She could hear Mitch bellowing Waltzing Matilda in the cockpit. She had not heard him sing in years. She glanced through the hatch as she ladled out the eggs. He wore nothing but his denim skipper’s hat. He was studying the swells marching down on their quarter. He had disengaged Irwin and was standing on the cockpit coaming, clinging to a shroud. He was steering with his bandaged foot, apparently for the joy of guiding Linda Lee down the long sapphire slopes. His voice rose: "Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?" A wave arose behind him, capped with a great white plume. She almost shouted in alarm, but at the last moment, as he eased the wheel over with the sole of his foot, the crest sighed and passed under them and they were sliding sedately down the other side of the mountain, neatly under control.

He looked down at her. His upper lip had already lost the greenish tinge. The early light etched his face, beneath the battered cap, with abrupt shadows. He had not shaved in a week. His jaw shone with a thick golden stubble, but he looked wonderful. He was the young student she had married.

She had brewed real coffee instead of instant. She stirred up Tang and brought the whole mess topside on Navy surplus trays. They ate, in the cockpit, mouthing each morsel eye-to-eye like the lovers in Tom Jones

When she had washed the dishes he went below to sleep. She took over the wheel, relieving Irwin for a while to try to match Mitch’s ease and economy of motion.

She raced alone for hours across a sapphire, bottomless deep. Her hand on the varnished wheel was light: she let the boat balance the wind and the sea and let her body soak up the sun.

Finally she re-engaged Irwin, and then she had nothing to do at all but to lose herself in the rolling ride downwind.

The northeast winds were granite-steady, off the port quarter. Day and night they stayed, force-five, twenty knots. The swells grew mountainous, with a length, crest-to-crest, of a quarter mile. Ahead, they looked harmless. Aft, they towered menacingly above the cockpit. Each looked as if it could broach and swamp them.

But the white rolling tops fell always just short of their stern. Linda Lee rose on the slope, curtsied on the peak, and dropped into the following trough as the great blue swell rolled on ahead. With the wind shifting daily further astern, Mitch doused the mizzen. He left the jib up, hoisted the stas’l, and lashed its boom outward to a shroud. Under the foresails and main, they let her tug at the bit.