" The Albatross' Foot," I said. " My God, Sailhardy!"

" Here it comes," he said excitedly. " Look, Bruce, look at the seals! They're grabbing the tunny!"

It was more dramatic than I had ever imagined it to be. As the warm current swept round the southern point of Tristan, the sea boiled with the commotion as the seals fought the longfin.

Sailhardy looked wistfully at the staccato glints. " If we had some Japanese longlines, we'd be able to bring them up from as deep as seventy fathoms," he said.

" I still want eighty-eight million plankton in my net," I grinned.

" You won't have to wait long," he replied. " Maybe half an hour. There's no hurry. It will go on like this for weeks."

" Weeks?"

" When I was twelve," he said, " we nearly all died of starvation on Tristan. You know how it is-without fish, we couldn't live. The kelp got some sort of disease and the crawfish disappeared."

The islanders rely on the inshore crawfish and deepwater

Blue Fish as a perennial source of food. With seabirds' eggs and mollymawk chicks, it is their main diet. I could imagine the week-by-week cutting of their starvation rations.

" We stuck it for a year," Sailhardy went on. " Then it. came-The Albatross' Foot. I was so weak I could scarcely pull an oar. We hauled in some of the biggest bluefin that day I have ever seen-some of them up to two hundred and fifty pounds."

We were standing with our backs to the west, watching the current and its creatures sweep towards us.

It hit us then. Sailhardy's guard was down. The Southern Ocean waits for that in a man. We had overlooked the unsleeping menace. Thank God Sailhardy had untied the mainsail halliard from the boat's ribs.