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The seas were different colours all over the world, but the deep oceans were always the same. Sonja leaned across the coaming and watched the water cream along the topsides, bubbles and froth dissipating when they reached the stern, leaving a knife-edge swirl behind. A blue so deep and crystalline, it was as if she looked into the heart of a flawless jewel.
The huff brought her gaze up, and she smiled as the small pod arrowed toward her little yacht, black and white sides giving them the distant look of miniature orca. They broke through the long, evenly spaced swell, their speed and grace taking her breath. They could outpace Gypsy in a hundred yards, but they liked company, circling back and rolling to the side to look up at her, offer their acrobatics for her applause.
Under an infinite expanse of sky, etched with streamers of thin white cirrus, the ocean glittered, a siren’s seduction just as fatal as the cold, death-bringing kisses of the myths. Sonja was warm enough, in a down-filled vest over a thin, high-necked shirt, and tucked out of the wind against the sun-warmed timber sides of the cockpit. The temperatures hadn’t been really warm since she’d laid off her southing into Drake Passage, two hundred miles ago, the wind constant and fresh, chilled from the ice sheets only seven hundred miles distant.
