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know how else to talk about things that happened before), when we had
a spell of fog, Uncle Dock recited a poem about fog creeping along on

little cat feet, and as soon as he said that, that’s what I saw when I looked
out into the gray mist: hundreds of little cat feet tiptoeing along. Later,
when the fog rolled along in deeper, darker clumps, I imagined great big
tiger feet loping toward us—soft, furry, graceful tiger feet.

75 I had a mournful lonely spell when I was on watch, peering through
all that gray, and suddenly I didn’t want to leave the shores of North
America, to set off across the ocean, to be so far from land. But I didn’t
have long to be mournful, because the wind came up strong from the

north, which meant we had to do a lot of tacking and heeling. The
waves were huge—six to eight feet—or at least I thought they were huge,
but Uncle Stew called them baby waves.

76 “You getting scared, Sophie?” Uncle Stew said, and it seemed as if he
hoped I was scared, so I said, “No, I’m not a bit scared. Not the least bit.”

I was scared, but I didn’t want him to know it.

77 Below deck, it was chaos. It was Cody’s and my turn to cook lunch,
and we had food sloshed all over the place.

78 “Mind the mizzen pot! Hoist the flibber-gibbet!” Cody shouted, as
the pot’s hot contents went sloshing over the side.

79 “Cody, are you ever serious?” I said.
80 He tossed a clamshell right in the soup. “Oh brother,” he said,
“sooner or later, everybody asks me that.”

81 I guess it’s a touchy subject.

82 The Wanderer has had a few problems on her shakedown: leaks
in the aft cabin and water in the sump. We spend a lot of time crawling
around looking for trouble and then trying to fix whatever’s wrong.

So far we’ve been able to plug all the leaks. You don’t feel too worried
when you know you can get to land within an hour or two if you have
to, or where there is enough boat traffic so that you can hail help easily,

but once we set off from Nova Scotia, what will we do if we spring a
major leak?

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