NCERT Book Class 11 English (Hornbill) Chapter 2 We're Not Afraid to Die... if We Can All Be Together

 “’
”

Notice these expressions in the text.
Infer their meaning from the context.

 honing our seafaring skills  pinpricks in the vast ocean
 ominous silence  a tousled head
 Mayday calls

IN July 1976, my wife Mary, son Jonathan, 6, daughter Suzanne,
7, and I set sail from Plymouth, England, to duplicate the round-
the-world voyage made 200 years earlier by Captain James Cook.
For the longest time, Mary and I — a 37-year-old businessman —
had dreamt of sailing in the wake of the famous explorer, and
for the past 16 years we had spent all our leisure time honing
our seafaring skills in British waters.
Our boat Wavewalker, a 23 metre, 30 ton wooden-hulled
beauty, had been professionally built, and we had spent months
fitting it out and testing it in the roughest weather we could find.
The first leg of our planned three-year, 105,000 kilometre
journey passed pleasantly as we sailed down the west coast of
Africa to Cape Town. There, before heading east, we took on two
crewmen — American Larry Vigil and Swiss Herb Seigler — to
help us tackle one of the world’s roughest seas, the southern
Indian Ocean.