And the Sea Will Tell Read Online Free Page B

is very well-equipped,” Mac said.
    “Best-equipped I’ve ever seen,” Jamie concurred.
    Mac and Muff left that night with a stack of material on Palmyra, including a letter from an Army officer to a college professor planning a trip to Palmyra. “I can assure you it will be an experience that you will long remember,” the military man wrote in 1963. “You will have plenty of animal, insect, fish, and bird companions, and after a while you become very friendly with them.” Attached to the letter was a detailed three-page list of items to take to Palmyra, from “partner” and “well-equipped first-aid kit” to “pistol and ammunition.” The letter concluded: “It’s a place where you can remove yourself from the many problems of the world.”
    That was exactly what Mac wanted to hear. Although San Diego was more unspoiled and picturesque than most large cities, it still suffered from increasing traffic and crime. Reports of violent muggings, rapes, and shootings were alarmingly more frequent. Smog, a harbinger of urban blight, was becoming a concern, too. He sensed that his world lay somewhere out there , on the vast windswept bowl of the ocean, not here in a mushrooming city of half a million people jostling for space.
    Muff, by contrast, would have loved life in a rambling, ranch-style home, complete with backyard pool, in this coastal city with its clean beaches and bustling shopping malls. She would have liked to have children, too. But even though Mac talked often in the earlier years of their marriage about raising a family, sailing had always stood in the way. Muff was reconciled to the inevitable. Was any life perfect?
    She doubted she was capable of loving a man more than she loved Mac. She found him dashing and intelligent, and he seemed to love her deeply. She was still committed to the decision she’d made early in their marriage in accepting Mac’s way of life. There was that rapt, yearning gaze that appeared in his eyes only when he talked about sailing. She had never asked him to choose between her and his other love. He deserved both. And anyway, she wasn’t entirely sure which he would choose.
    A few weeks after the visit to Horton’s, Mac finished his Pacific itinerary. The Sea Wind would depart San Diego for Hawaii, dock there a month or so, and then set sail for Palmyra. If the island was everything Mac fantasized it to be, he intended to stay from six months to a year. Then they would continue on to Tahiti and other fabled islands throughout the South Pacific.
    Mac gave notice to his employer, Triple A South, a ship repair business at Underwood’s Marina. Recommended for the job by Jamie Jamieson, Mac had so delighted the owner with his mechanical prowess that he’d been promoted to a supervisory position within weeks. That had been almost a year ago, and now Mac had succumbed to that familiar longing to leave job and hearth behind, and set sail.
    As their departure date approached, Muff felt increasingly apprehensive about the voyage. Internalizing her fears, she suffered from insomnia, heart palpitations, and stomach pains. Her doctor didn’t find these symptoms disturbing—just indications of a bad case of nerves.
    She did not have Mac’s good memories of the sea. On their nearly six-year round-the-world honeymoon cruise a decade earlier, they had endured a horrendous typhoon in the South Pacific, a perilous journey through the Red Sea, and a close call with a marauding pirate ship in the Mediterranean. Living with the constant fear of bad weather and high seas, they had been drained by the tension that comes with sailing a small boat in a very big, very unpredictable ocean. She did not want to go through any of it again. But if something happened to Mac sailing alone, she would never be able to forgive herself for not being at his side.
    “This trip will be easier than the world cruise,” Mac assured her. “We’ll only be gone two years. We can take it slow and easy. Honey,