Ebb Tide: Book 1 of the South Wind Saga

Chapter 1

I ghost towards the wrecked cargo ship under a staysail and deeply reefed mainsail. The sun has fallen behind the stony crags that crest the island like the spine of a great sleeping lizard. The sky is banded like the shell of an iridescent beetle: copper, cerulean and a deep indigo that fades through ultraviolet to black. A spreading fan of wake marks the passage of my yacht, the sea glimmering with the faintest traces of bioluminescence.

The breeze flickers this close to the cooling shore. The staysail luffs and flaps and I steer downwind, making three knots. My depth sounder hasn't worked in years but I don't bother casting the lead. The water is deep blue here. No bottom to be seen.

The bay shallows to the north east; I can see yellow bands and dark shadows where the thin headland reaches out. This is where I will anchor tonight, when I have ten metres under the keel. Half a mile from the shipwreck, that rises like a castle of twisted steel and rusted iron piled up on the rocky shore. As good a moat as any.

One of my first memories is us anchored in a bay much like this one. But not this one. Before the Great Dying. Before the world ended. When we were together. Dad, Mum, Jayden and me, lying on deck, picking stars. My family is all gone. Voodoo is my boat now. She is my home. She is my sanctuary.

She is all I have left.

I glass the wreck with Dad's 7x50 binos. The left lens has a hairline crack but they are still good. Older than I am. The ship is deserted. Great streaks of rust dribble down her scarred flanks, almost obliterating her name: BLACK HARVEST, TIANJIN written on her stern in letters a metre tall. Appropriate name. She was a bulk cargo carrier, carrying all manner of goods in her cavernous holds. Her four cranes once dipped and plucked containers with the elegance of storks bobbing for fish. Birds line the rails and spiral overhead, searching for a silver boil of feeding fish in the last of the dusklight. No other movement. No crew to be seen. Everyone is dead.

At least, that's what I pray.

I see the faint trunks of coconuts palms, pale ghosts looming over a thin strip of beach, almost lost in night's curtain. I put the helm over and turn Voodoo into the wind. The staysail shivers and then shakes and I furl it, drawing in the line to the cockpit hand over hand, as always feeling pride in the smooth roll of the furler. It seized three years ago and I repaired it with bearings I scavenged from a Lagoon 440 I found cast up on a reef in the middle of the Solomon Sea. It wasn't an easy job at the time but I appreciate the effort now.

I move forward to the bow, pausing at the mast to slip the main halyard from its cleat and let the mainsail fall and be gathered by the lazy jacks that form a rope cradle between the boom and the mast.

At the bow I watch the faint dying ripples as Voodoo is slowed by the breeze. When the wake can barely be perceived, I let go the anchor. It's my light option, a CQR weighing about fifteen kilos, with thirty metres of 10mm chain spliced into sixty of half inch manila rope. The twenty five kilo Bruce is heavier and has sixty metres of 12mm chain and will probably grip better in the broken coral bottom but I may have to raise it quickly so I go with the lighter option.

The wind pushes Voodoo back and I pay out chain slowly, the rattle of the links echoing back from the cliffs like the fading memories of the time before.

That night I sit with my legs curled under me in the cockpit and eat raw albacore tuna. I hooked it that afternoon using a lure made from hooks wired into a teaspoon. Its glittering bubbling wake irresistible to pelagics. When I was young, you could trawl for days and never catch anything. The ocean a blue desert scoured clean by rapacious fleets of trawlers. Now the fish are coming back. Now that the cities are dead and their insatiable maws no longer suck the sea empty like great whales straining all life from the ocean.