Watch and Watch

About this book

Ness Bray is a Falmouth delivery skipper with fourteen years of ocean miles and a story everybody in the pub has heard: how she sailed the cutter Margery Daw across the Atlantic with one hired crewman, lost the autopilot nine hundred miles out, hand-steered the rest of the way, and hauled that crewman back aboard by his harness in a squall. She has signed her name to it in a statement for the owner's legal claim. Then, one wet February morning, the crewman walks into the chandlery where she is hiding between jobs. Ivo Marić, quiet, dry, from the Croatian island of Vis, puts the ship's logbook on the counter. The solicitor needs it. So, he says, does she. Twenty-one days alone at sea with a stranger. Six weeks in a Cornish spring. One logbook that remembers it differently.