Offshore
Episode 21: Strait Chase
I lost track of the weekdays and didn't realise it was Saturday, so have the chapter first. The art will come later!
The last day of the Niro-Helfi Race glowed to life, cold and fresh on the Antao Port. There was no trace of rainstorm left in the ice blue sky. After a breakfast taken at a quieter pace than the last, Jinai and Anqien met with their crew on this last walk to the marina. All around, the waterside buildings were straight, narrow and grimy, leaves gathering on rusted drains. This city that had boomed two decades ago was showing its maturity.
“All fed and ready to go?” Telaki was answered by two quiet nods. Across the jetties, competitors were stretching, jogging and refuelling their engines, all with a remoteness born of nerves. They straightened their backs as they came past Xye and Zera, having a chat in front of their yacht along the same jetty as theirs.
The Cloudlander crew picked up their stride, but the Mirages had already broken out of their conversation to look. Zera called out, “Nice one evening the score last night! May the best team win.”
“Namely, us!” Xye cut in, shades glinting at them.
Jinai rolled her eyes, but when she next looked, Zera had yanked Xye back by the collar and was tearing him a new one in Niro-hei. He nodded enthusiastically and then turned back to them with a two-finger salute. “Good luck—you’ll need it!”
“Close enough,” they heard Zera mutter.
“Yeah, good luck to you too,” Jinai obliged without turning.
When they had moved out of earshot, Telaki said, “The Mirages made a miscalculation yesterday, unlucky for them. Going in front of the storm took slightly longer.”
“Kind of a miracle they still came second then,” Jinai replied. They were beasts, she had always known that much, but it took more than just competence to come second without radios.
“They did right amazing,” Iki said, nodding. “Sends a chill up my spine to imagine what they might do today.”
“Hopefully not enough,” Jinai answered in clipped syllables. Her hands were icy. She clasped them together.
As they came up to their moored yacht, Lujang stopped the sailors with hands on their shoulders. “Headsets,” she said. They stood wordlessly while she installed and started the devices. She pushed her own receiver to her mouth. “Do you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” Jinai said while Anqien gave a gesture of affirmation. She turned to Telaki with a motion at the Cloudlander. “How’s she doing?”
“The sails took a bit of a beating yesterday,” she said, “so we swapped them out.”
“New sails? Fantastic. Thanks,” Jinai said with a nod. Then turning to Iki, “What’s the weather situation today?”
“We’re looking at stiff, persistent northwesterlies at least to mid-afternoon,” he replied. “So it’ll be a close reach north, and as you round the Cape of Joutien, you’ll have the wind in your backs. A comfortable broad reach home.”
“So, you’re saying both the Sunken City and the long way around Canlan are viable,” Jinai said.
“Yeah, it’s your choice, both will get you there in reasonable time.”
She nodded slowly. “I honestly thought we would take the City today. But on a broad reach…I don’t know.”
Telaki glanced from one sailor to another. “Well, that’s up to you,” she said. “I say make that decision as you round the cape, once you know what the Mirage is doing.”
With just fifteen minutes remaining before the starting horn sounded, the Cloudlander crew buckled down to work. Besides the formalities, the chit-chat was thin and sporadic, nothing to pad the conversation while they kitted up and ran their checks. Life jackets. Attractor glove. Shoelaces, again.
One by one the yachts around them peeled away, till only half remained in the marina. At last, Telaki clapped her protégés on the shoulder and nodded. “Well, looks like we’re all good to go. It’s the moment of truth, little stars! Shine bright!”
“We’ll do our best,” Jinai replied. Anqien nodded mutely back.
Now, as the pair took to the ladder’s cold rungs and began to descend to the yacht, they finally broke their silence. “I feel like I’m going to be sick.”
“Aw…just the nerves?” asked Jinai, waiting for them to vacate the rung below her before she stepped down. “Or was there something funky in your breakfast?”
They shook their head as they leapt off, clinging just a second longer to the bottom rung than usual. “I wish it were food poisoning.”
At the bottom, Jinai missed a rung on the ladder and landed on the deck with an ungraceful thump. By then, her teammate had sat down on the back thwart, by the helm, bouncing their heels on the bumpy metal flooring.
She sat down beside them. They were gripping the edges of the seat, white-knuckled, the colour drained from their face.
“Hey, hey,” she whispered, reaching up to rub their back.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” Anqien said. “It’s such a big deal. It’s too much.”
“That’s my fault,” Jinai replied, voice low and earnest. Something about seeing her teammate like this made her heart hurt. “I’ve made such a huge deal about this being my last NHR. But really…it’s just another race. Isn’t it?”
“Is it?” they replied. “But you’ve been saying…”
“The stakes aren’t much different from last year, or any other year. And honestly…if we did come in second?” She pried their hand off the seat and clasped it between hers, to be answered by widening eyes, catching reflections of the sky and all its clouds. “I think I’ll take it better this year. Just a little. Because I see you better now…and how much you enjoy just being on the podium. It’s made me appreciate it better, too. Second in the world is pretty damn good. And the thought of standing there with you, showing off our medals...it’s a nice one.”
They laughed with their gaze cast to a side, fingers fidgeting in her grip. “Gods,” they whispered. “It makes my head feel light just imagining.”
She grinned. “Great, keep that smile on. You look so pretty when you do.” Anqien gave a little squeak.
On the jetty, Lujang clutched her head in her hands and screamed, “Will the two of you just—”
The first call horn interrupted her, and the two, briefly lost in staring at each other, jolted apart with a cry and darted to their positions. Heart pounding, Jinai began to hoist their new sail with its maroon streaks. On an impulse of the breeze, they coursed out of the marina with their tell-tales aloft. Into the starting convergence they wove themselves, threading a lane parallel to the shore.
The coastline of Antao was flat and wide, not a bay so much as a straight open coastline that ran north to south. The start line looked almost naked out on the water, marked by orange flags that fluttered atop the superstructures of two anchored tugs. Up north, the silhouettes of pulley cranes projected up and out of the shoreline. Down south, the forested coast curved out of sight.
It was a fitting start for the third and final leg of the Niro-Helfi Race. Half the distance of the other two, and with Thread engines permitted, the sail from Antao to Wulien followed the outline of the Helfi coast and would be over in four hours.
As Jinai and Anqien darted and wove into the tangle, the last call sounded. The waters were whitened by the jockeying behind the start line, more than there had been at the past two starts. The Cloudlander veered around the pack, homing in on the starboard mark. “Thirty seconds!”
Fifteen. It was like counting off heartbeats. They positioned, adjusted, readied their trajectory.
Ten, nine, eight, seven…
They nodded at each other and tacked. Effortlessly—they had it down to an art—they leebowed the Rider and the North Star, cutting them off with only two seconds to spare. A chorus of protests erupted behind them, only to be sliced in two by the rending blast of the start horn, drowning out all noise.
Never had such a thunderous sound been so chilling. As they burst past the line and forward on the undulating surf, Jinai nodded to Anqien with a spiralling gesture—weave. They lifted their hand into the air with their gloved hand, plucking Threads from the Helfi sky. Like they had a thousand times—under duress and in tranquil silence both—they wove the Thread across the deck, lifting the hull out of the water with each knot they tied.
Then the boats were all in the air, save for their hydrofoils, and the wind was blinding in the eyes of the racing fleet. The crowds of spectators blitzed by, terraces upon terraces of tourists with cameras, all of whom had flocked to the largest port of Helfi to watch them leave at the horn blast.
“Good going, hotshots!” came the unmistakeable voice of Xye from the turquoise sailboat to their right. They were as close to neck-and-neck as they could be.
“Piss off!” Jinai yelled back.
“We definitely cleared that leebow, right?” Anqien whispered into their headset, casting glances over their shoulder at the Rider and North Star.
“No doubt about it,” Jinai replied, teeth gritted and eyes narrowed on the path ahead.
They surged past the end of the port, the striped cliffs of Helfi taking over. They pulled into the lead pack—almost side by side, in nautical terms, with the other three: the Mirage, the Catcher, and the North Star they had only just cut off from the right. All were aloft on their hydrofoils, ploughing saltwater in a churning wake.
The shoreline sloped away so that they were now encompassed by a grand bay of cliffs and stacks, undulating in great striated sweeps, farther than the horizon. Now the race was truly getting underway: the leaders began to fan out, Mirage and Cloudlander trending off about half a mile out into the open sea, while their two competitors hung slightly closer to the coastline. The wind, uninhibited by geographic barriers, blew much faster in open sea than close to shore—and in an air-sailing race, where a surprise gust could topple the boat in a flash, sometimes playing it safer paid dividends.
But not for the two vying for the trophy. Today they brought their fiercest to the game, ploughing into the waters where the greatest gusts blew. At every instant, Jinai had her eyes in two places: she clocked when their opponents in green found and caught a short puff, pulling ahead, and she glanced about for other transients, keener than a shark scouring the surface for its next meal.
At the forty-five minute mark, the fleet had separated into clear packs, and the four leaders had not changed.
Then, in that minute, the prevailing wind swung, becoming a northerly—almost straight in their faces. All four boats began to beat out of phase, Jinai and Anqien taking shorter beats than the Mirage, which was farther from the shore. Little by little, zig by zag, their rivals clawed forward to five seconds ahead.
“That’s nothing,” Jinai growled through gritted teeth, eyes out on the water below while Anqien cast theirs to the telltales above. Here the wind was chaos, and they cranked the jib car to trim the sail; the matching clatter of the mainsheet car told them Jinai had taken the cue.
They had only just brought their gaze level when she gasped and shouted, “Over to starboard!”
“Let’s tack,” Anqien replied, knowing without asking that she’d found a good puff.
“Ready to tack!” she answered. A singular mind, they swung to starboard and dipped, eyes on the brief disturbance of the water that indicated a gust of wind till—with a clean countdown from Jinai—they caught the lifting wind and gybed into it.
By now, the Mirage had snuck forward to a seven-second lead. Their boat, with its black and blue-green sail, charged through the waters of Helfi, hungry for no less than their third trophy in a row. Yet again, Jinai witnessed firsthand the skill and aplomb that graced their every move—deft, clean tacks and well-controlled heeling, which both Zera and Xye’s respective years as short course champions would have given them. They were experts under pressure, and it had shown all three times.
“They’re good, I’ll give them that,” Jinai said under her breath. But the puff they were on had proven an investment, lifting them forward till they were almost nose-to-nose with the Mirage again—close enough for a photo finish, if the race ended there.
But the race did not end there. They were minutes off from the famous first turn of the last leg that marked its halfway point: rounding the Cape of Joutien, and down southeast onto the home stretch.
Just before they swerved into the turn, they veered close to the Mirage. Anqien straightened at the sound of taunts issuing from the rival boat—Xye was staring right at them, no doubt with a shit-eating grin, and most of the words were lost in the whistle of the wind, but they caught— “see ya later!”
The words trailed after them as they swerved across—behind—the Cloudlanders’ path, and straight diagonal towards the tip of the Cape.
“Tack to port! Tack to port!” Anqien shouted.
“Shit! Ready to tack!” Jinai called back.
They snapped the Threads on the port side. She hauled the mainsheet, and they swung in an arc, taking an outer lane to the Mirage, as both boats they cleared the tip of the cape and the three seastacks of rainbow rock layers hurtled into view.
Like a comb it parted them—Mirage between the first stack and the shore, Cloudlander between the first and second stacks. Now, as they pulled out of the great hairpin turn and honed in parallel with the shore once more, it became clear that their foes had regained their lead, and had widened it to ten seconds.
Xye and Zera whooped on their deck, and Jinai spat out a wordless, frustrated cry, as both teams steeled up for the final push.
IT HAS BEGUN. I didn't want too big of a gap between Episodes 21 and 22, so you can expect 22 sometime during the week.