“I’ll have to drop the jib, which will lose us some speed for a minute. Then I’ll hoist the spinnaker, with a pole to the tack—that’s the corner—to swing it outboard to where it will catch the wind. Then—but we can’t waste time talking about it! I’ll show you now and explain some other time!”
Both boys took another look back, but by now the night had swallowed up Jones’s sloop, and all they could see was the glow of the freighter, growing rapidly smaller and fainter behind them.
“I wonder if Jones has seen that?” Sandy said. “The freighter must be under way. They haven’t even waited for him, to see how things turn out!”
“I’m not surprised,” Jerry said. “If Jones catches us, they don’t have anything to worry about. And if he doesn’t ... they want to be a long way away from here!”
Turning their attention back to their own problem, Jerry asked Sandy to go below to the cabin’s sail locker and pull out the sail bags, but not to light even a match. The odds were that Jones still could not see them, and it was better to keep it that way.
“How will I know which is the spinnaker?” Sandy asked.
“We only have two sails below,” Jerry answered. “We’re flying the main and genoa jib now. That means that the only bags will have the working jib and the spinnaker. The working jib is the small bag, and the spinnaker will be as heavy as the mainsail.”
In the cabin of the sloop it was as dark as it had been under the cover of the lifeboat. Sandy groped about, searching for the sail locker, which was forward of the mast, in the peak of the boat. Finally, after tripping a few times, and once bumping his head badly, he felt his hands come in contact with the brass catch that secured the locker.
Inside were several sail bags, most of them empty. He came on one that contained a sail, but it was obviously the small working jib. Worried now, Sandy burrowed deeper into the locker, and at last found a bag that seemed heavier than the first. Relieved, he carried it out to the cockpit, where Jerry was anxiously looking aft.
“Look! If you look just about four points off our stern, you can see her!”