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Although Pitt had honed the blades on his Swiss arrip the handle with both hands and exert a great deal of h underbelly of the shark Under Maeve's guidance as a professional ist, he expertly cut out the liver anda recently eaten dorado and several herring Then Maeve showed him how to slice the flesh from inside the skin efficiently

"We should eat the liver now," she advised "It will begin decaying almost immediately, and it is the most nutritious part of the fish"

"What about the rest of thethe knife and his hands in the water to re to spoil in this heat"

"We've got a whole ocean of salt Slice theit up around the boat As it dries, we take the salt that has crystallized on the canopy and rub it into the meat to preserve it"

"I hated liver when I was a kid," said Giordino, soht "I don't think I'h to eat it raw"

"Force yourself," said Pitt "The idea is to keep physically fit while we can We've proven we can supply our stomachs Our real problem now is lack of water

Nightfall brought a strange quiet A half- a silvery path toward the northern horizon They heard a bird squawking in the star-streaked sky, but couldn't see it

The cold temperatures common to the southern latitudes came with the disappearance of the sun and eased their thirst a little, and their ainst the boat and lulled Maeve into thoughts of a happier tiined hi on a couch, an ar of Coors beer and his feet propped on a coffee table as they watched old movies on television

After resting most of the afternoon, Pitt ide awake and felt revitalized enough to work out their drift and forecast the weather by observing the shape of the clouds, the height and run of the waves and the color of the sunset After dusk he studied the stars and attempted to calculate the boat's approxi his old coe froton, he noted that the yacht had rees for twenty minutes short of thirty hours He recalled John Merchant saying the yacht could cruise at 120

kiloh distance traveled of 3,600

kiloton until they were set adrift This he estimated would put them somewhere in the middle of the south Tasman Sea, between the lower shores of Tasmania and New Zealand

The next puzzle to solve was how far were they driven by the storm? This was next to iree of accuracy All Pitt knew for certain was that the storht hours it could have carried theht of land He knew from experience on other projects that the currents and the prevailing winds in this part of the Indian Oceansomewhere between the fortieth and fiftieth parallels, their drift would carry them into the desolate vastness of the South Pacific, where no ship traveled The next land fall would be the southern tip of South America, nearly thirteen thousand kilometers away

He stared up at the Southern Cross, a constellation that was not visible above thirty degrees north latitude, the latitude running across North Africa and the tip of Florida Described since antiquity, its five bright stars had steered mariners and fliers across the ies of the Polynesians Millions of square miles of loneliness, dotted only by the islands, which were the tips of great mountains that rose unseen from the ocean floor

However he figured it, no ood luck they ainst their ever setting foot on land again

Hiraer swa past in a blur as if he were in a jet aircraft flying through tinted clouds He swept over the edge of seeh valleys of vast listened surface The seascape was eerie and beautiful at the sah the void of deep space