Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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Within twenty minutes I was sacked out on the couch at their apartment, where I slept soundly for four hours and awoke as they came yoo-hooing up to the door to get me. The plan, if you had not guessed, was that I would parade over to the women’s apartment with them, hauling the cereal I had so responsibly acquired at the supermarket.

As we arrived, Margaret emerged from one of the bedrooms, looked at me quizzically and said, “That was quite a shopping trip, Charlie!”

Unsure whether she was on to me, but not about to concede, I said, “It was!” and neither of us said another word.

In the meantime, I felt infinitely better for the sleep. By evening my cankers and digestion had improved to the point where I was able to eat a walloping chicken tagine and drink a pint of beer at one of the restaurants along the seawall—a restaurant, as it turned out, that would come perilously close to killing poor Tom.

WE SLEPT the night on the boat, and awoke in a cool pre-dawn mist with no wind to speak of. At about 6:30, in the darkness, Steve and I walked to a restaurant along the seashore for a bite of breakfast and a last cup of decent French coffee. By the time we returned, Ryan had popped a bottle of champagne, and the countdown had begun. Behind us to the east a band of cloud-rippled azure was broadening above the mountains. A brigade of noisy gannets was aloft in the motionless air.