She valued the jug for its buoyancy, afraid that her jacket might turn soggy and that she would have to jettison it. And the jug was a link with the boat.

The whole nightmare was past belief. Safe in her bunk at 3 A.M., she had been deep in the New York subway system, reading The Taking of the Pelham One-Two-Three, in paperback. Fifteen minutes later she had been thrashing idiotically in their wake.

She let her mind drift back, looking for some excuse. She had been soft and snug with the cat in the forward cabin, under the bunk light. The kitchen timer had croaked from its niche above a deck beam, telling her that it was time for her half-hour survey of the horizon. She spilled M. le Chat from her bare belly, snapped off her light to save the main battery, and groped with her feet for the varnished cabin flooring.

The cabin sole, when the boat was hard on the wind, sloped almost thirty degrees. Automatically, she swung herself aft in the dark from bulkhead to handhold to shelf, making no move without a hold on something. She was as familiar with her environment as a gibbon in the jungle, alternately light and heavy as the boat pitched wildly in its normal battle with the head-seas.

She sidled past the trunk of the mast, feeling a trickle of water down its varnished face: the canvas mast-boot topside was leaking, as usual, and Mitch kept forgetting to tape it down.

That was her current bitch. And the stupid chirping from the steering cable under the lazarette, which was making a neurotic out of the cat. Tomorrow she would get him to squirt it with WD-40.

In the main cabin, by the moonglow through the skylight, she could make out his bare form, tangled with his pareu on the leeward side of his bunk. His massive shoulders and the line of his butt, after almost twenty-two years of marriage, were still sexy to her.

Maybe it would all work out once they got the hell back.

She left the lights off, not wanting to hurt her night-vision or to wake Mitch. She groped for her jacket in the foul-weather locker and put it on. She picked her safety belt from the hook under the canvas dodger and cinched it on too. She drew a flashlight from a rack by the hatch, took the logbook from its niche above the chart table, and climbed to the cockpit.

The night was warm but the wind whipped her hair to leeward. Its ends stung her cheeks. She snapped her safety belt to the gooseneck on the mizzenmast, with slack enough to move around the cockpit but leasing her from straying much further.