Clinging to the wheel, pounding toward the spot he should have been searching for the last sixteen hours, he watched the sun turn quickly into a squashed tangerine and sink below the horizon. Now that he knew where she was, he would use the last evening twilight for a star-fix to pin his own position down. He glanced east.

His stomach tensed. Evening clouds were galloping in, like ranks of black-plumed knights, from over the eastern rim of the sea. He needed a knife-edged horizon for the ancient sextant, and bright stars for its clouded scope, but mostly he needed clear skies for himself. The open seas and long free passages of the South Pacific had tempted him to rely too much on the sun. His mental map of southern stars was vague.

He seldom shot an evening round and almost never got up before dawn for morning observations. When a tricky night passage or an early-morning landfall forced him to shoot a star-fix, he used a star-finder to identify the bodies.

Picking, roughly, altitudes and zeniths from the star-finder, he would write them down for Lindy to shout up to him. The system was OK, but it was easier if you had two people to work it. And you needed clear, uncluttered skies.

If he’d learned the southern constellations properly, he could fill in the blanks in a cloudy sky and still identify the signposts. He hadn’t.

At 6:15 the first dim twinkles showed. He had not much time before the horizon grew too dim to use.

His mental map grew hazier, the sky became chaotic, the dark patches above were growing, the sextant below was obsolete, and he was so tired that his mind was drifting.

Gas grumbled in his stomach. Next would come the cramps and diarrhea he got when he faced an uncertain decision. There was no time to go to the head: he would simply have to sweat it. He was unsure and scared.

He went to get the sextant.

On February 2, a little over three months after their original deadline for departure, they stood by a beer keg on the dock and played host to their own farewell party. It seemed to be the only way to take care of the friends they had promised to show aboard, and hadn’t. The crowd stretched down the dock for three boats.

Linda Lee lay deep in the water, her boot-top stripe completely immersed, though they had painted her waterline three inches higher when they hauled her. The hateful lists below were only two-thirds checked off. Mitch still had doubts about his planning.