Offshore
Episode 14: Island Hide
When Anqien dashed into the marina, the sky was still velvet blue, pricked at the edges by the beginnings of sunlight. Today they had worn their training wetsuit—it seemed best not to carry the company logo while gallivanting on the ocean—and a wide-brimmed straw hat, blue ribbon fluttering as they jogged out onto the boardwalk in the briny breeze.
“There you are!” Jinai’s shout drew their eye to where she waved on the boardwalk, the first seeping glow of dawn just enough to reveal the matching reddish shades of her off-season wetsuit and shoes. “How’re you?”
“Still waking up, but good!” they piped up as the pair fell into step.
As they strolled up the pier and lazily conversed, Anqien pondered on how effortlessly Jinai coordinated outfits, and then let themself follow the thought of whether she ever wore cool colours. Maybe purple and maroon sometimes. Like that dress she wore at the party—
“Hey, over here!” They stumbled to a halt, and only then saw that they were a few steps past the Cloudlander, which bobbed gently in the phosphorescent morning, upon the moon-shallowed water. They backtracked sheepishly. The seaweed waved in the sand below.
Without missing a beat, Jinai slid down the ladder and leapt backwards onto the deck, the mast and canvas swinging with her landing. While Anqien followed in a mild daze, she stuck her head out over the hull on port side, peering down at last week's scratch.
“Should be fine for a day trip,” she murmured, then scrambled to the halyard winch.
Anqien dropped their pack and tucked their hat under the dashboard. “Where to today?” they asked, starting to winch the jib sail up.
Jinai hoisted the mainsail. “I don’t know. As far north as we can go. North until we hit the border. Farther than that. Doesn’t matter.”
Anqien knew they were the last people to have to fear sailing without a plan, at least not to anywhere within half a day’s reach of Wulien. “Alright then, let’s get underway,” they said, as the first breeze picked up their loose sail and began to push them outward. “Northward it is.”
They set out as the sun peeked halfway across the horizon, lighting all of Wulien in gold so its waters shone like topaz. The moon had yet to set, and it hung over the sea as a thin half-circle. Container ships lingered, hazy shadows in the distance, and thick flocks of birds swirled over the boats.
Between the two celestial bodies, they charted their northward course on a broad tack. The wind swung gently, but it was not hard adjusting with its turns, zigzagging gently up the strait—past Canlan, past the waters of the Sunken City, deceptively placid in the low tide with the tops of barnacle-coated stones rippling the surface.
They circumnavigated the obstacle course, moving gently enough that they did not have to devote their entire minds to their manoeuvres.
“So...is everything alright?” Anqien asked. Settling into a stable point of sail, they jammed the mainsheet and took up residence on the starboard bulwark, back pressed against the stanchions.
“Yeah,” Jinai said, joining them on the bulwark so the Cloudlander leaned out of its bias. “Why do you ask?”
“Because we’re going on a day trip with no destination.”
“Oh, true.” Chuckling, Jinai shook her head. “I’m just tired of everything. The disappointment, the stress, expecting the worst. It seems like as good a day as any to take that vacation we keep talking about.”
They nodded thoughtlessly. “I’ll do what I can to make it a good one.”
“I’m already having a blast.” She bumped their shoulder with her own, and they smiled like a fool.
The boat rolled on the waves, carried by the wind. Seagulls and cormorants cried, and Wulien, then Canlan Island, disappeared behind them, while ever newer islands rose out of the glowing horizon. The gold turned to blue overhead, and clouds scudded across their periphery, bringing out in relief the endless depth of the sky.
“Isn’t it weird that the sky can be all these different colours?” Anqien said, head tilted upward. “I bet it would look so cool if we could see the sunlight cross the earth from space.”
“That could happen in our lifetimes. I read that commercial air travel is becoming mainstream in Astra and Sonora. How long before they figure out how to take us up beyond the atmosphere itself?”
“Shorter than we'd think, I bet. I always wondered if people could walk on the moon like they do in the shows.”
“If anyone could figure it out, it would be them Astrans.”
At lunch they loosened the sails, and leaned on the stern facing the sea, Anqien trading one of their seaweed rolls for one of Jinai’s dumplings. They pulled their hat back on as the wind fell and the late morning sun glared. Seagulls began to alight on their stern in ever heavier droves, and they spent a minute shooing the birds away, to little avail.
Anqien stopped mid-mouthful to say, “Did you make this?”
“Hah, I wish. I got that from the corner store.”
“Figures. I was gonna throw a fit if it turned out you’d grown new cooking skills overnight. I did make the rolls, though.”
“I can tell,” Jinai said. “They’re delicious. And too heavy on the cucumbers.”
“Hey, come on,” they said, laughing despite themself. “If you want fishier rolls, go make them yourself.”
The pair leaned against each other on the bulwark as they picked at the crumbs of their lunch and the gulls lost interest. Lazily they watched the sky while the shadows of wings crossed their faces. Jinai turned to her companion, and when Anqien returned her look, she reached out to snatch the hat off their head, placing it on her own. “How do I look?”
About to protest, they studied her with as neutral an eye as they could muster. Her curly locks were untameable beneath the brim, some swept across her cheeks and forehead by the breeze.
“Stunning,” they said. “You should keep it. It looks better on you.” She laughed with a lift of her shoulders, a bit more of a giggle than her usual harsh, pointed laughs. They tore their eyes away, if only just to avoid making it too obvious they were staring.
“So, Niro next Sunday,” Jinai went on. “The big week’s coming. How are you feeling?”
“The race?” Anqien asked. She nodded. “Not ready at all.” They propped their chin up on one arm. “But we’ll have the time for one more run of the Sunken City, right?”
“I reckon we could figure out that course with one more day,” she said, brow furrowing. “Just need a proper day to go over the whole thing.”
“Yeah, and I need to learn how to focus on two things at a time. But if I don’t…”
“If you don’t feel up to it, then we’ll go the long way around Canlan, no big deal,” she answered, taking the hat off her head, and returning it to Anqien’s. She smiled as they adjusted it back in place. “You know…” She paused, a frown fleeting across her face. She shook her head. “Let's get here early next Tuesday, I'll let Telaki know.”
“Can do.”
They nodded to each other, and putting their food boxes and hat away, they trimmed the sails to catch the next rising gale. The Cloudlander resumed its northward flight, on beyond the reach of any familiar bay.
Five hours fleeted by like nothing, borne on the wind like a migrating swallow. They sailed till they weren’t sure if they were still in Helfi’s maritime territory.
It was as they were drifting into an open lagoon whose name they did not know that they finally slowed, noticing the flock of dark shapes gathered against the sandy bottom of the inlet.
“Are those…” Jinai asked, then trailed off, taking the helm to steer them towards the congregation. Four long, robust bodies drifted in the waves, the tell-tale bump of a glistening back just clearing the surface of the water.
The trees on this atoll were sparse, but the water was clear, and here and there, they saw shoals of fish swirling by.
When one of the shapes blew a spout of fine mist into the air, they knew it was a family of four whales, perhaps the great-winged kind that frequented the bays of this ocean, the Las Enmir. One rolled on its side, a flash of a long flipper breaking through the ripples.
Anqien gasped. “Whoa! No way, I’ve never seen those before!”
They had both had the regulations surrounding whale approaches drilled into their heads—slow to five knots approaching from any direction but headlong—so Jinai began to lower the mainsail, and they glided to a gentle halt about a hundred feet from the vast grey bodies.
One by one, the creatures seemed to notice the approach of the vessel. One of the young ones spouted, and their parent bumped it with a flipper. Then the other calf gave a great flick of its tail, and began at once to hurtle obliquely in their direction, before launching itself out of the air with a thrust of its flukes. They watched it arc through the air—dark mottled grey, pale barnacles crusting its rostrum—and crash back into the water, the yacht bobbing in the shockwave of its ungraceful entry.
The parents were following in the calf's direction, no more than twenty feet away, their pointed heads piercing the waves. From here, Anqien could finally see that they were far larger than they had ever guessed, from peering through binoculars on the boardwalk. Each adult was almost twice as long as their yacht, bow to stern, with a mouth large enough to carry them in its mouth.
Jinai gripped the rails and leaned out as far as she could, craning her neck. The deck bobbed as the great-winged whales lifted their gargantuan heads out of the waves to meet gazes with these frantic strangers, tiny eyes set close to where their mouths ended, dark hide wrinkled with age and the sea. For seconds, they hung in silence, watching each other with equal intrigue.
One of the adults spouted a column taller than their sail with a bellow like a steam chimney, a fine mist reaching them and cooling their skin.
Then, together, they descended back into the water, so that they were silent shadows once more. Quickly as they had approached, they began on their ways into the open sea.
Anqien watched motionless till the tiny herd had disappeared from sight. “I’ve never seen whales this close before,” they whispered.
Jinai did not respond. They glanced at her. Her eyes were brimming with tears, drops gathering on her chin.
“Ah, what's wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, wiping her eyes. “For a minute there, I just felt…like nothing else mattered.”
They turned back just past one o’clock, after making a round of the lagoon and finding nothing of interest beyond some fruiting coconut trees. A close reach took them homeward in the stiff southwesterly wind, with both keeping their eyes on the horizon as they searched for familiar signposts to point them back to Muli Bay.
There was a lull in the chatter, as Jinai found a pensive mood had come over her, and she could not—however she tried—reconjure the momentary blitheness of watching the whales gather the calves and take them on beyond Helfi’s waters.
What did disrupt the mood somewhat was the dawning awareness that their next training run would be the last, before they were shipped off to Maka-do for the most important race of her life. Islands floated by sparsely in the blue at first, then began to cluster more densely, till they were following an island chain through the blue, back to where Canlan Island ascended into view.
They moored quietly in the marina and helped each other back onto the jetty. At the top of the ladder, Jinai heard Anqien whisper her name, their fingers tap her shoulder lightly.
She turned. “Yeah?”
Her companion seemed to briefly lose track of what they had meant to say, then laughed, head tilting to their shoulder. “I had fun,” they said. “You’re really just…so…”
“I’m tired, is what I am,” Jinai answered, stretching her arms. “But never of you. We’ll do this again, yeah?”
“Just say the word.” They beamed. “I’ll go with you.”
At the corner store the next morning, Jinai stopped by the news rack, eyes reeled in by the photograph staring up from the cover. There they were, the AmaShiru Mirages, smirking in their sea green wetsuits like they owned all of Niro. The title page declared a full two-page feature about their team.
Like thousands of sods before her, she could not help it as she picked up a copy and took it to the counter.
Reading the sponsored interview over breakfast was perhaps not the complement to her sandwich that she needed, but it certainly did add…some sort of flavour.
Q: You’re a young team—you were formed just three years ago. Do you think that’s an advantage or a point against you?
X: Why, thank you, my young looks are natural.
Z: Xye, will you use your brain just once? Yes, our newness is absolutely an advantage. We come into this shouldering no expectations, and ironically, I think it makes us far more effective than a team under heavier pressure.
X: But obviously we’re gonna win, expectations or no. We’ve never lost the NHR!
Q: You seem quite confident in yourselves.
Z: I think we’re just chill about it. I’m here to sail an impressive race, and part of that is outracing everyone else.
X: Honestly? We have the work to back it up. We’ve been practising the course almost every day since the quals.
Q: Would it bother you if you came second?
Z: Nah, but it’s hard to imagine getting beaten at this juncture. I’m really not worried about that at all.
X: If we come in second, I’ll probably do twice the number of shots at the afterparty. But what are the chances? I mean, even the betting odds are on our side. So how about that.
Jinai wasn’t sure what she had expected to get out of reading this. But she was coming away with a roiling in her stomach, and very little insight into their strategies and intentions. Fluff, all of it—very unsportsmanlike fluff.
She flicked the papers onto her coffee table and kicked back in her couch, closing her eyes. The air was still, floating lightly over her through the window.
The primary meaning of "hide" in the title is apparently specific to British English - it refers to a little hidden shelter where you can watch wild animals.
Also, "great winged" whales aren't literally winged, but they do have very large flippers. I'm naming them after the humpback whale's genus, Megaptera.