Offshore
Episode 19: Seastorm Split
They sailed the Cloudlander into the canal by the guidance of golden bulb arrows, and the waving lanterns and glowsticks of the crowd. Over the largest wharf, a two-storey scorecard of diode lights broadcast their standings in red, new lines flickering on as the boats arrived.
One point for the Mirage, two for the Cloudlander, three for the Catcher and four for the North Star.
They steered the Cloudlander into the berth marked with its name in the estuary marina. There they were met by ushers who took their lifejackets and handed them towels, shepherding them to their waterside accommodations. Although it was past midnight, the streets were alive with undulating spectator crowds flashing their banners and lanterns, and the market district that never slept seemed to shimmer surreally in the afterburn of their exertion.
As they walked and towelled off their hair, Anqien could not stop staring at the crowds, held at bay from the competitors’ path by a velvet rope barricade.
“Still gets me every time,” Jinai said, silhouetted against glowing street lanterns. “Prettiest city this side of the world.”
At their destination inn, they were herded through the narrow lobby, all calligraphed screens and lantern lights, to a chorus of greetings from the staff.
On a bench inside, Zera dozed against Xye’s shoulder, towels crumpled around both pairs of shoulders. Xye’s head perked up at the rattle of the sliding door. She waved with a grin, also seemingly halfway to sleep. “Ten points for effort,” she said, tossing her loose ponytail over her shoulder. “For a whole minute I thought you’d catch us before sunset. But we prevail again.” She stuck out her tongue.
Jinai folded her arms. “And this is meant to be your best leg, yeah?”
She shrugged. “Any leg can be our best leg, you never know till you’re on the water.”
“True, we’ll see you at the start line tomorrow,” Anqien said, tugging on Jinai’s arm as the black-vested ushers returned with trays of hot towels and water jugs.
They began to take the sailors to their rooms in pairs, first Xye and Zera—the latter waking with a sputtering cry when her teammate slid her shoulder out from under her head. Seeing the Cloudlanders for the first time, she offered a polite smile over her shoulder. “Impressive work out there,” she called out behind her.
“Same to you—leading from start to finish,” answered Jinai.
Another pair of ushers soon came to collect Jinai and Anqien, even as more competitors trickled in. They were escorted down the straw-mat corridors to two adjacent rooms, on which wooden placards carved with their names awaited. “You’re set to start at ten in the morning tomorrow,” said one usher. “It’s not confirmed. But be ready by then.”
Nine o’clock was announced by a brash knocking on Jinai’s door, then Telaki’s voice hollering Jinai’s name. “Day two! Day two of the race!” the coach shouted, until she got the door.
“Yeah, yeah, is Anqien there?”
Anqien was in fact there, peering over the coach’s shoulder. “I got us both breakfast,” they said, lifting a pair of paper bags over Telaki’s head.
Once Jinai had dressed and laced on her water shoes, there was only the time to take the paper bags with them and sprint up a confetti-strewn pavement to the marina while chomping on pork floss buns. The start line spanned the mouth of the waterway: rather than two Sail Fed boats, the markers stood on the bank and the delta of the estuary, flashing orange in the muted sunlight.
After the flurry of greetings and paperwork—one team had been disqualified yesterday—they boarded, checked, and unmoored. In the gently outflowing current, the Cloudlander drifted downstream till it became wide as a lake and revealed the unbroken horizon.
The city of Nara-sa was changed in this cloudy daylight: the crescent-arc of buildings along the banks stood watch, dressed down in the dark muted browns of Niro acacia wood. Here and there, bright colour was splashed on roofs and banners, with lettering in Niro-hei that neither of them read particularly well, watched by carved owl totems.
They hadn’t had the time for the full briefing by the team and so it was now, during the fifteen minutes of warming up in laps around the estuary, that the crew filled the relays.
“Well, this will be a big one,” said Iki. “It’s a new port of call, Antao, and there’s a storm system forming four to five hours southeast of Nara-sa.”
“Oh, delightful.” Jinai sprinted to the jib sheet. “How bad is it?”
“Let’s just say, if this were any other race, they would’ve postponed. But we’re talking about the Sail Fed here. Big storm, high ratings. You know what that means—best for you to steer well clear, either east or south after you pass, uh, the Crane Rock.”
“Is that what that one island is called?” Anqien said. “With the jutting bit in the middle? It…doesn’t look like a crane.”
“Yeah…’Crane Rock’ is what the locals call it,” Iki continued. “Frankly didn’t know its name till this morning. Janda always has her ear on the ground, what a star.”
“Now, stop using your old nickname for that damned island,” Janda chuckled. “Well, the other teams are planning on making a decision there themselves, so you’ll probably want to make a judgment call there based on the wind situation.”
Iki mmed in agreement. “The storm is moving east, so if you’re able to just outrun it, the downdrafts would carry you right across the border and straight to Antao.”
“Don’t suggest outrunning the storm,” Telaki now cut in on the Thread line. “I mean, if you’re absolutely ahead or the conditions become predictable, then sure, it may be worth it. But for now, I say go around the back of the storm and catch the lift from the updrafts instead. Won’t be as big of a lift, but…”
“Besides,” Lujang cut in, “you know how staticky storms like this can affect the relays. And I’m obliged to warn you that there’s a non-zero risk of comms going down. Particularly if you’re on the far side of the storm from us.”
“Got it,” Jinai said. A stiff wind now rolled into the estuary, and she adjusted their tack so that the yacht was heading back into position behind the line. An opponent yacht ducked behind them, its blue sail tilting. “If comms go down, then we’re sticking with the plan and riding the back of the storm to the end.”
Iki cleared their throat. “Lujang, is the anemo station up—”
“Yes! It was up ten minutes ago, I’m literally right next to it!”
“What are the bearings of Antao from here?” asked Anqien, peering at the map. “About a hundred and forty degrees from north?”
“A hundred and forty-one, so, correct,” Iki replied. “It’s going to be an interesting one—”
The first call cut his sentence in two, the triplet of foghorn blasts shaking pedestrians from storefronts. Along the banks, they saw heads look up and pedestrians flock to the banks. All along the estuary was a wall of onlookers, jostling and pointing and shouting across the waves.
“Going to be an interesting one,” they went on, “correcting your heading behind the storm, but there are a couple of landmarks you can use as reference points for your position. Make sure you have your maps handy.”
“I’m personally a little rusty with juggling this thing around, but we’ll figure it out,” Anqien said.
“Good work yesterday, by the way, I ought to have mentioned,” Telaki said. “Thanks to the storm, how today’s leg turns out is anyone’s guess. But quick reality check: if you can’t win this leg, then you’re in a bad way, ‘cause you’d be depending on the Mirage to come in third tomorrow.”
“Yeah, yeah, been there, done that,” Jinai replied. Anqien, who felt distinctly less settled than she sounded, drew in a head-spinning breath as the wind blew cool on their face. The Cloudlander had a good track record with the NHR’s second leg. But with the weather holding a hundred surprises in store, they weren’t particularly sure if anything beyond a prayer would assure their victory now.
As if sensing their hesitation, Jinai turned and leaned over, quickly grasping their hand with a nod. “We’ll play it by ear,” she said, “and we’re quite the skilled improvisors, if I do say so myself.”
They smiled back, shaky but sincere. “I couldn’t ask for anyone better to take on a storm with.”
Almost as soon as the start horn blasted across the field, the wind swelled fearsomely behind them from the west, a stray gale drawn into the weather system that was gathering to the southeast. For miles out, the sky was greying, and they let the wind lift them in the direction of their destination—as did every boat in the race.
The fleet, tighter than usual, forged uneasily forward—an uneven rank of vessels travelling across the waves. The positioning shuffled around endlessly as the vying boats found puffs and currents that propelled them briefly ahead in turns. The Cloudlander spent most of it moving between first and fourth, sometimes on the tail of the Astran Rider in the lead, and sometimes falling back behind the Mirage.
This was the status quo for the first hour of this leg of legs. Then, as the unmistakeable jutting structure of the Crane Rock materialised in blue on the horizon, almost blending into the dense, roiling grey beyond, the fleet began to sift out into two. They saw, as they gybed to port—towards the back of the moving storm—that the Mirage had split off in the other direction with a handful of others.
“They’re going to try to outrun the storm,” Anqien said.
“Or they’re gonna die trying,” Telaki replied.
“They’re not the only ones going that way,” Jinai answered as the sky began to boil over far ahead, curtains of grey swallowing the horizon. “If that group makes it to Antao first, we’re done. We’re out of the running for first. Are we completely sure—”
Anqien could hear that she was breathing faster and faster, and they knew her mind was on things outside the race, trying to take too much into the equation at once. “Jinai,” they said, abandoning the helm to fly to her side, a hand lofting down on her shoulder. “We’ll be fine.”
“Don’t let them freak you out. You still have a minute to change course,” Telaki said. “Now. Imagine you’re the only ones in this race. Can you do that?”
“Yes—yes I can,” she said breathlessly. Anqien’s grip tightened on hers.
“You want to get to the destination as quickly as possible. There’s a storm in your way. Huge rotating winds, hundreds of miles on every side. All environmental factors considered—the storm, the wind direction, the location of your destination…what would you do?”
They closed their eyes, hands on the jib sail winch.
“If we get caught in the storm,” Anqien murmured, “we’re done for, too. We either get there on a reliable route, or we risk getting thrown completely off course.”
Jinai nodded slowly. “And if the storm is moving east, then…trying to outrun it means it would be much harder to escape the downdraft when we need to. But from the back, we could curve our route to follow the trailing edge. And leave when we decide.”
“Great! That’s my team,” Telaki said. “Now commit to it. The back of the storm will eventually be closer to the destination than the front. And there’s no telling, in this weather, if the Mirage will pass it before that becomes the case.”
“They’re probably cocky enough to try,” said Jinai. With a smile, she jammed the mainsheet in place and ducked for a flask of water. “Into the back of the storm, let’s go.”
The racers thinned out and split around Crane Rock, and the Cloudlander quickly rallied to the head of the group ducking under the storm. From this far out, the rotating mass of the storm was visible, disks of clouds and lightning spinning across the open sea. The sailors fanned out into various tangents beneath the outermost clouds of the system, some honing closer than others. They took a slightly inner lane, just about lining up with the edge of the turbulence where the sea and clouds began to roughen, and then Anqien raced to hoist up the spinnaker while Jinai trimmed the sails, water rushing against their hull from the port side.
They gybed with the micro-shifts in the wind, but stayed on their almost-downwind course into the orbit of the cell. At this speed, they were right next to flying. The first showering rains pattered down across the deck and on their faces, joining the dance of the sea-spray.
“Reached the storm yet?” asked Iki, his voice crackling more than comfortable. “You all good over there?”
“Just about,” Anqien replied, wiping rain from their forehead. “We’re starting to get the rain, the relay’s getting a bit choppy.”
“It’s stuttering alright,” he answered.
“May be a good time to pull out a little, it’s getting rough,” Jinai replied, to which Anqien gestured their agreement. “Ready to tack!” They steered to starboard while she hauled the sail out, taking their new trajectory for eight minutes, until the rain thinned to a drizzle. Then they gybed again to point in a tangent through the edge of the storm, letting the downwind lift them to a sprint again. In the blurring of raindrops, the closest competitors were nowhere to be seen.
“Any news from the front of the storm?” asked Anqien.
Their headset crackled with what may have been Iki’s voice, but it was hard to tell. Then Janda’s words punched through—“couldn’t—”
The line was all rumbling and rustling for several ominous minutes, and then it was silent. Wind buffeted their faces, flicking raindrops from the tips of their hair. Anqien turned to Jinai as lightning pierced the gloom, lighting her features in sharp relief. “Well, that’s not great,” she said. The Thread line between them had survived intact, and Anqien still heard her voice clearly in their ear.
They looked up at the horizon, divided in two, storm and sky, nothing around them but the rumble of the thunder and the whipping of wind and rain.
With the wind rising all about them, their heart pounding with the fear of not knowing if they would live, it almost felt like their first weeks of sailing again—back when they had been a student fumbling with keelboat ropes on Muli Bay for the first time, when the allure of sailing into the blue and losing their way in this rigidly-orchestrated world had cast its spell on them.
“It really feels like flying,” they said, out of nowhere, perhaps spurred on by the knowledge that the crew couldn’t hear them from the red ferry. “Sailing with you, not knowing where we are.”
“I don’t know that I like the prospect of getting lost in a storm,” Jinai muttered, gazing through the streaking drops as another flash of lightning tore the sky. “But I know what you mean. The world looks so unfamiliar here…I wish it always did.” She tweaked the mainsail’s trim to the buffeting winds, and they trimmed the jib sheet, and together they forged into this strange, unknowable sea.
