued down. Below, in the gloomy chaos of the cabin, he gulped water and then primed Lindy’s swinging, stainless stove. He touched it with a match and watched as the raw alcohol went off in an orange puff. He remembered her doing it, swiftly and expertly. Her long auburn hair was always too close to the flame. He would yell at her for it, and she would brush it back. She never seemed to get it singed. The flame turned blue, now, heating its vaporizer.

She must be hungry...

Doing the things she would have been doing was agonizing. He pumped water into her kettle, put it over the flame, and glanced at the clock. Three minutes gone from the quarter-hour he had allotted. He turned up the stove. He pumped another glass of water and gulped it, wanting more but not taking the time.

She must be dehydrating too...

He began to prepare automatically for the morning observation. He slid his hack-chronometer from a drawer above the chart table, ducked forward and pulled their Transoceanic Radio from a rack. He nestled it between pillows on the leeward bunk, yanked up the aerial. The 9:30 news from Radio Tahiti blasted from the speaker: if he could hear Tahiti, why couldn’t they hear him? He caught a few words of French, too fast for his understanding, and President Ford’s name, and Kissinger’s. Quickly he switched to the nineteen-meter band. He dialed in the high, nerve-wracking pulse of the WWV time-signal that Lindy hated so much.

“At the tone, nineteen hours thirty-six minutes, Coordinated Universal Time.” His chronometer was nine seconds off in two days, and the rate was changing. Something wrong there, but he couldn’t worry about it now. He was glad he had bothered to check it. Nine seconds could mean a two-mile error in his line of position.

He grabbed the handle of the varnished sextant case on the shelf over his bunk. Kneeling awkwardly on the berth, he waited. With its case, it weighed ten pounds. He must ease it over the retaining fiddle without straining his back. He caught the sea in league with him and hiked it over, using the roll to beat gravity. As usual, he strained his back anyway. Each job took twice the effort it would have taken ashore or at the dock. That was why cruising sailors stayed thin.