A steady, reliable Captain, a rock in a stormy sea, carries his stable persona home. Its not how he once was, when he met and married his wife Yvonne and before the sea had tamed him. She now wants him to return to land, she has a serious illness, but is afraid that if he was confronted by this he'd leave the ocean for her and would realise his real love for her had gone. The Captain sees things very differently, his wife, his job, his crew demand a steady hand, he believes he would love more time with his wife, but without realising it, responds to the dependence of his crew much more than he does to hers. The story turns, when a valuable salvage operation is sabotaged by another hand and instead of success, becomes a meagre but niggardly failure for the Captain. He can do nothing to temper this slight, to quit his job would leave his crew unemployed and though he talks of this to his boss, he hides this from his wife. The other turning point is a beautiful, lonely woman, rescued during the salvage operation, fate throws her and the Captain together when both are mentally at there lowest ebb and each glimpses the other as a rope to climb. Their brief fling is interupted almost before its started as the Captain's wifes illness suddenly takes a turn for the worst. Though he rushes back to her side and resumes his strong, steady role, we hear no response to her dying plea for an avowal of love, only his anguish. As she dies, the sea calls again with another SOS and despite all that has happened, he is powerless to resist her call.
