Mitch said that acetone would eat through any of her plastic food jars. The nail-polish smell of it was already making her sick. She dug into the liquor locker and found two half-filled bottles of Johnny Walker. She opened them. That smell made her sicker. She emptied one into the other, capped the first, filled the empty bottle with acetone, and labeled it carefully. She was lurching aft with it when it struck the corner of the stove and shattered. Acetone was everywhere, and slivers of glass.

He heard the crash and came down, tired and carefully unangry. He was barefoot. She started to warn him and he stepped on a piece of glass. She dug through bandaids, letting the acetone eat the varnished cabin sole, but got sick from the motion and smell in the head. He bandaged his own foot while she urped into the john. She staggered out to find him picking up the last of the glass. The galley deck would never be the same.

The total time, from his need for acetone to the final disaster, was a little more than an hour, and now there was no more acetone, so he glued the base without it, and both knew it would never hold.

She had been sailing virtually all her life, yet she was only five days underway and unraveling already. No wonder the novices turned back after two days at sea.

She and Mitch seemed to grow apart. Keeping their balance on their rolling, lurching little world used up so much energy they had no time for each other. She was more isolated than when he was at the office: at least, then, he was home nights. Now he was completely occupied with navigation, sails, or the engine. And sleep ... Out of the steamship lanes, he slept all the time.

She still served cold food but did not bother to apologize for it now. They spoke little, and never discussed their condition. To admit that all the months of preparation had led to misery would have been brutal.

Everything went wrong, usually at night. They ran their engine an hour each evening to keep their batteries charged. On the fifth night it wouldn’t start. Astonished, she saw him spend three hours stuffed into the smelly engine compartment, wedged between engine and bulkhead and tortured by the sickening roll. He wouldn’t change the oil in their stationwagon, but he could diagnose an engine problem five hundred miles at sea.

He fixed it, just in time for the toilet to overflow. He found the spares for that, too, and replaced the flapper valve and cured it before he collapsed into sleep.

He grew leaner each day that he refused to let her cook. He was hard and sinewy, his face all sharp edges. He would not have to worry about his potbelly for a long while. But his skin was tinged with green, like the sea-worn winches topside.