The trades never shifted. The puffy trade-wind clouds romped by, endlessly following-the-leader. Routine became unalterable and time raced faster because each trade-wind day was like the last. She would awaken every morning to the tick of the radio time-signal, as he checked his chronometer. In the trades, the sound was not nearly as nerve-wracking. After breakfast, he would wind the clocks at eight: an old Navy custom, he explained. Each half-hour, day and night, they would log the barometer reading, wind direction, and wind speed.

Every morning at ten he would shoot the sun, and again at noon. He would emerge with a noon position, another tiny circle to put at the end of the neat track on the pilot chart. The path inched relentlessly south and a little west, toward the Marquesas.

Now she wanted the track on the chart to stop cold. Instead, it moved faster and faster. They were logging over 120 miles a day. Once they made 137. She wanted the passage to last forever.

Time was flashing by. There were not enough hours for all the things she wanted to do. She was studying Polynesian, from a Mormon dictionary they had found in a used-book shop. She read of Tahiti and the islands west and, to please Mitch, even tackled Herman Melville, whom she’d always hated.

She continued to cook enormous meals, there was so much to use up and they had starved so long. She felt no threat to her figure; even in the gentler motion running before the trades, every muscle in her body was working for balance all day long, and even in her sleep at night.

Below, they began to move as a team. Unconsciously, she would synchronize her actions with his, tuck her feet up on the bunk if she sensed that he was passing, without even looking up from her book. Finishing his morning sunsight, he would automatically wait until she was through the dishes before crowding her with his bulk at the chart table.

They discovered one night that the plywood dinghy-cover top was a superior place to make love, under the crackling stars. But he wanted her infrequently, apparently too tired fighting motion for sex. He napped intermittently all day long.

In the afternoons she would lie on the foredeck, dozing. Sometimes porpoises would swoop in to frolic in their bow-wave. Once a school of them, babies and all, played with her for an hour, piping to her and listening to her squeak back. She tried feeding them: sardines, scraps of ham, strips of canned bacon. She never found anything they would touch: they were there to play, not to beg.

During the night, flying-fish would board them to die odorously in their scuppers, and by the time they found them in the morning, they were always too far gone to fry.