“Okay.”

Bear moved over to one side, still keeping hold of the tiller. Mia cautiously took his place and wrapped her fingers around the wooden pin. Mia had control of Ursula.

8

MIA IN CHARGE

The tiller trembled beneath Mia’s hands. Every now and then it tried to give a strong jerk to the left or the right.

“It wants to go all over the place,” she said.

“Well, sailing is one big balancing act between the sails and the keel and the rudder. We’ve lost our normal rudder and we’re using a washboard attached to an oar, so we’re unbalanced. So yes, the boat wants to go all over the place but we can’t let it. Now, we want to steer a course of two hundred and ninety degrees.”

There was a compass the size of a dinner plate in a glass case next to the wheel. The dial was marked with the four main directions, and every ten degrees in between. If it had been a clock face then 290 degrees would have been where ten o’clock was.

Mia tried to keep Ursula on course, but the compass swung back and forth.

“The waves keep knocking us all over,” Mia protested.

Bear smiled.

“Don’t try to exactly correct the course every time we bounce one way or another. The best we can do is stick to the right course generally, as close as we can. Also, the person steering has to keep an eye on the wind.”

He pointed.

“See those tell-tales, those bits of cotton tied to the ropes, blowing in the wind? They show the direction the wind is coming from. You can see that at the moment it’s coming from the front right, and we’re sailing at an angle to it. That means we have the sails hauled in quite tight. If the wind shifts further forward, we’ll pull the sails in a bit more, and if it comes back, we’ll let the sails out. So, the wind pushes on the sails one way, the water pushes against the keel the other way, and the boat moves like someone squeezing an orange pip between two fingers …”

“It moves forward,” Mia realised. Bear nodded.

“The wind’s like the boat, always moving a little from side to side, and that’s fine. If it changes big time then you have to adjust the sails, using these winches.”

There were winches on either side of Ursula, with ropes that led to the end of the foresail. A third rope was attached to the end of the boom. Bear showed how to either turn the handles on the winches to tighten the sails up, or how to release the winches and let the sails out.

“Now, how’s the line doing?”

Bear tugged on the line streaming behind Ursula.

“Hello! We have something!”