"There is no life nor death any more," broke in a sputter from the port bundle; "and even if there was we wouldn't—"
We picked up the two dripping bundles and bore them gently below just as a second comber, running wildly amuck, banged its head off against the rail and turned the cockpit into another maelstrom.
Save for shortening periods of introspective languor induced by whiffs from the galley or the clink of dishes, matters were better the next day, and the day following the sufferers were sufficiently revived to begin unpacking and—as they called it—"putting things trig and shipshape below." After that things began falling into the even routine which, save for its occasional disturbance in stormy weather, characterized our life at sea to the end of the voyage. But there never came a time when, for the Mater and Claribel, the first three or four days out of port did not hold the menace of that chaotic state in which there was no night or day, heat or cold, wetness or dryness, and in which if there was to have been a choosing between life and death the latter would have been the less bitter portion. A Pacific yachting cruise is not all an idyllic pleasaunce to the mal-de-mer subject, for the ocean which has not been pacific for many hours at a time since the day it was discovered and christened does not temper its moods for the small craft.
Lurline in drydock before sailing
"The Commodore laboriously squinted out his first
"Full-and-by"
sights"
In spite of restricted quarters, the days which followed seemed never long enough to do all we laid out for them. The Commodore was the busiest of us. To him it became evident before we were fairly out of sight of land that his pleasure cruise was going to have to be enjoyed to the accompaniment of a lot of hard work, for Lurline's former sailing master—whom he had shipped as mate and whom he subsequently let go in Honolulu—was absolutely incompetent as a navigator and only fairly so in the actual sailing of the yacht. This came as a very disconcerting surprise, for the man had been well recommended, and his incompetence meant that all of the work—to say nothing of the responsibility—of navigating the yacht through some of the stormiest and worst charted latitudes of the Seven Seas was to be thrown on the Commodore, whose deep-sea sailoring had been confined to a voyage around the Horn on a clipper when he was in his teens.