Throughout the afternoon, the weather behaved as predicted. The swells, the wind waves and the wind increased from behind. Tartarus's autopilot reacted about five seconds too late to take advantage of the waves, so Matthew and I decided to take turns driving by hand from the third floor. We didn't do much better at first. My guess was that the rudders were too small to change the direction of the boat's considerable mass, once it started down a wave. The trick, then, was to anticipate the next wave five seconds ahead and line her up. That, however, took a lot of hand-over-hand steering.

Alia watched us struggle, disappeared below and returned with a brodie knob that she clamped onto the steering wheel. She said she found it the day before when she inventoried the wall of parts. I wondered why anyone would remove it. With the knob, steering became a new game, a source of entertainment.

Matthew did quite well for about forty-five minutes. For my turn, I drove down no more than three waves when the steering wheel became useless and spun like a pinwheel. Tartarus turned right, leaned heavily to port in the next wave and headed out to sea. After regaining my footing, I pulled the throttles back to idle. Matthew hustled down to the second floor to see if that wheel worked. It did, as did the autopilot. He put us back on course.