He never failed to get three sun-sights a day. She knew that he was often as nauseous as she, and wondered when he would finally crack. Watching him leaning on the chart table, at an impossible angle against the heel, she could not understand how he could follow the endless figures in the Nautical Almanac.

She grew to hate the daily morning throb of the time-signal from Hawaii. They were both on the verge of breaking.

And then late one memorable afternoon she awakened from a nap to feel a certain warmth in the damp cabin air. They were six days out of the Golden Gate, 600 miles off the Mexican coast and far to the west of Guadalupe Island. She sensed a subtle change in the motion. She went topside. The wind had shifted to the quarter. When she had dozed off, Linda Lee had been lurching like a drunken elephant. Now she was lifting to immense purple swells off the port quarter, cresting, settling gently. She had been staggering; now she waltzed.

Mitch, stripped to the waist, was sitting in the cockpit facing the late sun. He flashed her a smile.

“Mitch,” she exulted, “what’s happened?”

“Trades,” he grinned. His face was luminous. He had sailed the northeast trades before, on the Hawaiian Race. “And this, my sweet, is what it’s all about.”

They lost the trades that evening, but regained them sometime during the night. She awakened at six, starved. Mitch was already topside. She discovered that she could move without hanging on. Everything worked. The toilet flushed exuberantly. She tapped bare toes on the foot-pump. For days she had had to call Mitch to prime it. But now warm salt water poured from the spigot, just as it was supposed to. She rinsed her face and looked at herself in the mirror.

She had gone to bed haggard and drawn. Now she looked great, if pale. She scrubbed her face with a washcloth: her color returned. She brushed her teeth in salt water, worked Lubriderm into her skin so she would not get Cruising-Wife Leatheritis, and metered herself a cup of fresh water. The fresh-water pump had quit leaking.

The stove lit without a murmur, after a week of retirement. She cooked an enormous breakfast: four eggs for Mitch, three for herself, canned sausages, slabs of toast from stale bread, mountains of canned butter on each slice.