"She goes!" I triumphed, tactlessly referring to my Herculean labours with the engine.
"D'you think it's broken?" demanded the Skipper, extending an enormous, bootless foot.
"Flat as a pancake," muttered Steve.
Which gives a fair idea of the trend of individual thought on occasions.
But at long last we were off! Off before a seven-knot nor'-wester, and with only twelve thousand miles to go! What else mattered?
Sailboat, flying fish
By the time we had picked up an intermittent pallor on the horizon that was Ushant light at a distance of thirty miles, the wind had strengthened to half a gale, and there was nothing the dream ship loved more dearly than half a gale on the quarter. In a series of exhilarating swoops, it flung her down into the Bay of Biscay; but what she did not like was being left there to roll helplessly in a windless swell. I have to call it a "swell," just as I have to say we "rolled," though neither word conveys our subsequent acrobatics in the least.
"The Bay" has an unsavoury reputation anyway, but for sheer unpleasantness commend me to the mood in which the dream ship made its acquaintance.
Literally from beam end to beam end we lurched. The engine was useless. Our propeller was out of the quarter, and under present circumstances as much out of the water as in it.