Old Hywel refused to sail on a red-dawn morning, a superstition his grandson found charming until he noticed the pattern: red dawns preceded, with uncomfortable regularity, the low-pressure systems that turned the strait vicious by noon. The grandson did not believe in omens. But he began, quietly, to check the barometer before every red dawn, and found it falling nine times in ten. He never told his grandfather that the superstition was, in fact, sound meteorology dressed in folklore's clothing; some truths, he suspected, survive better as stories than as forecasts.