Ned craned his neck and caught the nod from the bridge, and shifted the lever that tilted the pot launcher so that the pot slid over the side to crash into the heaving sea and begin its rapid journey to the muddy ocean floor some three hundred feet below. Kate heaved the coil of line after it, Andy the buoys. The process was repeated with the remaining five pots. After thirty-or was it forty? straight hours of practice, the crew was moving well together, more of a team now, working about eight pots per hour. In good weather the really good boat crews worked between fourteen an eighteen pots per hour, but she didn't think this was one of them, and it sure as hell wasn't good weather, so they had done pretty well. She was almost proud of their performance. Just not enough to make a vocation out of it. She stretched, bare y repressing a groan. Her body felt like a hockey puck after a sudden death play-off.

The skipper, a short, broad man with a short, broad face drawn into a perpetual scowl, appeared on the catwalk outside the bridge. He shouted and the deck boss looked up. The skipper made a circling motion with one forefinger.

The deck boss stuck up his thumb in reply and went aft, where he tossed out a short line with nothing on the end of it, letting it dangle down the side of the boat and trail in their wake.

It was the signal they had all been waiting for. On the bridge the skipper took a couple of turns on the wheel, and plunging and rolling as she came crossways of the heavy swell, the Avilda began to come about. Kate began gathering and coiling lines as the others stored the rest of the bait, secured the pots that needed mending, and replaced the hatch cover.

Dinner that night was whatever came to hand first.

Kate, choking a little on the last bite of her peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, stumbled through the door of her stateroom, feeling her way, eyes already closed in anticipation of hitting her bunk. Her foot tangled in something and she tripped and nearly fell. "What the hell?" Her bloodshot gaze peered around malevolently and encountered something that looked like a tent made out of a bedsheet, draped over three lengths of welding rod tied together in a kind of teepee frame.