Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(4)

She gave him an icy stare but was too exhausted to reply.
“How about bad weather?” Ingram asked.
There hadn’t been much, at least nothing to bother a sound
boat. Two days out of La Paz they’d run into a freak condition
of fresh to strong winds which had kept them reefed down for
the better part of twenty-four hours. They’d had a couple of
days of bad squalls, the worst of which was around two weeks
ago when they were trying to beat their way back to
Clipperton Island after they’d decided they’d overshot it. The
squalls had left a rough, confused sea, and she’d pounded
heavily.
“And it was just after that you noticed it was taking more
pumping to keep her dry?”

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(3)

5
Far to the northward a squall flickered and rumbled along the
horizon, but here they appeared to hang suspended in a
vacuum while the sun beat down and the oily groundswell
rolled endlessly up from the south. The air was like warm
damp cotton pressing in on them, muggy, saturated,
unmoving.
Perspiration didn’t evaporate. It collected in a film over the
body, a film that became rivulets, now running, now stopping
momentarily, now moving again with the irritating feel of
insects crawling across the skin. It ran down into his already
sodden and clinging shorts and dripped into his sneakers. His
back ached from crouching under the boom.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(2)

3
The sun was hotter now. He turned, searching the horizon for
any darkening of the surface of the sea that would indicate the
beginnings of a breeze. Rae came up the ladder. “Your bunk’s
all ready, Mr. Warriner. Try to sleep until this time tomorrow.”
Warriner smiled. “Please call me Hughie. And I don’t know
how to thank you.”

“You don’t have to. Just get some rest.”
“In a little while. For some reason, I don’t feel sleepy at all.”
She nodded. “You’ve been wound too tight for too long. But
I know how to fix that.” She disappeared down the ladder and
came back in a minute with a bottle containing a little over an
ounce of whisky. She poured it into the cup that was still
beside him. “There’s just about enough here to do it.” He
drained it and accepted the cigarette she held out. “By the
time you finish that,” she said, “you’re going to collapse all
over. Just try to make it to the bunk when you feel yourself
start to go.”

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(1)

1
Though it had been less than four hours since he’d secured
everything on deck and come below, Ingram awoke just at
dawn. He turned his head in the faint light inside the cabin
and looked at his wife asleep in the opposite bunk. Rae,
wearing sleeveless short pajamas of lightweight cotton, was
lying on her stomach, her face turned toward him, the mop of
tawny hair spread across the pillow encircled by her arms, her
legs spread slightly apart and braced, even in sleep, against
the motion of the ketch. She never minded, he thought; some
people grew irritable and impossible to live with on a sailboat
too long becalmed, with its endless rolling and slatting of gear
and its annoying and unstoppable noises of objects shifting
back and forth in drawers and lockers, but except for an
occasional pungent remark when the stove threw something
at her she took it uncomplainingly. They weren’t in a hurry,
she pointed out, they were on their honeymoon, and they had
privacy measurable in millions of square miles.