Surrounded by plastic, halliard-clinking bathtubs, their own wooden ketch glowed with romance, and they bore the brunt. She looked like a world cruiser already, if only by comparison. Big auxiliary fuel tanks were lashed in cradles to her deck, two stainless beer kegs of emergency water were set before the mast, and her rigging bristled with baggy-wrinkles.

They couldn’t get the nautical tire-kickers out of their hair. The Bowsprit-Knocker was the worst. He was usually a day-crawler, often retired. Placing a familiar hand on the bowsprit, he would beam at the boat.

“Tell me you folks are going to Tahiti.”

“Eventually. Watch it, that rail’s just been paint—Shit!”

“It’s OK, hands were dirty anyway. Guess this sounds stupid, but how long’ll it take, boat like this?”

“Haven’t worked it out.”

“Hope you got your appendix out?”

“Yes.” Neither of them did, but it saved conversation.

“Pretty small island. Think you can find it? Got a radio?”

They all seemed to assume that if you had a radio, you could turn it on as you left the dock and somehow follow its nose to Tahiti. “Yes, got a radio.” Where the hell had he put the paint thinner? The fog was due and he had less than a foot of rail to go, if the old bastard would just get off his back.

“Mind if I step aboard?”

He had suspected that he had a subspecies, the Mind-if-I, on his hands, but hadn’t wanted to believe it. “I’d rather you didn—”

Too little and too late. He was aboard, just missing the paint bucket.

“Feels solid under your feet.” A tentative soft-shoe, followed by a jolly stomp.

“Thanks. Don’t sit there, please.”

“Long way, Tahiti. Hey, you missed some railing. Couple of thousand miles, I guess?”

“Yeah, about four.”

“How much fuel you carry?”

“Not much. Plenty of sails. Watch the bucket!”

Peering below, the Bowsprit-Knocker would glimpse Lindy. “Just the two of you?”

No, you stupid shit, we’re taking a crew of seventy-four midgets and a dwarf to handle the sheets. “Just us two.”

“You and your daughter.”

“Wife.”

Obligatory pause, faroff look in the eyes, and inevitably: “You know, one of these days—”

“You’ll do the same thing? You should, you really should.”

Maybe if he escaped below, he could shake him long enough to return and finish the painting undisturbed, afterward. “Excuse me, please.” He started down.

“Seems awful small inside,” his tormentor would suggest. “Mind if I take a look?”

Lindy had already promised him that if he let one more half-assed dreamer down to slow her progress, she’d disembowel them both with her bread knife. But she was just as helpless before longing eyes as he was, and he couldn’t be the bad guy always, so he would lead him below, and shoot another half-hour showing him around.