They went out the main channel past the Coast Guard base and the federal prison on its spit and the Angels Gate light, its green beam going round in the rain, and they hit the open sea at the gap like running into a wall. The Marija stood up on her stern and came down with a crash that threw Duncan into the chart table. Green water came over the bow and ran aft and went out through her freeing ports, all of them open, and Duncan heard himself laugh, once, a terrible sound.
Zoran had the wheel. Sig stood at his elbow with the chart spread under the red light and a pair of dividers in his hand, braced against the roll, and he was talking, quietly, steadily, the way Duncan imagined he must have talked on the bridge of the Corvallis Trader before the war in him turned into a bottle.
"He never made the buoy," Sig said. "A skiff that size, in this, he'd be half full before he was a mile past the gate, and lose his engine, and the wind would take her." His dividers walked across the chart. "Southeast forty. Ebb's been running two hours. He'll be set northwest, back toward the outside of the breakwater. West of the light. If he's anywhere, he's on the rocks on the outside face, between the gate and the Cabrillo end."
Zoran looked at the chart and then at Sig, and then he put the wheel over without a word.
They found the skiff at twenty past ten.
It was Jure who saw it, on the bow with the searchlight, a flash of aluminum in the backwash of the breakwater, upside down against the granite of the outer face. Then the light caught a shape on the rocks above it, a man in a white shirt, no jacket, on his hands and knees on a wet block maybe six feet above the surge, and as they watched a sea came in and broke over the whole face of the breakwater and the shape disappeared in the white water, and when it drained off he was still there, lower down, holding on.
"I can't get in there," Zoran shouted. "She'll go on the rocks. I can't get in there."
"Put me in the skiff," Duncan said.
Zoran looked at him. The Marija's seine skiff was lashed on the net pile on the stern, a heavy steel boat with an inboard diesel, built to tow a purse seine around a school of fish. It was the same kind of skiff they had drifted in on the nineteenth of March, for three hours, with Davor's father in the stern saying his son's name over and over.
"You can't run a skiff in this," Zoran said.
"I've run one in worse. You'll hold me off on a line. Jure comes with me."