CHAPTER 6
Wind and Waves
Friend and Foe
Cut off from a raft, a boat, or a larger vessel, a naked human in mid-
ocean is unimaginably helpless. In the tropics, imagine the lingering
terror of wondering when the sharks will arrive. In the icy seas of the
North Atlantic, any terror will be short- lived as the body quickly be-
comes chilled and the brain shuts down within minutes. Yet tropical
seas, temperate seas, and icy seas provide the very conditions with which
seabirds routinely cope, be it a penguin passing half a year out of sight
of land, or a Sooty Tern spending months on the wing, never alighting
on the blue tropical sea, never ceasing to flap its wings. Indeed, not only