About half way across the channel between the islands a notification informed me I had unlocked a new skill.
‘[Skill gained - Nautical: Pilot - 1 rank]’
With the wind in my hair, and the feel of the water crossing our bow, this was easily one of the freest I had ever felt…
Sam spent most of the trip fiddling with his interface, content to let me enjoy the thrill of piloting a boat across practically open water. As we got closer to the shoreline, he directed me towards a gap in the coastline. It took us into a sheltered area of the coastline and Sam lowered the sail and sat back down to row us towards a cave.
“The current here is a bit of a pain, can you keep us aimed at the cave until you see the hull. I’ll focus on rowing.”
Sam’s description hadn’t given it justice. She was beautiful. Long and sleek, her single mast had been lowered down to keep it from the roof of the cave; she was at least five times the length of the boat we were pulling up alongside her.
Sam had me steer the much smaller boat around to the docks on the other side of the ship, where he carefully hopped out and secured the bow line, while I held the boat steady, then he returned the favour as I got out and secured the stern. We untied the two sails from the longboat, manoeuvred them onboard and then he showed me where to drop the ones I was carrying in [Inventory].
A notification on my HUD informed me that a side quest existed for this island.
I mentioned it to Sam while hovering over him watching him repair the tiller system, and he pointed me towards the back of the cave at the far end of the docks.
“This might take me a while, I know how it should look, but I've never installed one myself before. It’s not something I want to rush and there isn’t enough space here for two. There was something which reminds me of a weather station at the top of the ladder at the end of the cave. It was what I was exploring when I found the hatch that led me here. It’s just past a well, to the rear of the building.”
So I left him to the repairs. The ladder was exactly where he said it would be, metal rungs which had been drilled into the stone. A thirty meter climb had me coming out of a hatch in the cellar of an old building. The stone stairs led up to the ground floor of a house overlooking the sea to the south. I followed the path, past the well, to find a weather-beaten shack with the telltale signs of a weather monitoring station coming out the top of it. There were a couple of wind speed measuring devices on poles, something which could catch rain water, and a dirty solar panel aimed towards the sun. Inside the shed I saw the first problem. One of the shelves had collapsed, and its plank had fallen onto some of the cables, pulling them out of the cabinet rather than stressing the connections, it looked like they had been designed to simply pull out. I opened the cabinet, nothing seemed out of place and checked out the cables, most of them seemed pretty unique and only had one slot for them to go into, and I just had to guess the last ones. I tried the on button. It powered on briefly, but died.
If I'm lucky it’s just not getting enough juice from the solar panel.
I tried rubbing the dirt off the panel, but it was a little too encrusted on for that. I’d need some water, and preferably a cloth. The prior was easy to find, the well’s bucket could be detached. The closest I found cloth wise though was completely rotted and would probably be worse. I pulled out my old ripped shirt from storage and used that.
It took two more buckets of water, but I finally had the solar panel clean.
I powered up the console again, this time it posted.
The screen indicated it had all of its sensors reporting, with the rain sensor reporting an error. It turned out the hopper for capturing the rain had a bunch of leaves in it. I cleaned them out and the error went with them. That just left the directional antenna, which I had to aim through a window back to South Harmony, and then adjust using the console to meet the minimum signal strength. I found the sweet spot with the strongest signal and shortly later the quest completed.
By the time I got back down to the ship, I found a grease covered Sam grinning himself while he washed his nearly black hands.
“Fixed?” I asked.
“Fixed.” he confirmed, “Fixed?” he asked.
“Fixed.” I confirmed. “What now, Captain?” I asked.
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“Let’s get the boat on the davits and then we can cast off.” he pointed at the two wooden hoists over the side of the ship.
We removed the boat's mast, secured it to the boat and then hoisted it up onto the ship. Between us we then secured it, upside down, to the bow of the ship in a space apparently reserved for it.
Sam then went about making sure the sails he intended to use were in place and were ready to raise.
I’m not sure how they got this ship into this cave, but as soon as it was unmoored from the dock we started drifting out. Sam directed it slightly with the tiller, and then once we were out of the cave started turning a winch, which raised the mast up to vertical and then locked it in place. He moved with a long pole when we approached some rocks, but the current swept us past them without moving that close. Once he was sure we were away from immediate danger, he started raising the main sail. I got a nod and a smile when I moved to assist.
“‘Nara, can you tighten that line?” he called out, pointing towards one of the winches on the side of the ship, which helped to angle the sail.
“Aye aye, Cap’n!” I responded and jumped on it. I got three cranks in when a notification popped up.
‘[Skill gained - Nautical: Sailor - 1 rank]’
“Wahey! I just unlocked sailor!” I called out.
“Grats” he called out followed by a “Oooh! Apparently I needed a system recognised sailor to acknowledge me as their captain! I unlocked the Captain title!”
“Sweet. What bonus does that give you?”
“Oooh, I should have this one equipped!” He called out from the tiller as I moved back to join him in the stern of the vessel. “Doubles the bonus my Sailor gives, and adds that bonus to any sailor under my command.”
“Nice!” I state.
“Ok, that's game changing!” he declared. “I’ve unlocked an interface screen, it gives me stats on the ship, direction we are travelling in. Even on the map screen! I have an estimated course! Can you hold the tiller for me? I want to try something.”
“Sure.” I responded and sat down on the other side of it and took a hold. He got up and headed into the cabin. I pulled up my own titles to see what had changed. I had four new ones
When I selected the Sailor title, Sam stuck he head around the corner.
“You equipped your sailor title,” he stated. I nodded “the interface moved your status from crew to sailor, and our ship handling score went up.”
“Let me try this one.” I called out and selected my Ship Navigator title. There was a ripple in the wind, a slight smoothing of the ride.
“That just upped our speed by two knots.” Sam reported. “And it’s moved you to the Ship’s Navigator role.” The ship slowed down. “Ahh, I can assign you to any role you qualify for, and the ship benefits from it.” We sped back up.
“A system which encourages crews to specialise and collaborate.” I comment.
“Yep. Seeing as you have the skill as well, want to go and see if you can plot us a route to Landing, while I aim us around some rocks up ahead?”
Sam had pulled the sea charts out and had them laid out on the charting table in the ship's upper cabin. South Harmony was identified near the south east corner of the chart that was on top. Just north of an island about half the size called Portia. Landing wasn’t on this map, but it was on another one, it was on the west coast of the huge land mass north of the islands, maybe twenty miles north of the southern coastline if I read the scale correctly. On a river that merged with the sea. To get there though we first were going to need to head north and west. The choices were to simply head north past the islands and then follow the coast west, or cut across west and then head north. Following a route north would need us to cut around some quite close together islands, which made me think of the charts i’d seen on the Wayfarer and the sand bars, which none of these charts had markers for. Not wanting to take chances, I looked for routes with wider gaps, and then realised there was a strong current near the western edge of the chart.
I did some quick maths, and I think our quickest route would be to head west as much as possible to hit the stream and then ride it north. I turned to see Sam entering the cabin.
“We have good visibility, so I locked the tiller. I think your course looks good. We’ll cut west once we get past the next island.” I shot him a confused look. “Check your map, Navigator.” I looked down at the chart before me and then realised he meant my system map.
I brought up my HUD and accessed the map. It had pulled back from the island view I’d had last time I had looked at it, with its visibility fog making me not think about it much. Now I could see the side South Harmony I’d walked along and the northern coast of Portia. I could also see outlines of the rest of those islands, and the outlines of all the islands on the charts before me. If I zoomed out I could see the outlines of both the northern and southern continents, though what wasn’t on the charts before me was a fuzzy rough outline. It occurred to me, it was the detail I had learned from the globe.
There were three routes on the map, the first headed mostly north, before cutting west, the second was a more direct zig zag, and the last was mostly west before cutting north. Each had an estimated time. The last one was by far the quickest.
“Aye, Aye, Cap’n” I said and saluted. The two other routes disappeared off my map.
‘You plotted a near optimal route without resorting to the interface, your naval navigation skill has been enhanced.`
Going by the estimates our maps were giving us, that skill increase just knocked off ten minutes to our travel time, and was now estimated to take us about ninety minutes to make the journey.