He opened the case and caught a familiar whiff of oiled mahogany. He drew out his polished-brass Plath. With the sextant vulnerable in his hand, he turned cautious as a father with a newborn infant. If he banged its arc against a bulkhead or jarred the telescope going topside, he would be lost at sea until he readjusted the whole instrument. Their spare sextant was a grand old 1880 antique Lindy had bought for him in Copenhagen, to mount as a lamp in his den. They had brought it along, because it still worked, but the engraved figures on its silver arc were almost too worn to read, and he had not tested it in a year at sea.

His Plath would be Lindy’s salvation: an old and trusted friend. He venerated it as Jean-Paul honored the Tikis he had shown them in the Marquesas, as a charm against disaster. The feel of it in his hand raised his spirits.

He reached for his stopwatch, hanging from the spice rack in her galley. She insisted on using it in cooking. Because tiny things mattered as sea, her attachment was an invasion of his private bubble, as navigator. He had bought another in Papeete for the galley. But his own kept returning to the spice rack, ready to time his eggs in the morning. He found himself frozen, stopwatch lanyard half around his neck, remembering the argument they had made of it.

He had forgotten the sextant, and it lay carelessly on the chart table. He grabbed it quickly, before it could slide. He climbed halfway out the hatch and braced himself, feet on the companionway ladder, for the morning sun-shot.

Facing the sun, jammed for support against the side of the hatch, he waited to be carried to the peak of a swell. When he felt his belly grow light at the summit, he lined up the horizon and checked his index-correction on the arc. Then he swung his heaviest filter over the lens and began to search for the sun in his telescope, swinging the sextant fore and aft while he moved the thumbscrew along the arc.

He glimpsed the great orange ball, lost it, found it again, and enticed it to the horizon. He let the lower part of his body, supported by his knees in the hatchway, gimbal his torso, which he kept pliant to absorb the roll and pitch. He lost the sun again under the main boom and had to wait until it reappeared. When he had the bottom of the orange disk at the razor-edge of the horizon, he rocked the sextant with his wrist, letting the sun swing up to the right, touch the horizon, and then swing up to the left. At the precise moment that he felt in his gut the peak of an upward surge, he centered the sun again, made disk and horizon kiss, and punched his stopwatch. He had made his observation.