He needed Sailing Routes of the World, a fine old volume of routes used by the clippers, but it was a British Admiralty Publication, hard to find, and he had not found it. With two hundred charts of the South Pacific carefully rolled, corrected, and stowed aboard the boat, he had a deep conviction that he had forgotten the most important ones. He would probably find out which ones they were when they were racing toward the mouth of some coral-fouled pass.

Their boat-papers, passports with visas for French Polynesia, and international health cards lay wrapped in plastic below. He had every conceivable handbook for the boat’s systems: engine, stove, Guest-lamp, radio. Half of them were too technical for his understanding, but he could always try to translate them into French for a mechanic.

Their normal water capacity was only sixty gallons, but he had ninety gallons of emergency water below the floorboards and sixty extra in the beer kegs mounted forward of the mast. He was all at once certain that it was not enough. He had an emergency solar-still, but now he doubted that it would work. He saw themselves parched in the doldrums, drinking their own urine.

He had every day been rating his Accutron watch, two bulkhead clocks, and a surplus Navy hack-chronometer. Now that they were about to leave he had a premonition that they would all fail simultaneously, along with the two radios for his time signals, and leave them lost in infinite seas.

He had remirrored his sextant, got spare parts for the toilet, and found a twelve-volt power drill. He carried spare plywood under the bunks, spare wooden plugs for failed seacocks, sheet-lead to tack below if a floating log holed their hull.

Their tiny medicine cabinet was stuffed with pills and antibiotics. Lindy had somehow found time to go to a Red Cross first-aid class. A latent Nightingale had awakened: for weeks she injected oranges, bandaged his arms and his legs, splinted fingers, and wrapped his elbows. What they would do if she were the victim they hadn’t discussed.

They had sailed to Raccoon Strait on a weekday, when they would not feel ridiculous before other boats. They spent the day practicing nautical emergencies: fire, abandon-ship, man-overboard, collision, dismasting.

They might founder but would surely not starve. Linda Lee bulged with food. There were eight dozen oiled fresh eggs, all logged and stowed away. There were fifteen gallons of Fresca and five of fruit juices, a case of beer, and a case of Johnny Walker. Below were nine pounds of margarine, four cases of canned fruit, twenty-four cans of stew, three canned whole chickens, nine canned hams, one case of hash, two cases of shrimp, one case of crabmeat, twelve cans of salmon.