Instead he nearly drowned them all. Television and the Hornblower books had hitherto been his total knowledge of the sea, but even from them he knew that you couldn’t just turn. You had to “come about”, wasn’t it? Obviously, if you just pushed the rudder over there’d come a point when the wind got behind the sail and slammed it across hard enough to snap the mast. And there’d be no accounting for the manners of the waves while that was happening. What you did was to point the bows towards the wind, and get round that way. Nudging the boat round came easily enough, though at the changed angle the waves sprayed high over the bows and stung like hailstones as the big drops hurtled aft. At each change of angle he hauled the sail in another few inches, so that it would have less far to travel when the moment came to turn. There came a point, down in a trough, when all seemed still and poised. He put the helm over. It was a bad choice.
