"Did you know that was going to happen?" Andy’s face was flushed with anger.

"Don't be an idiot. Are you all right?"

Andy stared hard at Mitchell. "Yeah," he said.

They worked the boat in a fragile silence. Off the starboard beam tiers of empty gun ports stared like vacant eyes from the squat granite walls of Fort Adams. Mitchell steered north of east, then east through the harbor entrance into the roadstead and the sloop was quickly flanked by hundreds of yawls and ketches and cutters. Pleasure boats, rich boats and working boats, old and new were at anchor and on moorings and tied along the waterfront’s salt-blackened docks. A big schooner, maybe forty tons, was moored off to port. Big sport fishing boats from the south were here for the summer, and enormous white-hulled motor yachts with satellites dishes atop super-structures with multiple decks. Past the docks were the red and yellow brick buildings of Newport town, its finery blue and white and green and golden, a rare jewel on the mighty hand of the old Atlantic.

Andy climbed up from below and paused on the top step of the ladder to study the boats jammed behind a boundary of small white interval buoys to starboard. "That's the general anchorage," he said and pointed to American and Australian and French and English flags flying from the backstays and stern poles of the boats at anchor as far as shallows near the beach.

Mitchell steered past the green hull of a seventy-foot sloop, its tall mast flew a Canadian flag. "Drop the jib. This'll take awhile."

They cruised the boundary then tacked and cruised it again, then again, until they found a spot in the anchorage between a twenty-foot blue-hulled sloop and a sixty-foot wooden ketch.

Mitchell turned the sloop into the wind. "Drop the hook."

The sloop backed until the anchor grabbed and the stern halted just inside the buoys. "We're okay but you’ll have to tie the dinghy in close." Mitchell saw his field of vision was limited to the beach and the anchorage and the roads. The town was astern. A change in wind direction was unlikely, the prevailing winds were southwesterly.

Andy stood on the starboard bench to lash the main to the boom. He leaned on the thick folds of sail and surveyed the harbor town. He wanted them to explore this place like they had in Mexico. Mitchell could see it in his eyes. Andy wanted to say they had been here.

"Do you see a dock we can pull alongside?"

Andy shook his head. "Do you want to call the harbormaster?"

Mitchell called on the VHF. The harbormaster told him there were no accessible docks in Newport.

"I can't get you in the dinghy by myself," Andy said, he was apologizing.

"Don't worry about it." Mitchell pulled the tiller to his chest. "A pram like ours isn’t big enough for two men and a wheelchair. I need an inflatable with a solid floor. That's what this is about, shaking things down and finding out. You take the dinghy. Go ashore and look around."