BOY TOY

by Jim Nisbet

Yacht Harbor

Captain Ron Tagus was pairing a whiskey with a weather check when his phone rang. He glanced at its display: 2:35 a.m. Blocked. He finished the pour, turned down the VHF, and took the call. "What's up, boss?"

"We're going out."

"Sure." Captain Ron glanced over his shoulder at a calendar tacked to the bulkhead behind him. "What day?" He set down the bottle and drew the flat stub of a carpenter's pencil out of the folded brim of his watch cap.

"Tonight."

He moved the tip of the pencil to a square labeled Monday. "What time?"

"What time is it now?"

"Two thirty-six."

"Let's shoot for three fifteen."

The faceted lead of the knife-sharpened pencil hovered above the empty square. "That's not tonight. That's this morning."

"Your circadian hair-splitting is of no interest to me at the moment." That was the boss's carefree vocabulary all right, but the tone was off. Brittle, like.

Ron turned away from the calendar. "Regan—"

"Under sail," the boss added.

Captain Ron glanced at the darkened porthole that topped the whiskey bottle like the dot on a letter i. "There will be a little weather."

"All the better."

Pause. Ron asked her where she was.

"On the bridge."

"How fast are you going?"

"A hundred and three."

He believed her. "Hey."

"Hey what?"

"You okay?"

"Just peachy." She hung up.

Before reverting to its matrix of icons, the display informed him that the call from Blocked had lasted fifty-three seconds. Captain Ron dropped the phone into a gimbaled cup holder and chased it with the pencil. On the bulkhead behind the settee on the other side of the chart table hung a handsome analog barometer, an antique with a six-inch bezel of tarnished brass. Its arrow pointed almost straight up, and Captain Ron could easily discern its reading of 29.3 inches of mercury. He slid off the settee to administer the glass two taps of a fingernail, and the needle dropped a single mensuration, to 29.2. It had been falling all day, creeping counterclockwise over the lovely italic script of the word Change inked onto the card covering the instrument's face, leaving the telltale behind at 30.1. For a couple of days, Stella, the common name around the waterfront for the female version of NOAA's weather-reading robot, and Stanley, her male counterpart, had been predicting a blow, with winds hooting into the thirties bringing one to two inches of rain. A typical winter storm. The cube of ice capsized in the dram of whiskey. A gust tugged at the trucks. A standing wave rippled through the lengths of the paired staysail halyards, taut along the mizzen, so that they clattered up and down the mast like a little girl running from one end to the other of a hardwood floor in her mother's shoes. The elevating pitch of crescendoing whistles and whirring shrieks, peculiar to a couple of acres of masts and rigging as a rising wind combs through them, virtually encouraged windward vessels to crush their fenders between hull and dock, and the lines of leeward vessels to stretch their snubbers, so that the otherwise deserted marina was phantomic with sound. We won't even take the cover off the main, thought Ron, as he took up the glass of whiskey. Boy Toy could certainly be sailed under a reefed mainsail; but as she went short sail, being a ketch, she handled much better under a foresail with mizzen and no main at all, a suite commonly known as jib and jigger. We'll motor out of the harbor, of course, a series of tight zigzags, and once out we'll stay out. After the low pressure has made its way down the coast we'll come home, and not until. It'll remain a little rough in front of the breakwater, shoal as it is there, but we'll be coming back by daylight. He glanced at a light-blue line that undulated across the calendar week—by daylight and on the flood. Altogether, the makings of an excellent excursion. He downed the whiskey at a go, tossed the ice cube into the sink, parked the empty glass next to it, and set about stowing anything that wasn't nailed down.

If it takes time to rig a sloop, with its single mast, it takes approximately twice as long to rig a ketch, with its two. Tonight the timing would be about the same as the latter because, despite leaving the main furled, he wanted to switch out the jib. After little debate he went with the No. 4, which was 80 percent of the foretriangle, instead of the spitfire, at 35 percent the smallest sail aboard. A spitfire would be flown only in the most extreme conditions, to keep headway on the vessel sufficient to maintain steerage, a situation in which, so long as Captain Ron had been in charge, Boy Toy had never found herself. Ron rigged the mizzen first, a simple matter of removing the canvas cover and shackling the halyard to the head of the sail. Dropping the rolled cover down the companionway as he moved to the bow, he unrove the sheets from the clew of the No. 2 jib, moved the sheet leads forward to a mark on each genoa track, and unbent the 125. Despite the rising wind and because of a big motor cruiser called Pay Dirt, three stories high and seventy feet long, to windward, whose bulk blanketed the dock between her majesty and Boy Toy, he managed to fold the 125 into its bag without spending the rest of the night keeping both on the dock and out of the drink. He was reboarding with the sail bag when a chirp of tires alerted him to a car, and he looked up in time to see a pair of headlights swivel off Spinnaker Way into the parking lot. This would be a Jaguar roadster, green as a pool table, with two leather seats, many horsepower, and, inevitably, its top down. The roadster's brakes locked up and it skidded to a stop in its reserved parking place. Bits of gravel tumbled down the riprap to the water, just in front of the Jaguar's front bumper. A little hasty.

The sky had darkened considerably, leaving no stars visible, and the north wind that had chauffeured the storm down the coast now backed southwest. At perhaps twenty knots the wind made quite a racket as it foraged through the huddled shipping, on the prowl for the unbattened, the unstayed, the carelessly lashed. Even as Ron made this observation, an improperly secured roller furler aboard Cohiba, a sixty-five-foot sloop with an eighty-foot mast docked on the other side of the marina, unspooled the better part of its charge in less time than it takes to tell it, leaving a thousand square feet of high-tech fabric thundering to leeward, sheets aflail.

That's an easy ten or twelve grand worth of trouble, thought Ron. The spreaders will tear that sail to shreds if somebody doesn't soon get it under control; dangerous, too, even in broad daylight. It's hard to comprehend how much power a big sail like that has until you get launched off a boat by one. Meanwhile, back on Boy Toy, there would be no such thing as raising the No. 4 dockside in order to double check the positioning of the sheet leads. Not in this wind. Captain Ron backed down the companionway ladder, dragging the sail bag after him. He gathered up the mizzen cover in passing, and as he backed along the cabin sole with his arms full of textile, he caught a glimpse, through the chart table porthole, of a pair of open-toed stiletto heels, red with a pedicure to match, and heard them overhead as they boarded the boat. When Captain Ron came out of the forward locker bearing the No. 4, Regan Ellis was standing at the chart table, half turned away from him, downing a shot of whiskey, after which she promptly poured another. The neck of the whiskey bottle made a little tintinnabulation against the rim of the glass, for her hands were trembling. Feeling the skipper's presence, however, Regan pulled herself together. But she didn't greet him, nor did she meet his eye. Okay, thought Captain Ron, we've had a rough night at the office. I'll just go about my business. To get himself and the sail through the narrowest point in the saloon, he backed around her, turning as he went, so that he and the sail bag swiveled from facing forward to facing starboard to facing aft.

Despite his determination to manage otherwise, their eyes met, and Captain Ron could draw only one conclusion: tonight, a woman he knew for her remarkable self-possession was a mess. "What's up?"

No answer.

"You seem . . ." What's the word? Upset? Pissed off? Disconcerted?

Regan refocused a thousand-yard stare onto Ron's face, mere inches in front of hers. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Her eyes, which were of a green that the roadster could only hope to rival, liquified. She clutched the glass to her sternum. She shook her head.

Captain Ron dropped the sail bag and embraced her. He didn't know what else to do. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke. The glass smelled of whiskey. A shudder passed through her. Captain Ron realized that, beneath the knee-length faux-ermine coat, his boss might not have any clothes on.

After a full minute she pulled back far enough to place the empty glass against his own sternum, but not so far as to break the embrace. She watched her fingernail, lacquered to match the shoes, trace the rim of the glass. "I'm not going to cry," she told the glass.

"If you can't cry on your own boat," replied Captain Ron, "where can you cry?"

She pursed her lips at the evident truth of this, but made no reply. A gust thrummed the stays. Boy Toy rolled to the limit of her snubbers and rebounded.

Captain Ron raised his eyes toward the overhead. "If this keeps up we'll be sailing right here at the dock. We won't have to go—"

"We're going out," she interrupted, still addressing the whiskey glass. "Are you ready?"

Captain Ron nodded toward the sail bag, on the sole abaft him. "Need to bend on the small jib. Then we'll see if we can get out of here without holing somebody's million-dollar yacht."

"I've got insurance," she whispered. And added, "The bastards." Regan turned out of Ron's arms and finished the drink. She placed the empty glass in the galley sink, and at last she looked at him in the eye. "I'll change clothes, and we'll be off."

That is one good-looking woman, Captain Ron reflected, not for the first time, who pays me to take her sailing.

The hint of a smile crept over her lips. "That's right."

"Which part?"

She smiled only a little more.

"All of them."

"Dress for weather." Ron hefted the sail bag and pushed it ahead of him, out the companionway.

* * *

The wind brought with it the unmistakable smell of rain as it raked through the harbor in search of mischief, which latter, aboard Boy Toy, amounted to having carried over the leeward rail the working or forward ends of both jib sheets, left unattended on deck, along with what standing length could follow until the stopper knots halted the chicanery at the after-cars, just forward of the cockpit, which is why they're called stopper knots. No big deal, although, as Ron soon realized, the ebb, falling strongly under the wind, had carried the lines beneath the boat, port to starboard. He had to walk the cordage forward, then aft and back again, hauling all the while, before he could tease the lines free of some object or other, beneath the rippling opaque brine, and drag them back aboard in a braided tangle, itself remarkable in that a braid is usually accomplished with three or more strands, proving yet again the adage, not confined to matters maritime, that if something can go wrong, it will. Hanging onto the cloth of the No. 4 while he bent its luff to the forestay presented another small challenge. A heavy weather sail is made of stouter stuff, and is respectively stiff, but that doesn't mean it won't blow overboard in a heartbeat of inattention. He used one of the sopping sheets to belay the bulk of the jib to the port bow cleat while he sorted clew from head and tack in the dark, then bent on everything in its proper order, the tack to the foot of the forestay, the head to the halyard's venerable bronze pelican shackle, each with a sennit he'd rove himself, and in between clapped the piston hanks to the forestay, throats port to starboard, in their proper order.

The sail's empty bag he kept aboard by kneeling on it. After a quick trip aft to drop the sail bag down the companionway and retrieve forty feet of half-inch line, back forward he rove a chain knot about jib and forestay, belaying the line to the starboard bow cleat, so the sail wouldn't blow overboard on the way out of the harbor, yet at the proper moment he could raise it out of the slipknots of the chain with a reasonable amount of control. And now, as he deployed a variation on the bowline called a sylvain knot to reave the working ends of both sheets to the clew, an all-too-familiar sound rent the air, and before Captain Ron could so much as bring it to bear, the tip of an upper spreader had speared the big jib aboard Cohiba and the sail simultaneously ripped up to its tack and straight down to its boltrope, midway along its foot, opening as it were a vertical geologic fissure with a sound that most closely resembled that of eighty feet of one-hundred-dollar bills glued nose-to-tail being ripped down the middle one end to the other, only louder. The commotion of whipping sheets and streaming Kevlar gave Cohiba the appearance of flying to windward, a revenant ship. Maybe by the time we get back, Captain Ron reflected, observing Nature's profligate spree, maybe they'll have that mess under control.

Regan came topside in full foul-weather regalia—bibbed Gore-Tex overalls, cuffs velcroed over sea boots, hooded jacket with gasketed sleeves, watch cap, fingerless gloves, a personal flotation device, or pfd, that would inflate at the tug of a lanyard or upon contact with seawater, with a built-in harness, a tether—which reminded Captain Ron that he'd be well-advised to jump below and don similar gear. Engine started, they performed practiced maneuvers to get underway, Regan handling dock lines and fenders with Captain Ron on helm and throttle, for it is not at all uncommon to encounter a capful of wind in this or any other marina on the San Francisco Bay. Blanketed by the considerable mass of Pay Dirt, they poked Boy Toy's bow into the fairway, got her headed up into the wind, and powered out. The water was very shoal at the entrance, and the chop was considerable, but, decisive on the throttle, they made the two quick turns, one to port, the next to starboard, and cleared the spuming breakwater without incident, leaving the structure's "continuous quick" flashing green light to starboard. The shriek of spars and rigging and the flogging of the ruined jib quickly faded, replaced by the salubrious cough of the diesel, wind in their own rigging, whitecaps slapping and thumping the windward topsides.

After she'd stowed the three fenders, Regan took a seat on the starboard locker, opposite the skipper, just as Boy Toy lifted her bow and set it down with a crash. A gout of solid water engulfed the foredeck and streamed aft, port and starboard of house and cockpit, until it sluiced over the after-combing or drained away through the scuppers. Regan closed the companionway hatch and tore free the Velcro collar that covered most of her face. "I feel better already."

"I can't hear you!" Ron shouted above the din.

"I feel better already!" she shouted back.

They motored west, quartering the weather in order to get some sea room between themselves and the Berkeley Pier, the ruin of which extends west-southwest almost three miles into the bay, coming ashore not three hundred yards south of the marina entrance. With the breeze on port they'd be fine; still, it was dark out there, and rough, and along the entire length of the pier there's but a single light, at its far end, flashing red every four seconds.

After ten minutes, Ron gave the helm to Regan. "Keep her nose into the wind and enough rpms to keep steerage on her. Let the mizzen luff, so she won't start sailing before we're ready."

Regan steered the bow into the wind, the gooseneck over her head rattling as Ron untied and hoisted the sail, its leach clattering. He made fast the halyard, hardened downhaul and outhaul, dropped the sail ties into the starboard locker, and scuttled forward. At the bow, though it was wet work, everything went as planned. Leaving the raised No. 4 with the breeze evenly streaming both sides, Captain Ron collected the forty-foot line and regained the cockpit.

"Okay," he yelled, coiling the length of rope, "let's go sailing!"

One foot on the wheel, Regan hardened the mizzen sheet. Ron took three turns around the starboard winch and hardened the jib sheet. Regan let Boy Toy fall off until the boat abruptly heeled as both sails took the wind and fell silent.

"Okay," pronounced Captain Ron, "kill the iron wind."

Regan put the drive in neutral, pulled the choke, and the diesel died with a plaintive tweet. She turned off the key and a silence arose that consisted entirely of the noises made by a wooden boat under sail. Water purled along Boy Toy's hull, the odd gout lifted over the port bow, spray descended upon the foul-weather gear worn by the occupants of the cockpit. Below deck, a chimney in a gimbaled lamp tilted to touch its brass bail, the whiskey glass inched across the stainless-steel basin to the low side of the galley sink, a screwdriver appeared, as if out of nowhere, to roll around on the cabin sole.

On deck, the working sheet creaked on the winch drum as Captain Ron eased it a bit. "Ease the mizzen, please."

Regan made the correction and the starboard rail came up out of the teeming brine.

Satisfied with the state of things, sheets made fast, Captain Ron joined Regan on the port side, their backs to the wind. "Where we going?" he asked, bracing both feet against the mizzen.

"I'm just glad to be going," Regan replied. "I'll leave the details to you."

Ron considered this. "There's four knots of ebb, but with a breeze like this we can go just about anywhere."

"Your call," she reiterated.

"The southwesterly makes for refreshing points of sail," Ron observed, which is true. Prevailing winds on San Francisco Bay blow out of the northwest. "We've got another hour of ebb. Let's reach over to Angel Island, tack, and have another reach behind Alcatraz. Before we get to San Francisco we'll tack again and have a throughly entertaining beat west. Close aboard Fisherman's Wharf or Aquatic Park we'll throw in a northwesterly bias and have ourselves a lovely beam reach toward some point between the middle of the bridge and Point Cavallo." With a glance at the compass he faced the wind, turning his head until the breeze blew evenly over the tips of his ears. "Maybe even a broad reach."

"Either way, it sounds wet," Regan pointed out.

"Wet on deck for sure, salt and fresh water both. By the time we close the bridge the tide will have turned and it'll be blowing like stink and raining too. We'll get as far west and north as we can before we fall off, and then we'll be running dead downwind right up Raccoon Strait. A sleigh ride. If we play our cards right we won't have to touch a string. A little work on the helm, though. With just the two sails we should make six or seven knots over the bottom. If we have to jibe in thirty knots of wind it'll be nothing but fun, if nobody gets killed, and by the time it's over you won't even remember who you are anymore, let alone why you lost your mind and bought a boat."

Regan almost smiled. "I can't wait."

"At the far end of Raccoon Strait we'll leave Buff Point to port and have a leisurely half-hour cruise in the lee of Tiburon Peninsula, till we drop the hook in Paradise Cove, which will be protected in this weather. We'll have a drink, eat some breakfast, and take turns napping and standing watch. Dawn's at six o'clock, sunrise is an hour later, though today we may not see the actual entity. We'll still have a bit of the flood midmorning and plenty of wind to go home on. If the entrance to the harbor is all cut up, we can go sailing again till things settle down. Altogether we'll have more fun tonight than most people have in a lifetime. What do you think?"

"Let's go."

Regan drove until, not half an hour and three nautical miles later, about a mile east of Angel Island, they tacked, and Captain Ron took the helm. Close-hauled on starboard with the port rail under, they bucked their way south-southeast, to the leeward of Point Blunt and Alcatraz, heading straight for the lights of San Francisco with the waning ebb nudging them westward. Wind over tide is what the sailors call it, wind going one way and tide the other; it can make for wet sailing, which some people think of as fun, delivered in a small enough dose.

There was no shipping, large or small, there wasn't a light on the bay that wasn't stationary—the light on Alcatraz, for example. They had the bay to themselves, a stout ship underfoot, and all the time in the world, early on a stormy Monday morning.

"It really is hard to credit," Regan marveled as they closed on the city. "Six million people in the Bay Area, and only two of them are on the water. What's the world coming to?"

"No good end," muttered Captain Ron. He fanned one hand and passed it over the view, east to west, from the lights of the Oakland container port, along the illuminated span of the Bay Bridge, to Treasure Island, the ferry building, two or three of the tallest buildings on the West Coast, Coit Tower, Fisherman's Wharf, Fort Mason, the dark stretch of Crissy Field, Fort Point, all the way to the yellow nebulae of the sulphur lights that flank the six lanes of the Golden Gate Bridge, four miles west. "Although," he added, "from this perspective you'd like to believe that some good might come of it after all."

After another half hour of steady sailing Ron said, "Ready about?"

Regan took up the lazy sheet. "Ready."

"Helm's alee."

And as they tacked, the rain arrived with great force, obliterating much of the view. By means of short, close-hauled tacks, they worked their way west along the city front, visibility limited but reasonable. The tide donated about fifteen minutes of slack to their progress, but they were taking both wind and rain on the nose.

About halfway between Aquatic Park and Fort Mason they tacked into a long beam reach, bearing midway between the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge and the inland blur of Sausalito.

Now they had rain coming aboard in sheets. Both sailors sat on the port locker, their backs to the weather.

"I forgot to figure this in!" Ron yelled above the racket, watching a continuous cataract of fresh water, captured by the spread of the mizzen, plummet from the clew onto his knees, and thence into the cockpit.

"You're fired!" Regan yelled back.

"It looks like Bridal Veil Falls!"

"You're rehired!"

A roller came along to lift Boy Toy, then shrug her off, as she fell into the trough behind, deep enough to lose the wind and appreciably slacken the sails.

"That might have been the biggest swell I've ever seen inside the Gate," said Ron, as he corrected the helm. The darkness turned a shade darker. "Look to port."

The lights on the Golden Gate Bridge were nowhere to be seen.

Regan realized that she was looking at a wall of water. "Yikes!"

"Just about perfect!" yelled Ron, correcting the helm as the next swell lifted the sails into the wind.

The mizzen cataract appeared to redouble its effort to fill the cockpit. Regan thrashed her boots in the rainwater as if she were on a stationary bicycle. "Perfect!"

When Boy Toy topped the next swell and Ron saw where they were: "Okay, boss, prepare to fall off under gale conditions."

"Prepare to fall off under gale conditions. What's that mean?"

"It's time for you to take the helm."

Regan looked at him.

"Come on," Ron said. "Switch positions with me."

He scooted forward on the port cushion and Regan jumped aft to take his place.

"We're going to fall off the wind," Ron shouted, "into a broad reach, maybe even a dead run! It's not a jibe, nor do we want it to be, but it will feel like one. As we top the next roller, ease the helm over as we ease the sheets. Otherwise she'll want to stay on her current point of sail. When were done we'll still be on port, but with the breeze over the port quarter." He slashed the edge of his hand at the new vector, to starboard. "In the course of this maneuver, not only will the skipper be steering, she will also be easing the mizzen." Ron freed the mizzen sheet, led it under the away horn of its cleat, and handed Regan the standing part. "Try not to burn a stripe through the palm of your glove."

A gust heeled the vessel. Regan held the helm. The starboard rail dipped under, but Boy Toy heeled no further.

Ron moved to the starboard side. "I'll be slacking the jib." He bounced his hand off the standing part of the working sheet, between the cleat and the winch, sufficiently taut that it might have passed for a stick of wood. "Keep your sail to leeward of a right angle to the wind, keep the bow to weather." He unwrapped the working sheet until its standing part passed but once under the away horn of the cleat, as it passed from his gloved hand to the winch. "Ready?"

"Ready!"

As the next eastbound roller lifted the boat: "Fall off!"

Regan eased the helm to starboard as both of them eased sheets. The swell carried Boy Toy eastward as the bow fell away from the wind.

"Feel it?" yelled Ron.

"Yes!" she replied.

"Ease sheets. Ease the helm. Ease sheets. Center the helm. Ease, ease, steady as she goes . . ."

Now, wind over her port quarter, Boy Toy was seething straight for the half-mile gap between the Belvedere Peninsula and the western tip of Angel Island, the entrance to Raccoon Strait, surfing the swells as they passed under her, having smoothly affected a course change of some seventy-five degrees in thirty knots of wind.

"Steady as she goes, boss!" exclaimed Ron. "Make fast. Nice!"

"Likewise, I'm sure," Regan said. "Skipper," she added, and they high-fived a couple of sodden gloves beneath the mizzen boom.

Ron lifted his eyes for a thoughtful gaze at the main truck, rainwater running over his face. "We should do this more often!"

"Yes!" Regan shouted back.

A swell passed beneath the hull. Regan corrected to port. The jib slacked as Boy Toy settled into the trough. Regan corrected to starboard. Again, a following swell lifted Boy Toy into the wind. Regan corrected to port. Both sails filled with a crack, and the starboard sheet parted. The bow veered to port. Regan threw her weight onto the wheel. "I can't hold her!" she yelled amid the racket of the flailing jib.

"Don't try!" Ron seized the mizzen sheet. "Give her her head!"

Regan let the rim of the wheel spin. As the Boy Toy swung to port, broadside to gale and sea, Ron hardened the sheet so that the mizzen pushed the stern to leeward. The next swell turned Boy Toy broadside to the wind, and she might have broached. But Ron eased the mizzen as she rose so that, though yawing downwind and into the trough between swells, she had only her hull and but a little sail area to present to the wind as the next swell lifted her. She climbed the following swell and, on top, more or less righted, Ron hardened the sheet so that the mizzen carried Boy Toy's stern into the lee.

Worked thus, two or three swells later, the vessel lay bow to windward, stern by the lee, both jib and mizzen flogging like guns firing at will, the entire operation slowly driven backward by wind and turning tide.

"Now what?" Except that she had to shout to be heard, Regan put the query in an entirely reasonable tone.

"I need to go forward and get that sail under control," Ron shouted back, "before it destroys itself."

Regan regarded the scene at the bow. In the streaming dark, it looked as if the shadows, lines, and shapes of the inanimate world had come alive to conduct a knockdown brawl, with appropriate sound effects, strafed by tracers of rain as the works flailed in and out of the red and green of the running lights. The flogging canvas, fore and aft, sounded like a regiment of enraged taiko drummers.

"Let's start the engine!" Regan shouted.

"I thought you wanted to go sailing!" Ron shouted back.

Regan looked at him.

"Besides, that's three grand worth of sail up there." Before she could dismiss the financial angle, Ron said, "Let's try something else first. If it doesn't work, we'll start the engine."

Regan nodded. "At your orders, skipper."

"We're in irons. Understood?"

"Irons it is."

"We want to bring the bow to port. Once she's on a starboard tack, I'll take a line forward, reave a new starboard sheet, and we'll be good to go."

"But how do we get out of irons without a foresail or the engine?"

Ron pointed. "We bowse the mizzen boom to port. The breeze will push the stern to starboard. As soon as the wind comes over the starboard side, we sheet both sails to port and Bob's your salty uncle."

"Heading right back where we came from," Regan pointed out, casting an eye into the darkness.

It struck Ron that back where they'd come from was the last place Regan Ellis wanted to go. "We'll make a U-turn soon enough!" Ron shouted above the din. "With this fresh breeze we have all the boat control in the world!"

When Regan smiled, raindrops pelted her teeth like bird shot. Fresh breeze indeed.

"Take three wraps on the port winch and get the slack out of the sheet."

"Done . . ."

"Where's the goddamn winch handle?" The winch handle wasn't in its holster, low down on the forward side of the mizzen mast.

They felt around in a couple of inches of brine until Regan found it under a tangle of wet lines. Handing the crank to Ron, she belayed the tail of the port jib sheet around the away horn of a cockpit cleat, so as to pass the better part of the load to the boat's superstructure rather than her own, to prevent the sail flogging the sheet forward.

Meanwhile, Ron retrieved a four-part bosun's tackle from the rope locker. He clapped one block to a loop of line midway along the mizzen boom, the other to a dock-line cleat abaft the cabin, and led the purchase across the cockpit to starboard, took three wraps around the starboard winch, and inserted the sprocket of the winch handle. "Ready, boss?"

"At your orders, skipper."

Ron hove away on the tackle, forcing the mizzen sail to port, against the gale. As the rattling sail took the wind, the pressure pushed the stern of Boy Toy to starboard, which had the effect of turning the bow through the eye of the wind. Air began to flow over the starboard side The foot of the No. 4 cracked over the foredeck, starboard to port, its clew trailing a twenty-foot spiral of wounded sheet.

"Sheet home!" ordered the skipper. "Lively, now!"

Regan hardened the port sheet. If the jib had wrapped the forestay in the interim, it would have been a different story. But the stalled sail shivered to leeward until the fabric took the wind and ceased its flogging, and Boy Toy cracked into a starboard reach. Ron released the tail of the bosun's tackle and hardened the mizzen until its boom lay just a little to port of the centerline of the boat. And all went silent, excepting the maelstrom, as Boy Toy galloped through wind and tide and the teeming dark with a phosphorescent bone in her teeth, her new course nearly parallel to the span of the Golden Gate Bridge, whose lights cast an ochre pall high into the mist, not two miles west of their position.

"It worked!" shouted Regan. "It worked!"

"Dang," said Ron, as if no one were more surprised than he.

"I haven't had this much fun," Regan replied, clinging to the wheel, foulie hood and drenched hair streaming to leeward, "since I totaled my first Jaguar."

"Touch the wood," Ron cautioned, tapping three fingers to his own head. "We don't want to be walking home tonight."

Regan touched three fingertips to the mizzen mast. "Consider it touched, captain!"

More work lay ahead. Gripping the helm, Regan lodged her feet in the corners afforded by port and starboard lockers where they met the cockpit sole, while Ron cranked in the jib until its high clew hovered above the forward deck, where he might get to it without hanging over the side. This pointed Boy Toy as close to the wind as she would sail, and it was correspondingly rough.

He jumped to the starboard side and, drawing aft what was left of the parted sheet, discovered the cause of the failure. "Look at this."

"It's been cut . . ."

Ron described retrieving the two sheets after they'd blown over the side at the dock. "It must have fouled some piece of junk on the bottom." Rather than throw the rope end over the side in disgust, he properly hanked it.

He was stowing the coil when Regan said, "Both sheets were fouled together?"

Ron gave this a thought, then crossed to the low side and eyed the working sheet. After the winch, he found no sign of damage to the line. Forward of the winch, the line was taut as a length of chain. He ran a hand along the sheet as far forward as he could, and there it was. Perpendicular to the length of the line, an incision cut perhaps a third into its diameter. It felt like an open wound. Under the present load, it couldn't last.

Ron rummaged the rope locker for a length of synthetic line that, though a mere quarter-inch in diameter, featured an extremely high breaking strength. He joined the ends with a Zeppelin bend, forming what's often called a strap or choker—a loop. Clipping his tether to the genoa track, he crawled forward alongside the house and, despite his outboard half occasionally dipping in and out of the passing stream, rove a lateral tension knot, so-called, in this case, a klemheist, about the sheet forward of the incision. Backing to the cockpit, he took a turn about a free cleat, threw in a trucker's hitch, bowsed down the doubled quarter-inch as hard as he could, and made it fast.

"If she goes," Ron said, "this will hold it." Since Ron Tagus was in charge of Boy Toy, each rope in the locker had a piece of tape on one end with its length inked onto it. By the light of the binnacle he selected a pair of lines. "Now I go forward, see . . ."

As he spoke, the sea walloped the starboard topside, just forward of the chain plates, lifted five or six feet above the bow, and collapsed onto the foredeck. Six inches of brine sluiced along the windward cockpit combing.

"You're going to the bow in this shit?" Regan frankly asked.

"You just keep that steady hand on the helm," Ron said, throwing a stopper knot into a line, "and I'll be fine."

"One hand for you," Regan shouted pedantically, "one hand for the boat! Little old me would be hard put to get you back tonight!" She dipped a finger in the remaining inch of water, beyond the combing. "Fifty-three degrees and all that."

"It's not complicated. You hold this course. I jump forward and bend on a new sheet. Which reminds me." He touched the breast of his pfd. "Knife."

"To cut away the old sheet?" Regan realized. "Because the knot will be too wet to capsize."

"Too wet and too slow. Then, new sheet rove, I come aft, and we tack."

"After which you take a new sheet forward on the port side and we do it all over again."

"Except for the tack." Ron pointed at the jury rig. "After the port sheet has been switched out, we fall off into right back where we started."

"Bob's your salty uncle."

"Indeed," Ron muttered as he crawled over the starboard locker.

"One hand for you," Regan shouted, "one hand for the boat!"

She perched on the locker with one seaboot hooked into a lower spoke of the helm and a hand atop it. Boy Toy was bucking, wind and tide on her nose, and plenty of water coming aboard, but she needed to be close-hauled so the rigger could access the clew of the jib. Any other point of sail and the clew would be hanging out over open water. Ron crawled forward on his belly, leading the new line through the after and forward turning blocks, clipping, unclipping, and reclipping his tether as he went, and keeping a weather eye. Only once did a sea lift and pin him to the side of the house, but by then he had reached the main shrouds and had plenty to hang onto. It was wet work and progress was slow, made slower by the awkwardness of working in gloves, and the pitching of Boy Toy, which afforded Ron the odd moment of near weightlessness. Gradually he disappeared into the teeming gloom, only to reappear in the lurid green of the starboard running light, to disappear again as he crawled and skidded past the mast, forward of the house, until, arriving beneath the clew of the sail, he was diagonally across the boat from Regan and lost to her sight. Five or six extra feet of sheet passed forward through her gloved hand, then stopped. She considered locking the helm, in case another hand was needed, but Boy Toy couldn't be asked to hold a steady course in these conditions by herself. And two people in trouble would do no good at all. Even as Regan had this thought, the forward half of Boy Toy sailed over an invisible hollow in the water, then dropped in with a crash and buried her nose. A wall of water backed the jib despite the high bias of its foot, throwing the bow to starboard. But with a little help from the helm, Boy Toy labored up and the sail took the wind on starboard. A foot of brine coursed along three sides of the house, past and into the cockpit.

Legs athwart and both hands on the wheel, Regan's leeward boot filled with seawater. After a long time Ron reappeared and rolled over the starboard combing onto the locker, his watch cap missing, his hair, though short, plastered to his skull, the cuffs and collar of his foul-weather gear leaking seawater.

"Ready to tack!" he yelled, flat on his back. "What's so goddamn funny?"

Regan, simply thrilled to see him again, shook her head, rainwater streaming down her face. "I haven't had this much fun," she shouted, "since I totaled my second Jaguar!"

The sea smacked the starboard topside abaft the main chain plates, lifted a human's height above the combing, and crashed onto the house. As water coursed over the companionway hatch and into the cockpit, Regan freed the winch handle from the port-side winch. "Ready about?"

"Wait! Switch sides!"

They did so. Regan took the winch handle, sat to starboard, and disentangled the new sheet from the lines on the cockpit sole.

"Take the helm!" Ron shouted, and she did so. He clipped to the genoa track and crawled forward to the conjoined jury rig. "Ready about!"

"Helm's alee!" Keeping an eye on the little Turk's head rove onto the rim of the helm, which marked its centerline, Regan rolled the wheel fifty degrees to starboard.

Boy Toy responded immediately and turned her bow through the eye of the wind. The mizzen boom clanged over. The jib backed with a smack.

Ron hacked the port sheet forward of the klemheist knot and the working end shot ahead, into the darkness. "Jib's away!"

Regan hauled the slack of the starboard sheet till she met some resistance, took three turns about the winch, belayed the after end of the rope under the away horn of the cleat, and inserted the winch handle. Ron appeared in the cockpit to center the helm. Cranking the winch, she made fast.

"Okay," Ron shouted, "close-hauled on port! Good job! Sit to the high side!"

As Regan sat to port and took the helm, Captain Ron unhanked the second length of line, threw in a stopper knot, took a deep breath, and clambered to the port side. "Steady as she goes, boss."

"Aye aye, captain." Ron disappeared up the port side of the vessel, now the high and windward side, clipping and reaving and crawling and holding on and achieving weightlessness as he went.

Regan fed the new line into the block on the after car. Ron reappeared in the lurid red of the port running light, crawled across the foredeck, into the glare of the green starboard light, then hauled himself up the shrouds, his seaboots braced against one corner of the house and the lower turnbuckles, in and out of water up to his knees, one hand lifting a knife into the night. This point of sail was much like the previous one, rough and wet. Boy Toy pitched through waves and swells, bucking both wind and tide. A wave smacked the port topside and lifted perhaps ten feet above the deck, its underside rendered as ruby as the throat of a giant trout, before neatly dividing itself about the shrouds and collapsing across the foredeck, seething along the decks and the roof of the house with the sound of big surf eagerly coming ashore.

Athwart the helm, feet planted wide, Regan's other boot filled with seawater. Above all the noise she couldn't hear Ron grunt as he crawled back along the port side of the house in the dark, clipping, holding on, unclipping, as he came one or two feet at a time. Arriving at the cockpit, he clipped to the turnbuckle at the foot of the forward mizzen shroud and rolled over the port combing onto locker, streaming brine.

"I'm blowed," he croaked, scrubbing the palm of a sopping glove over his glistening face. "Son of a bitch." He pushed himself into a sitting position and took the helm with one hand and the mizzen sheet with the other. "Ready to fall off?"

Regan freed the working sheet, leaving the standing part captured under the away horn of the cleat. "Ready!"

Choosing his moment, Ron eased the helm to leeward as they both eased sheets. It felt as if Boy Toy were pivoting about her righting moment, and soon enough, she was creaming along on a broad reach, making for the green and red lights that mark the entrance to Raccoon Strait, with rain, wind, and tide at her back.

Ron belayed the mizzen sheet and sagged against the port shrouds, one foot working a spoke of the wheel, breathing heavily. "Time for a whiskey, boss."

Without a word, Regan slid back the hatch and dropped below, to quickly reappear bearing two glasses half filled with whiskey. She stood on the companionway steps, and they touched glasses.

"Cheated death again," Ron said, as he downed half his drink. Adding, "More or less," he quickly finished the other half.

Regan watched him without tasting her own drink. "Hey."

"Hey what?"

"What happened to your eye?"

Ron flattened the fingers of his free hand over his left eye, then looked at them with his right eye. Regan waited. Ron made a correction to the helm with his foot.

"That parted sheet was whipping around like a snake on amphetamines. I could hear it but I couldn't see it. As I climbed up the shrouds I figured I'd keep my back to the wind, plus or minus the odd ton of brine boarding the vessel. I was just getting the blade inside the loop when goddamn if the bitter end didn't come from dead aft and pop me in the eye like it was born to the task." Ron circled his empty glass. "What are the chances?"

Regan frowned. "Wait a minute. You were cutting away the parted sheet? Are you telling me this happened on your first trip forward?"

"Correct." Ron angled his good eye. "You gonna use that drink?"

They traded glasses.

Ron downed his second drink at one go. "You'd think it would help a little," he scolded the empty.

"Can you see out of it?"

"No."

"Let me—"

Ron peered forward.

"Hey." She touched his cheek.

Ron turned to face her. "The lens is gone," he said. "Not that I'm an expert."

A band of rain swept the boat, southwest to northeast, blown horizontal by the wind. Regan looked north past Ron and toward the lights of Sausalito. She looked south toward the lights of San Francisco. Far to the east, obscured as they were by a vast density of airborne water, she could barely see the lights of Berkeley. Making landfall in the present conditions was out of the question. However they worked it, they were hours if not an entire day from any sort of medical attention.

"What are we going to do?"

Captain Ron shook his head. "Nothing."

"Goddammit," she said softly.

"One eye for the boat," he said, "one eye for me."

An hour later they dropped the hook in the quiet shelter of Paradise Cove. Fourteen hours after that, just after sunset, Boy Toy tied up in the Berkeley Marina. A month later, Boy Toy was rechristened as Sedna, an Inuit goddess of the sea. Not quite one year after the events related here, Sedna headed out the Golden Gate and took a left. Less than a day later, a big winter storm roared down the coast.

Neither the ship nor her crew was seen again in Berkeley.