Free And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi, Bruce Henderson Page A

was being unfaithful again. She still felt a stab of betrayal when she thought of Gina Allen, the coquettish girlfriend of Mike, whose Hilo roofing business had employed Jennifer at the time she met Buck. The work—carrying loads of roofing materials up and down ladders—was far too strenuous for Jennifer, and Buck later took over helping Mike. The two couples often got together, and Jennifer always sensed that Gina had tarted herself up for Buck. One night at Mike’s place after he’d passed out from too much booze and grass, Gina suggested that the three survivors climb in the backyard hot tub. Buck thought it was a great idea and began undressing. The next thing Jennifer knew, Buck and Gina were naked, necking playfully. Buck summoned Jennifer to join them, making it obvious what he had in mind. Shocked and upset, Jennifer stormed out, slamming the door behind her. When Buck came home the next morning, she asked nothing about the night before and he volunteered no details. She had not wanted to know then, or later, when Buck spent late nights in Hilo. To be fair, he had never promised Jennifer a monogamous life together. Just the opposite, in fact, as he bemoaned having been denied so many experiences for too many years behind bars. He needed to be free to act on his urges, he told her. At least he was being honest about it. Jennifer tried to overlook Buck’s occasional liaisons, hoping he’d get it out of his system. Yet it hurt whenever she sensed, as women so often can, that another woman had been in her man’s arms.
    But Jennifer had to face a much worse problem after a week at sea. She and Buck had no idea where they were . Months before they left, Jennifer had volunteered to be the navigator. She knew that finding a little island represented on the chart by a dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean wasn’t going to be a cinch. She’d heard that even the most experienced ocean navigators could miss that small a target. It wasn’t like hitting the Hawaiian Islands with their several good-sized mountains and busy lanes of sea traffic.
    She had learned everything she knew about the complex subject of celestial navigation from books—like a paperback guide called Ten Easy Steps to Navigation , which she had brought along. She had never taken a sight or worked out an actual navigation problem until this trip, so Jennifer had no reason to trust her navigating. The positions she plotted on the map fluctuated wildly—one day, according to her calculations, they had sailed three hundred miles south. “Wow, we’re making great time,” exclaimed Buck, who was only too willing to believe such good fortune. But the next day, they had gone seven hundred miles to the east ! Jennifer knew that in optimum conditions, given the Iola ’s slow speed, they couldn’t go more than fifty or sixty miles in twenty-four hours. Clearly, her calculations stank—and they did not change the Iola ’s course based on them. They just kept heading in the direction the compass pointed to for due south.
    Nevertheless, she doggedly followed the same routine each morning. She tied the wheel down, surveyed the horizon, and went below, tuning the AM-FM transistor radio to the international channel that gives the soft tick-ticking of Greenwich Mean Time. The seconds ticked off until a melodic recorded female voice said: “At the tone, Mean Time will be twenty-one hours and ten minutes.” In three or four seconds, a louder tick signaled the minute mark. At exactly that moment, Jennifer started the stopwatch and went topside. Dutifully following the step-by-step instructions in her how-to book, she raised the sextant and looked into the eyepiece that reflected, through a tiny oval mirror, the line of the horizon in relation to the position of the sun. Once fixed on that point, she checked the corresponding scale of numbers on the bottom of the sextant, which gave her the angle between the horizon and the sun. Jennifer would then go back below