midnight
Deakin , it is true , was making his second voyage ; but Willie Weeks , though young , had begun early ; and Upton , a man of forty , knew the banks and currents of the North Sea as well as Weeks . `` It 's all right , '' said the skipper , `` if the weather holds . '' And for a month the weather did hold , and the catches were good , and Duncan learned a great deal . He learnt how to keep a night-watch from midnight till eight in the morning , and then stay on deck till noon ; how to put his tiller up and down when his tiller was a wheel , and how to vary the order according as his skipper stood to windward or to lee ; he learnt to box a compass and to steer by it ; to gauge the leeway he was making by the angle of his wake and the black line in the compass ; above all , he learnt to love the boat like a live thing , as a man loves his horse , and to want every scanty inch of brass on her to shine . But it was not for this that Duncan had come out to sea . He gazed out at night across the rippling starlit water , and the smacks nestling upon it , and asked of his God : `` Is this all ? '' And his God answered him .