They drained the bags over the side in a great hissing brown torrent. At 16:30 the tender came up out of the water for the second time in four days, in daylight, with Lachlan at the controls and the two delivery deckhands from Ratline on the taglines fore and aft, two hard-faced young New Zealanders who had come in through the green gate, and Celestine Joubert on the radio calling every foot of it, and the tender went onto its cradle like a hand into a glove, and the deck crew threw the lashings over it and ratcheted them down.
In the chart room, Aled Llewellyn signed the amended casualty report to the Maritime Authority of the Cayman Islands and a new form CG-2692 for the United States Coast Guard, and a page and a half of handwritten statement that began, I, Aled Rhys Llewellyn, master of the motor yacht Coriolis, wish to correct, and slid them across the desk to Octavia without a word. Dex scanned them and sent them at 17:09. The rest-hour records, the real ones, were in a manila folder on top of them. They were in Solveig's handwriting, mostly, and they made Octavia feel sick, and she put them in her hard case and locked it.
At 17:22, at the chart table in the wheelhouse, with the penciled course line to St. David's Head under her elbow, Octavia Foster took the pen from behind her ear and signed the Return to Service authorization, Keelhaven Form 9.3-A, and wrote the time beside her name, and the conditions underneath it, all five, and handed it to Aled.
He read it. Then he folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket, over his heart, where Silvino kept his laminated card.
"Thank you, Foster," he said.
"Don't thank me. Sleep."
She did not sail with them. That was the whole point of her, in the end: the person ashore. She went down the crew stairs and through the crew mess, where somebody had already wiped the whiteboard clean and written, in green marker, NEWPORT TO BERMUDA, 635 NM, and underneath it, HAMISH WE'LL BRING YOU A SHIRT, and she went out over the passerelle, and the deckhand on watch pulled it up behind her, and she stood on the concrete of C pier with her duffel at her feet while they singled up the lines.
At 17:41 the Coriolis's engines came up from a murmur to a deep, even thrum that she felt through the soles of her boat shoes, and the bow thruster kicked, and the long dark-blue hull slid sideways off the pier with no more fuss than a car leaving a garage. Aled was on the bridge wing with the remote control box on its strap around his neck. Celestine was beside him. He did not wave. He lifted two fingers from the rail, once, the way he used to on the Kittiwake when he wanted the deck crew to know he had seen them, and then he went inside.
Silvino came and stood next to her at the end of the pier. They watched the yacht turn in the harbor, past the moored sailboats swinging on their buoys, and line up on the channel, and gather way, and go out between Fort Adams and Goat Island with the low sun lying gold along her starboard side and the white water building under her stern. Beyond her, the sea was blue-black and scored with white, and the wind blew clean and hard out of the northwest, just as Lenora had promised.