Cradling the sextant in both arms, he inched back down the lurching companionway ladder. He pulled sight-forms, Nautical Almanac, and Tables of Computed Altitude from his navigation locker. He braced all of them on the leeward edge of the chart table, so that they could not slide off.

On the chart, he found the shaky, lopsided circle he had labeled as their dead-reckoning position at 0317, when he had discovered that she was lost. He re-measured his track from the star-fix of the previous evening, to make sure that in his predawn panic he had not got it wrong. It was OK.

He wrote down his sextant altitude and laid the sextant on the bunk, intending to stow it in its box when he finished working the sight. He flung open the Nautical Almanac.

He worked for five minutes, in more and more dread as he approached the answer. He sensed something wrong in his figures. When he was finally through, the line of position was eighty miles away from any conceivable spot he could be on now. It ran smack through the center of Bora Bora, which they had left two days before.

Dismayed, he stared at the column of numbers. Each entry was a potential error. There were likely places for a mistake to creep in, and less likely ones, but the long search for this slip could be deadly. He had no time. He should be topside.

He groaned. He was coming apart already. If he couldn’t work a simple sunsight after only six hours aloft, when real fatigue got a bite of his brain he would dissolve completely.

He glanced at the bulkhead clock. 0945 already. He ought to have reversed course again by now and be back on the yardarm looking. He stood up, sat down again. Close to panic, he forced himself to concentrate on the figures before him.

He felt instinctively that his sextant altitude was good. He placed a tiny checkmark by that. There was no way to recheck the time: the instant of taking the sight had disappeared forever, like the strobe light tossed into their wake.

He tensed. Time ... Greenwich Time ... Greenwich date? He had a dim vision of himself, twenty-three years younger, on the bridge of the carrier at dusk. The Exec, a grizzled regular who had been a chief quartermaster, had glanced at his muddled chart.

"You using the right day of the year, Stud?"

It was even easier to forget the day of the year on a sailboat than on a carrier, especially when you couldn’t find the logbook. As Linda Lee plowed south, he searched wildly again for the book. When he couldn’t find it, he forced himself to sit down and count the days at sea, on his fingers, since Bora Bora. He had it. It was December twenty-second, not the twenty-first! With rising excitement he recalculated the sight.