“Is this Amaya?” she asked.

I nodded, crossing my arms as I stood on the Scafell stone dock, watching the wavelets ripple against Amaya’s green hull. For this trip, a sort of zig-zag around the inner seas of Sansara was the general idea (we had no idea exactly what places we would visit while there, neither of us having explored the coasts at great lengths), and I was looking forward to having Indigo Mertel along with me to take over the photographic duties as well as give me someone to talk to other than just the mast and my paws. We also knew this wouldn’t be a trip we could do in one shot… no, this time, we’re planning on doing a bit of aimless wandering once we reach the Adriatic, and given the size of the water there and the sheer amount of what might be down there… no, this would be bigger than one trip. Or even, bigger than one article. And, as we were still in Scafell, on the shores of Mowry Bay… we’d have to get to the Adriatic in the first place. We had the boat. We even had matching wetsuits from Shark, we were that ready.

Mowry isn’t really far from the inner seas, as the crow (or winged cat) flies. We could have just gone down the Linden highway through Macclaine to McFee, and meow, the Adriatic. But where’s the fun in that? Ever since sailing past the lights at the mouth to the Mallard River, I knew that one of my subsequent cruises would need to sail the length of that river, and what better time to do that than today? Plus, the Mallard River itself isn’t exactly lacking in interesting sights.

With that mission in mind, we boarded Amaya (I’d offered the tiller to Indigo but she was content enough to leave that duty to me, and after we’d dropped off the mooring ball and I had the lawnmower running she was distracted with her camera) and turned for a farewell pass of the docks. Naturally, any time the number of people engaged in a single endeavour increases, the chance for something to go wrong increases as well, and Indigo yelped as she lost… something… overboard. So we pulled up against the club docks so she could head ashore and run across the road to her home for a replacement.

Mowry has been getting busier and busier lately, with the expansion of Mowry Marine in the village and Fowl Deeds on the docks (at the time we sailed this, it was a simple dockside bar… now, it’s a lighthouse!) and that’s not entirely a bad thing. It means even at times like this there’s someone to chat with, such as Tory Micheline, who had been working on her Tako, and wandered over to wish us a safe trip and make sure we had plenty of crunchies and a compass. I assured her we did… at least, I figured, I could always catch something. I wasn’t too sure about Indigo’s provisions.

Gear replaced, Indigo returned down from the village and stepped across to Amaya, and we restarted the trip again. I turned off the lawnmower and we raised just the jib, letting it out enough to give us a little pull forward, Indigo snapping away as I tugged on the tiller to keep us traveling more or less straight. Of course the usual crowd was building on the west end of the club docks, where Fruitycakes Ra had opened Fowl Deeds some days earlier, and waves and good tidings were called across the water as we passed by and began to turn up into the middle of the bay, raising our mainsail and letting the voyage really begin.

Of course, it was around this time that the gear failure was on my behalf, when the tiller jammed and left us on a nice haul towards the north harbor. Fortunately, with me tugging on the tiller and Indigo managing to untangle garbage we fixed that little problem, and I yanked the tiller hard enough to turn our bow through the wind and back around to the west, towards Mare. Fortunately, that would be the last of the mishaps for the trip, and with the sails sheeted back in we set off towards… a floating shipwreck?

Indigo saw it first. “Huh? There is half a galleon over there.” I turned to see which way she’d been gesturing, expecting to see something in the water, but… no… indeed it was floating in midair, the aft end of some large sailing ship… we stared at it for a moment and I gave it cautious berth in case gravity noticed and decided to pull it down, but… it steadfastly remained motionless in the sky as Indigo snapped more pictures of it and we sailed around the headlands, leaving it behind us… we stared at each other for a moment, shrugged, then went back to admiring the houses and shoreline.

“This is a very nice area. There is a very nice bridge ahead, just noticed,” Indigo commented.

I looked towards the coast of Brazos. “On the main river part? Or this little fork of it?”

“There, on the left.” She raised an arm and pointed.

The Mallard branches into a sort of delta where it empties into the Nuba Gulf, splitting to either side of two round islands. The east channel is pretty much impassable, being shallow and crossed with a few footbridges, but it is indeed very pretty… I turned for that mouth of the indicated channel, fighting the current a little to get closer. I probably would have dropped anchor too, but I didn’t trust the currents, so we settled for a loop by the bridge before letting the currents push us back into the gulf. We’d go upriver soon enough.

“I was here today taking a stroll,” Indigo was continuing, indicating the structures all around the northmost of the islands. “The whole area with these buildings is kind of interesting. Well built, a bit scary.”

“Goreans? Or someone else?”

“Probably. Not sure. They must have expanded a lot since the last time I was here.” By this time we’d entered the mouth of the main channel of the river, and were getting bumped around pretty good for a moment. I debated motoring again, to make it upriver, but after we passed between the two towers at the mouth the water calmed a bit. Trimming sails to push us gently against the current (as the wind was now at our backs), I took a moment to look around again. “It keeps looking more and more lush every time I come here,” I commented. “Ooo, here’s the Linden Road bridge.”

The bridge over the Mallard is one of those structures impossible to miss. The road deck itself is 37m above sea level, suspended over the river valley by two tall stone pillars. I’ve ridden my bicycle across it before, and I assure you, the view down is just as vertiginous as it was looking up at it as we sailed below and wondered how much land cost in the valley there.

“It all looks more polished here,” my redhaired companion noted as she somehow managed a photograph of us from high above the bridge. I pawed at my eyes as the manner in which she did that made them hurt.

“This part right here is pretty new,” I replied after the nausea passed, as we sailed between stone walls that lined the river for a moment. “The store on the left is interesting…”

“Is it?”

“If you’re into bondage,” I mewled. “But what I’m referring to is the clean unobtrusiveness of it, and the seawalls.”

“Right.”

Many months ago, there was a fairly impassable bit of the river, in a curve that we were fast approaching. Even though it’s long since been dredged open, I still give it a bit of a wary eye. It’s in Mallard province, actually, the middle of the Mallard River’s biggest curve, where the Threemile River flows into the Mallard from the east. It’s generally choppy there at the confluence, and sticking to the southern shore helped keep clear from most of the eddies crossing into Mallard. Ugly water isn’t fun. Unfortunately, the scenery around that curve, along the river’s west bank, isn’t exactly picturesque, either.

Indigo shifted from the cockpit’s bench up onto the deck, sitting on the starboard gunwale. “Hmm. This is less nice.”

Tall, very urban, very industrial towers crowd the west bank in Pierce and Mallard. “I feel like I sailed into a downtown area,” I agreed. The east bank is prettier, with trees and smaller buildings. The west here looks like… urban blight. “I call it the city of Pierce. Huge concrete towers, zero tenants.” Really, this is nothing at all different from the sprawl one encounters all over our world, but right here for the first time on this leg of our journey it gets thrown up in our faces. I never lived in a big city, never cared to, and I was just as happy that we soon sailed away from the worst of the urbanization and further upriver back into woods and gardens dotted with estates and gracefully strange cantilevered towers rising over the landscape. Also, something that looked exactly like a white citadel with a cat’s head on it. I approved. This was river cruising at its best. Have you ever driven down a street through the nicer parts of a neighborhood to ooh and aah at the houses? That’s what the upper reaches of the Mallard are like.

The Mallard and the East Rivers are the two major drains for the Adriatic, with the East beginning in the distant east of Sansara and flowing mostly west, until Pippen, where it is close enough to the Adriatic that at some point in the past the sea chewed a channel across the land and hitched a ride, flowing lazily north to finally dump out near the Orientation Archipelago in Pooley. It would make a nice sail, were it not for the general lack of navigable channels. Maybe someday I’ll try it in my kayak…

Instead of an eroded channel, the Mallard begins as several channels that cut through Alviso before combining into one in Orwood. This was the part into which we were sailing now. Our intent was to continue through the eastern main channel and on to Lauks Nest (the largest of the three islands in the area) but as we sailed through Orwood, we knew we had to make an early stop.

The first hints that there were something neat ahead to see were the black hot air balloons tied up on the riverbank, each one of them emblazoned with the Jolly Roger. The second was the sloop Crow, tied below some sort of structure on the hillside that seemed to consist of platforms and stairs, with a small dock on the water that had a few boats already tied up to it. This, according to the sign on the dock, is The Black Spot. We couldn’t find any place to tie up immediately adjacent to the dock, however, so we let Amaya drift in a little closer to Tweeties Island (the northernmost of the three) and dropped anchor there.

The Black Spot appears to be a sort of combination specialty mall / bar / social center, heavy on the pirate theme (you can even buy pirate garb here) and replete with cannons, which Indigo took joy in firing. Repeatedly.

I swear, I think the girl is a pyromaniac. At the very least her fire-red curls fits that theme. I however, am part dragon, so it is entirely my right to set things on fire. That is to say, firing the cannons was kinda fun…

It kind of makes me wonder, though, if putting alcohol supplies that close to artillery is a good idea — for the Black Spot has its own bar, but at the east end of the place is a beautiful stone tavern called The Hawk’s Head. It was empty when we visited it, but the fire in the central hearth was crackling and bright and inviting, and we sat for a little bit to rest.

There are places like this all over our world, we deduced (so maybe we drank a little too, I’ll never tell, and at the very least rest assured that I was completely sober by the time we returned to Amaya, having burned off anything I consumed), excellent builds that maybe get used a tenth or less of the time by their creators, that are out there in the open for anyone to enjoy and yet… never do. What’s the good of a tavern that never gets patronage? Maybe, Indigo and I decided, what’s needed is for someone to find these places, talk about them, and then get all their friends and just visit, hang out, chat, and so forth… leaving messages of thanks for the creators when they go, and then returning again at a later date. Sure, it’s fine that we have our own go-tos for socializing, but… it’s a wide, wide world out there, both on the water, and once you set foot on land. I’ve probably sailed past The Black Spot dozens of times without really seeing it, and that’s sad.

We made our way back down to the dock, but didn’t intend to go back to Amaya just yet. We’d noticed a sign indicating a ferry to Treasure Island, the second of the three Orwood Channel islands. Climbing aboard the boat, we got seated and continued to chat as it left the dock, passing east between Amaya and Crow, circling clockwise around Tweeties Island, and then turning south into the western channel between the shore and Treasure Island. Indigo was staring around at the landscaping and the stonework in clear awe. I was more focused on the cone that was Lauks Nest, directly ahead. It’s an island that holds much special significance to me. But we would make it there eventually.

The ferry rounded Treasure Island and began to head back downstream in the main channel before pulling up to a dock. We climbed out and began to explore. Here too was another sloop, which we boarded and began to poke through. I did not at any time attempt to steal her, no. Although I do intend to have a square-rigged ship in my personal fleet some day, I think this one might have been a little too large for me to manage. Plus, it did nothing when I stood behind the wheel and commanded “Raise!” Imagine that.

All of the ships at anchor on Treasure Island (and The Black Spot too, for that matter) are for sale. The largest and prettiest, however, do not seem to be intended for actual use as a vehicle, being too large and physics-defying to operate as such. They would make a great harbor landmark, however, and the folks behind these places seem to use them to great effect.

Indigo, of course, found the cannons.

After firing upon the fish for a while, we returned to the ferry and The Black Spot. It was starting to get late in the day, I wanted to get Amaya on to our original destination for this leg of the trip, and Lauks Nest was so close it seemed silly not to. We boarded the little green Sojourner, raised anchor, and turned to head back up the main channel that we had just taken the ferry back down, passing Treasure Island to our port and soon after Lauks Nest to our starboard as I began to look for a good place to re-drop the anchor for the evening.

Lauks Nest is a combination ecology preserve and archeological site. It was one of the first places I traveled to when I moved to Sansara, and was one of the first places I sailed to once I discovered that it was possible to do so. As late in the day as it was, I didn’t want to tackle it tonight… besides, sunrises are prettier from one particular spot on the island that is probably special to me alone, and I would much rather see it after having rested, which I intended to do the moment I dropped anchor and had the tent up. Indigo’s plans, however, were to explore the coast and take notes on the architecture, being a fascination of hers. That’s fine. Exploring is the point of all of this, anyway.

We did a complete circle of Lauks, clockwise, and for a very brief moment had nothing but the wide open Adriatic to port. It would have been so easy to turn onto a reach and dart across it at full speed, but… no. Tomorrow. As much as it keeps changing, the world isn’t going anywhere. I had to drop sails coming back up the other side of Lauks, headed directly into the wind with no room to beat, and used the lawnmower to putt us the last little distance to our anchorage, where the channel around Lauks met the main channel of the Mallard again.

I unpacked the tent and began to drape it over the boom; Indigo stepped ashore, promptly found a bees’ nest, and ran off along the grass screaming. Well, that’s one advantage of the open seas. No bees.

Places Visited
Brazos Footbridge (Brazos 154,174,21)
Owner: Governor Linden
Autoreturn: yes, 5 minutes
Rezzing: no

Tweeties Island (Orwood 130,183,21)
Owner: Hamish Stuart
Autoreturn: yes, 2 minutes
Rezzing: yes

The Black Spot Tavern and Ship Supplier (Orwood 122,209,22)
Owner: The Black Spot
Autoreturn: no
Rezzing: no

Treasure Island (Orwood 54,28,22)
Owner: The Black Spot
Autoreturn: no
Rezzing: no

Alviso Anchorage (Alviso 24,243,21)
Owner: sandhya2 Patel
Autoreturn: yes, 20 minutes
Rezzing: yes

Photo Album
Photographs from this cruise may be viewed in their original size at
http://s263.photobucket.com/albums/ii142/elishakitty/Mowry%20-%20Orwood/

Navigation Chart
Inworld copies of this chart available for L$10 from the Cruising <second> Life Chart Vendor located at Mowry (174, 166, 44)