Andy climbed up in a new suit of foul weather gear. Blue bib overalls under a blue and white jacket with a hood over his cap. New sea boots, too. Fashionable, Mitchell thought. And dry and warm. Andy laid the chart in a plastic cover on Mitchell’s lap. "We hit a submerged wreck. That’s what the marker was for. Here." He pointed to the location on the chart.

"We’re lucky the keel went over. We would’ve been harnessed to an anchor." Mitchell studied the pencil lines of Andy’s plot around the headland on the chart. "You’re all set with this? Course, alternative course, anchorages?"

"It’s all there."

"Every day, okay? No more thinking I can do this by myself. Dumb mistake."

"An expensive one."

"Yeah, life is a lot like poker." Mitchell rubbed an itch from under the whiskers matted on his chin. "The worthwhile lessons are costly."

They motored through the roads to a gas dock on Goat Island in the north harbor. Andy filled the sloop's tank and the spare gas can in the dinghy. What the hell Mitchell thought. We have credit.

Under the main and the working jib he followed Andy's plot out of the harbor and onto a southwest heading, then south, and then he turned the boat east into a black sea with short rolling swells. The sloop made four knots, heeling gently, the sails echoed the rain beat and the puffs of breeze. Rain saturated Mitchell’s hat band and funneled between his eyebrows over the bridge of his nose and down his cheeks into his whiskers. Big splashes popped on the back of his tiller hand, the grasping glove was soaked. Half a mile off the port beam he located the red marker bobbing in the sea above the wreck.

Andy climbed up from the cabin into the cockpit after logging their course and conditions. He picked up Mitchell’s sight line. "There's something dignified about hitting a wreck."

Mitchell looked to the land. "When you’re telling your grandchildren about this speak highly of those two."

Andy nodded and they left it astern.

So many times Mitchell thought. I’ve made repairs and left so much behind and kept on toward something I can’t see. I’m tiring but I’ll find what I’m looking for. Through the mistakes and the losses and the hardship. I will find you.

In afternoon’s dark soggy confines of reduced visibility they sailed past a massive horn platform standing like an H.G. Wells creature at the entrance to Buzzard's Bay. Its great eye of silver-blue light flashed far into the mist every two and a half seconds. The horn blared. Mitchell felt distance behind them, finally, and he wondered where he would leave the boat if they made Portland. Lafleur, a friend, had said he could leave it at an owned mooring on Plum Island off the north shore of Massachusetts. That might work Mitchell thought, but he had never seen the place. I’ll need the winter to outfit the boat. I’ll need money, too. And crew, someone like Andy. Then what? The tropics maybe. "It isn’t important," he said, alone now in the cockpit. "Someplace where a little money is good enough. Any place warm."

His hands still stung like nettles from the years of frostbite, the price for cutting his wood in the wind and snow...