As he began to climb the ratlines again he glimpsed the cat, still lying on the dinghy. Its eyes mocked him slyly. In its pea-brain was locked the secret that could save her: what time she had gone.

He was again impelled to kill it. For a moment he rested his forehead on a ratline-rung. The teak was damp and cool. She had helped him shape the wood.

He struggled aloft to the yardarm and began his watch again.

They began to move aboard the boat in an unsteady drizzle under a corrugated sky. For a few days they returned to the empty house to sleep, until they stored their furniture. They slept one last night in bags on the living room floor, because she was reluctant to cut the cord.

Twice a day Mitch would return to the house to cram their station wagon with cartons of clothes, linens, and canned goods. Trans-Pacific races had taught him that equipping a vessel was not enough: you had to know precisely where each item was stored. If you did not, lockers, drawers, and stowage voids became tangled nests that you came to avoid at all costs. Jobs remained undone at sea simply because it was too much trouble to dig for the chisel or lightbulb or oilcan that would make everything work again.

So he had decreed a card-file. In it every item that went into the boat was rigorously to be logged, along with its location. It began as a neat and colorful inventory, tagged with tinted indexes.

Each card, he proposed, would be typed. He set his portable up on the cabin table to type it. The typing became penciled scrawling as the typewriter itself disappeared under piles of bedding, linen, and nautical charts.

The deadline to vacate the house approached. The drizzle persisted. The galley and cabin and fo’c’s’le became engorged with pots, books, and tools. Lindy, working below as he hauled more and more gear from the house, could not keep up. He piled household effects on the dock, on two-by-fours raised above soggy planks. A bottleneck developed on the wharf. The elder Dugan found him tarpaulins to cover the stacks but the tarps began to leak as the rain continued.