Mitch Gordon, lawyer and yachtsman, awakens 70 miles from Tahiti to find himself alone in his 40-foot ketch. Sometime in the last dark hours his wife Lindy has been swept overboard into the giant Pacific swells. For 36 hours he clings aloft in the tropical sun, tracing and retracing the vessel's course. Lindy, buoyed by a flimsy life-jacket, struggles to survive until he can find her.

In his fiction, Hank Searls has always drawn on personal experience. He is the author of The Big X, The Crowded Sky, Heroship and Lost Prince. He lives with his wife aboard their ketch in the South Pacific.