He kept on pressing out to sea by short tacks.

All the while he was peeping over the gunwale out of the corner of his eye.

He was near, he must be near, a bank covered by five feet of water at low tide.

A shoal of five feet is rarely visible on the surface.
Suddenly he rose from his seat on the gunwale, and stood with the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, half turning back to look at "Petite Jeanne" towering almost over him.

And as he looked, her bluff black bows rose upward with an odd climbing movement like a horse stepping up a bank.