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Tregatreath; I wondered, in our growing exhaustion, if we were now the Icaruses of this story.
    Sometime, in the dark early hours, we came into the shelter of Scilly. I kept the boat a mile or two offshore and although the wind didn’t drop, the sea went still in the islands’ lee. The smell of land came wafting across the night, thick and fleshy; a warm, musty, vegetable fug, like a soup, floated out to us over the Atlantic air. I bore away on to 325 magnetic, eased the sheets, and made for Ireland. Wonderful
Auk\
Wonderful sea-surging
Auk\
    A change of watch then and again in the grey-green dawn, the grey of the sea the colour of battleships, and then again at nine or ten in the morning. On my watches, I was drifting off to sleep. George’s face was creased and worn, but we were making progress. The
Auk
would look after us. We were at home, however tired we were. All day, we alternated, spending half an hour or so together on deck each time, a little talk, something to eat, a cup of tea. The swells were mountainous out here, mid-passage. The whole extent of this sunlit sea was the deep, royal blue of the ocean.
    On the wheel, time slid away. The sky was clear and endless, the rhythm of the boat lullingly repetitive, the sunshine bright in the eyes. Mid-afternoon, a little more than halfway across, a fulmar swung between the shrouds and the mainmast. An hour later, a swallow circled the boat, surveyed it, and without warning flew down through the companionway hatch, circling inside the cabin, cheeping, prospecting for a nest. On the way from Africa, it had found, miraculously, an almost empty, very suitable, if slightly small barn, 125 miles short of where it expected to find land. The swallow flew out again without touching timber, rope or canvas and away, its dipping, curving flight just held above the seas. Ten minutes later it returned, with another. The two of them flew down into the cabin again, not landing, cheeping in excited, quivering calls. They came out and back three more times. Surely aperfect site for a nest? Surely not: no mud or straw with which to build a home. They left again for the fourth and last time, as the
Auk
plunged on for Ireland.
    If the wind had stayed good for us, we could have slid into a harbour that night as sleepily and dreamily as this day had passed. We were lulled. We could have sleepwalked home. Our exhaustion didn’t matter because the
Auk
would take us on. We were her passengers.
    It didn’t happen like that. Late that afternoon, a weather front came through and winds veer on fronts. You could see it ranged above us, a curving wall of cloud, its leading edge quiffed up and back in wisps. The southwesterly wind that had been wafting us to Ireland shifted through thirty, forty, fifty, seventy degrees in the space of an hour. We were headed. Rain hammered down. Night was coming on again, the wind was now in the northwest, which was exactly where we wanted to go.
    The bitter tide of exhaustion came flooding in. There was no way we could sail to Baltimore where we were due. The engine was the only option and the prospect of ten hours of that, at something like four or five knots, dead into a rising wind, felt like sacksof grain laid on our shoulders. The wind started to blow. For the first time now it was shrieking in the rigging. We had no instruments to measure it, but George reckoned thirty-five knots, gusting ten knots higher, Force 8 to 9. The beautiful day had given way to a raging night. We hauled the sails down and tied them as best as we could in the climbing wind. The whole of the foredeck was plunging into the breaking seas. Just visible from the cockpit, the white teeth of those breakers appeared grinning around us.
    ‘Go down,’ George said, a level of intensity in his voice I hadn’t heard before. Freezing rain was driving into our faces. Til get you in three hours’ time.’ Down below, the saloon was jumping, a savage version of itself, thrashing at the lamp that