Offshore
Episode 18: Troubled Waters
After the frenzy of the first five minutes, Jinai and Anqien settled into third place behind the North Star and the Mirage, just ahead of the Catcher and their intermittent battle cheers. They soared through the waves beneath the placid grey sky, zipping out into the last sheltered waters of the bay.
Till now, tacking had been easy: the wind was howling from the north and they were still headed east-by-northeast, and so they would be on a beam reach till they had cleared the white headlands to their left. As scripted, the Mirage had immediately charged ahead beyond reproach upon the whitetips, and the Cloudlander kept pace with the North Star to their right, but they were too far apart to accurately tell who was in front.
“Yeah, they’re way off in open sea, and you’re trending close to the headland,” Telaki confirmed.
“Puff over to starboard, twenty degrees from our heading.” Jinai was—as she did—always peering out on the waters for transients, and she was quick on the draw, motioning out the sparkling water. “In three, two, one—” They tacked, and ocean spray hit their faces and goggles, bringing the tang of salt. Anqien was as efficient about steering as they had ever been. But they sensed, even now, how pointedly methodical her calls were, not one syllable more than necessary.
Their shout of, “feels like the wind is shifting!” was met with a “you’re right,” and a nod, and when she tacked the mainsail, they scrambled to follow with a change in rudder against the wind bias.
“Good read,” Iki said in their ears. Neither replied. Waves splashed on their soundless bow.
“Alright, I’ve had it,” Janda shouted. “Why are you two not talking during the final? The other teams have noticed. This is a matter of tactical importance!”
As she said that, Jinai turned to fix Anqien with a look. It was impossible to read, hard enough as it was to watch her and the sea at the same time.
They weren’t quick to anger—many had said they were one of the least confrontational people they knew. But when they glimpsed that cowering look from their teammate, they boiled over.
“Don’t ask me,” they snapped, then adjusted the helm.
Jinai pulled against the bulwark. “I’m sorry.” It was almost under her breath but they heard her in their earpiece. “I messed up, I’m sorry—”
“You didn’t mess up! You just decided that you did, and then you acted like you did!”
“Whoa, whoa,” Telaki’s voice knocked the words from their mouth. “Keep your current course, wind won’t shift for a while. Alright? Now, what the fuck is going on?”
Jinai sighed heavily. “We...” She massaged the bridge of her nose. “We kissed on the ferry. I mean, I started it. I’m so sorry. I have no idea why I did.”
Anqien was clutching the headset against their ear. “I said it was fine! I was fine taking that as it was. But you decided you’d done a bad thing and now I can’t convince you of anything else!”
“Are you being serious right now?” Telaki groaned. “You’re only bringing this up during the race?”
“I was kinda embarrassed about the whole thing!” Jinai shouted. She lifted her eyes helplessly to Anqien. As their gazes connected, they felt their fury peter out almost as fast as it had ignited. “Seriously…I’m sorry. It was immature of me to just clam up and stop talking. I was…panicking again. You know. As usual.”
Anqien went through five different emotions in the same number of seconds. “Jinai,” they replied. “You’re my favourite person in the world. No matter what you do. Even after all this. You’re not gonna scare me off so easy.”
Jinai nodded slowly, letting out a ragged sigh. “Maybe I worry too much about ruining it all.”
“It takes more than a tiny slip-up like this to ruin our friendship. I want you to know that.”
“Messing up is all part of this sport, huh?” she murmured, toying absently with the mainsheet.
Anqien finally felt their shoulders loosen. “It’s all about the recovery. Isn’t it?”
“Congrats on clearing that up, the wind’s about to shift north again!” Iki burst out.
The two sailors looked at each other and nodded, Jinai’s expression steeled up. “We’re coming up on the end of the headland. Then we’re heading twenty-five degrees from north next?”
“Twenty-five degrees from north,” Iki confirmed.
Ahead of them, the Mirage was still within view, though they had long cleared the headlands and into the open sea, turning into a blue-green sliver. To their right flew the North Star; to their back, the Catcher and the Bel yacht gave chase.
Jinai grasped the mainsheet. Anqien glanced at their dashboard compass. “Let’s tack to port!” they shouted.
“Ready!” she answered.
They swung the helm anticlockwise, metal gleaming in the sun. In the same lurch of the vessel, Jinai hauled the mainsail in, and they tacked towards the wind, on a clear diagonal past the tip of the forbidding cliff face.
The wind, previously a heavy downward draft, now batted them head-on, sails and all, as they passed the edge of the headland. Anticipating the shift, Jinai had already trimmed the sail to catch the steady air. “Alright, onward!” she said.
And they were out in the open sea, the clouds roaring by high above, upon winds much stronger than the ones below. Yet they, too, felt weightless. The heavens blew past, and the sky ahead cleared to pale blue.
The wind swung like a slow metronome—north to northeast and back again—just as Iki had said it would. The methodical rhythm was easy to keep time to, and they tacked each time it began to shift headlong onto their bow, beating to windward in right-angled zigzags so that they retained their rough northeast-bound trajectory.
Always the Mirage hovered two or three minutes ahead, and always the North Star and Catcher chased from less than a minute behind, dodging the Cloudlander’s slipstream and only just keeping pace. They knew the control crews were following aboard a Sail Fed ferry, hanging adrift just a mile behind the tail end of the pack. This way, the relays never broke even when the quality was occasionally marred by crackling.
As always, Jinai’s eye for the sea took them from fortune to fortune. They leveraged every current and puff to carry them into the prevailing wind, though by-and-large, they sailed beat after beat for an hour or two, shoring up strength before each tack as they approached lunchtime.
There was time between beats for them to take turns snatching protein bars from their packs, tearing them open with their teeth and wolfing them down. As the wind swept back into a northerly, they tacked once again to be lifted northeast: at their current speed, they were flying faster than the wind, and a close haul was faster than more beating.
“How’s it looking up front?” asked Telaki.
“Clear and easy, but the Mirage is pulling ahead a touch,” Jinai said. “They’ve run into trouble with some turbulence once or twice.”
“And behind you?”
“Still the Catcher and the North Star,” Anqien replied, casting a glance over their shoulder. “Pretty hot on our heels.”
“Alright, no risky moves. Wait it out…”
Eventually the wind came to rest in a gentle but steady northerly, so that Jinai and Anqien, by then about five hours into the race, could take turns on the mainsheet while the other organised a meal of canned lentils, carrots, peas and tuna, and a litre of water. As they glided into the late afternoon, the sky thickened with clouds that never broke with rain. By now, the Mirage had advanced to the edge of their sight, but the Cloudlander had pulled clear of the chasing teams behind them, dark specks on the pale sea.
Only the rising blue silhouette of a mountain ahead, with its ever-billowing column of thin white smoke, alerted them to the fact that they were approaching the split at Ima-tou Island. A conical volcano that towered half a mile over the sea, it was a forbidding vision to sailors in every direction. For miles westward, these waters were interrupted by shallows peppered with submerged islands.
As they sailed closer, they saw the thickets of dense greenery that hung in windswept curtains from the cliffs and slopes. Both squinted out on the water at the waves, where the sea diverged on either side of the tapering island. The Mirage, a green-grey speck on the waters about two minutes ahead, had tacked and was veering onto the port side, committing to the west split around the island.
“Alright, I know they went west, but I think we’re better off not dodging islands right now,” Anqien said.
“East would get less wind at best,” Jinai replied. “Or it’ll be full of turbulence.”
“I’d say that too, if we didn’t have to tack straight into the wind to get on the west side. Besides, turbulence means transient winds. I trust your eye.”
Jinai seemed to ponder for three seconds, then nodded. “I think you’re right, starboard it is,” she said. She waited till they were just about on the right point to start their trajectory to starboard, then she declared, “ready to tack!”—and they swung east, from a close reach to a beam reach. They swooped into the late-afternoon shadow of the glowering volcano.
It quickly became apparent—as Jinai stood up on the deck and pointed out an incoming puff almost instantly—that reading the sea had become far easier without the sun’s glare in their eyes. In that light, all became visible—crests and shadows, coarseness where the wind whipped up small ripples on the surface.
“That puff’s going to head us up from starboard,” she said, eyes fixed ahead of their bow. “It’s a big one and looks like it’s stuck—let’s tack to starboard.” Anqien counted them off, and they trimmed the sails as they took the puff, tacking through the wind. The boat heeled over to port and they sprinted to rebalance it.
Their handling was keen as a knife’s edge, and they bounced from rotor to rotor in the turbulent air in the lee of the island. The Cloudlander inched upwind around Ima-tou, the lone landmark on the first leg of the race. In the setting sun, they shot out the other end to see their path on course to converge with the Mirages, although— “Yeah, they’ve still got a little bit on us,” Anqien said, and tacked early to avoid their slipstream.
Now barely a minute ahead of them, they could hear yelling and commotion from their rivals’ boat, which seemed to stir into a quarrel. “Hm hm, from here it sounds like you’ve freaked them out,” Janda said with a grin to her voice. “They’re losing it in the control room. Good work.”
Now that they had suddenly regained the chase, their eyes were alight once again. Before the evening swept over them and they lit their lamps, Jinai and Anqien traded spots at the mainsheet so the other could bolt down dinner.
“You reckon we have a chance at first place this leg?” Jinai called out to her teammate.
They washed down a mouthful of their hasty dinner with water. “Would be a gigantic effort, but it’s never over till it’s over!”
They put up an admirable fight, clawing back a little ground on Zera and Xye in the last remaining sliver of daylight. It was enough to spook them, but once the night hit, it became next to impossible to read the wind in the dark. Then their positions were locked, and they toiled onward, far apart on the waters but close enough to gauge—from the tiny glow ahead—that the Cloudlander was still lagging. Even Iki could only help so much, and without the boost of unseen currents, the cause was good as lost.
“Now, now,” Telaki chimed in when neither of them had spoken for almost half an hour. “Second place is as good as we hoped for.”
“It’s midnight just about now,” Iki said. “Keep on your course and you’ll make a comfortable second place.”
The port of Nara-sa sparkled into view—glimmering on the edge of the water, beckoning them towards the light. A lighthouse blinked its welcome. The glow of this city’s streets was warmer and redder than that back at home.
Five minutes before they arrived into the port, they heard the cacophony of the shore, and began to see that every inch of the city’s port was decked out in banners and lanterns. The dancing lights stirred their hearts, even as they coursed past the incandescent lamps of the finishing marks.
Ahead, the Mirages’ blue-green sail had already settled behind the finish line in the wind-sheltered bay.
With that, Anqien is now my most drawn OC ever 😂
Quick question: since the race has actually started, would anyone prefer >1 chapter a week?