The principal scene of action takes place on an expensive, red-hulled sailboat named Big Bucks. This boat is the home of four people during a two-week trip that was planned to go from Galveston Bay to Cancun, Mexico. The author depicts the docks of a yacht club and a hospital in Brownsville as the locales of departure and arrival. These locales function as the background against which the major events of the eight-hundred-mile trip across the Gulf of Mexico are gradually developed and respectively resolved.

Thus, the boat is designed as the textual space from which the element of adventure originates and which constitutes the context for the emerging conflict. By selecting such a setting Strasser creates a site that perfectly suits his literary strategy of conflict building. While the life-threatening situation during the severe storm makes the boat into a battlefield of human against natural forces it...