Andy started the vents. Mitchell focused on breathing calmly and deep. A few more minutes and we’ll motor and make a false wind he told himself. Just a few minutes.

They motored due east with the sloop steady at five knots and the engine roaring loud under the cockpit sole. Andy dropped the sails and lashed them down. He saw the coast appear vaguely to port and climbed below. Mitchell steered for a northern land point that ended abruptly in grey-blue haze welded across the horizon. Andy climbed up with the chart and laid it across Mitchell’s lap. Then he took the binoculars and climbed on deck to sit on the cabin top with his back against the mast, his elbows propped on his knees while he surveyed the coast.

Mitchell was studying the chart where Andy’s pencil lines ran north to the last whistle before Boston Bay, then west, then south, to circumvent a maze of granite ledges surrounding the entrance to Cohassett Harbor. It’s too far. Mitchell’s gut told him they wouldn’t make it, told him they would run out of gas, with no wind, and spend the afternoon being torn to pieces on the ledges. "There’s an eastern channel through these rocks," he called.

Andy lowered the binoculars and stared ahead. He turned to look aft. "I saw it," he said, forcing his patience. "You’d have to know the place to get through there."

"I’m going in there."

Andy looked off toward the coast, his brow furrowed, eyes dark. Then he stood and walked aft, climbing down to stand beside Mitchell with his hand hung over the boom. The weight of his silence announced that he didn’t like the decision. "Why not go around?"

"Because we’re low on gas."

"How do you know?"

"I just know. We’re low on gas and we’re going through that eastern channel. It’s not open for debate."

Andy stepped into the companionway and stood on the ladder with his body in the hatch opening. He leaned on the cabin top to stare through the binoculars at the coast. The chart was on Mitchell’s lap. Andy was telling him to do it alone.

Mitchell closed his eyes against the sun-glare. He glanced at the compass and the coast before studying the chart again. No marker at the channel opening, just a green can mid-channel then a red nun before the gangway to the main channel into the harbor. It’s too goddamn far around he thought. I know it is but I have no way to prove it to him. Only two markers. "Do you see anything that looks like an opening?"

No response.

Mitchell studied the chart and the coast, judging the distance from the first break of land as he steered east, just a little, feeling it. Andy was on his elbows with the binoculars. To hell with it, Mitchell thought. I hope he stays this calm if I sink us.

The sloop had closed to a quarter mile from the ledges before they were actually discernable. Mitchell checked the depth on the chart. He steered the sloop to cut the distance in half. Then he turned the boat north. He cut the distance in half again and ledges lay off the port beam, indifferent and unyielding, ancient deposits of glacial rock as big as houses and bigger. Blue-green surf exploded like dynamite, pounding the rocks and raining on the sloop’s decks. Mitchell pushed the tiller to starboard. Quartz and mica flashed frantic warnings as the sloop rose on the swells into a labyrinth of glistening grey granite. Andy vaulted onto the cabin top and lay under the boom with his arms spread. Fear. Good, Mitchell thought, he is human.