Black Iron’s Glory

Chapter 28 Navigation

Old Sonny's little sailboat also has a name, the Swordfish, which means it flies as fast as an arrow, as clever as a fish in the water. It's just that there are so many of these small fishing boats in White Deer Town that nobody remembers the names of these boats. The registration of the private property of the residents at the town hall was also documented by the old Sunny family, a single sailboat.

There are three compartments underneath the deck of the fishing vessel, and the cover is lifted as you descend. The first two compartments, one large and one small, contain a single wooden bed for the crew to rest in rotation when fishing at night on the water. Small cabins are for storage, such as charcoal firewood hot pots, bowls, buckets, etc. Sometimes you can cook and cook directly on the water...

The last compartment, which is a living compartment and the largest of the three compartments, serves to harvest fish. There is a living plate in the bottom compartment that opens to allow the lake water to enter the compartment as long as the fish caught is kept in the compartment, so that even if the fishing lasts for two days and three nights, the fish in the compartment will not die and will remain alive and fresh on return.

Lake Beringa is huge and is said to be 100 miles long and nearly 20 miles wide. One connects the sea and the other connects the Camida Swamp. True, Lake Beringa should be the intersection of freshwater rivers and the sea, but the land is smooth and spacious, making it a deep-water strait lake near the sea.

So the water in Lake Beringa is also strange, and the third of the water near the Khmeda Marsh is fresh water, and the third of the waterway connecting the ocean is sea water, and the third of the lake water in the middle of White Deer Town is a little cloudy and will taste a little salty.

It is precisely this unique geographical environment that makes the catch from Lake Beringa so unique that even dry goods are particularly delicious. For example, the long-tailed fish of Lake Beringa, most of which are dried every year, are sent to the royal family of Sterling. There's no way, the longtail fish won't last three hours out of the water and can only be dried.

“Hoist the sail! Swordfish is about to depart!” Erickson held the wheel of the ship's rudder and drank it out loud and honest.

Verricolo untied the cable from the pillars at the pier, and Claude pulled the hemp rope on the mast pulley up the broken and rotten sail without knowing how many times it had been repaired. Bok Al grabbed the stone wall of the pier and the small fishing boat swayed away from the pier, slowly drifting towards the lake.

Bok Al stood on the bow, reaching out his right middle finger and licking it on his tongue, with a little spit in the air, and later turned his head and shouted to Eriksson: "No wind, what sails! ”

“Lift it up first. It's okay. There 'll be wind away from the shore.” Ericsson pointed to Claude and Verricolo: “You two, don't be lazy, hurry up and paddle. It's late in the night...”

Claude couldn't help but put the oars on the deck on the side of the boat, and Velikro started rowing from left to right.

It took a few minutes to paddle and a hundred meters off shore before the lake felt a breeze. "That's enough," said Alexander Hee. "Adjust the sail, watch the wind. You two don't have to row. ”

With Verricolo, he retrieved the two oars and put them under the boat, and Claude sat on the deck with his ass, rubbing his shoulder and complaining: "I'm so tired...”

“You're lacking exercise, you see Vero, he's fine.” Erickson replied.

Bok Al holds the sail on the deck with a rope along the wind direction and asks, "At our current speed, how long will it take to get to the scheduled landing point? ”

Eriksson pretended to look at the extent of the wind on the sail: “It may take two to three hours, it's not very windy, the sail is not at full capacity, the speed of the boat cannot be so fast...”

“Why do we have to land across the waterway from the stone outpost, directly across Lake Beringa, at the foot of the mountain in White Eel? Wherever you go ashore, it may not take an hour for the boat to go fast.” Bok Al complained.

Erickson shook his head with a smile: "Boa, you're not a fisherman, you're not a sailor, as long as everyone who lived on Lake Beringa knows, the shores between the foothills of White Eucalyptus and Lake Beringa are basically muddy, and boats can't dock. It looks like it's full of water and bushes, but once people step on it, they get stuck in at least half of their body, and they can't move.

So the distance across the lake was short, but we couldn't get ashore, and we had to spend more time along the shore of the lake to get to the landing point opposite the stone post, because only there was rock and hard ground, and there was a small river, and our boat could sail in and dock there. ”

Claude turns around and asks Virgilo, "Vero, didn't you go on holiday with your father at the end of two years on the same route? ”

Vericulo buzzed and replied: "We are not on a boat, nor are we on this route. Because it is winter and the weather is cold, the border between Lake Beringa and the Camida Marsh is frozen and the ice is thick. My father took me straight over the ice with a mara sleigh to the foot of Mount Baiyuzhou. At that time, the muddy swamps on the shore of the lake were covered in ice and snow, very solid, and we could go up the mountain from wherever we wanted. ”

Exactly, it's only the end of May, the spring flowers bloom, the lake shore is full of water and grass, unlike the white spot in winter, it's not that convenient to get ashore, you can only land on the rocky lake shore opposite the stone post.

It's just a little boring to be on the deck of this little fishing boat for two or three hours. Ericsson is at the helm, and he gave us an idea. When he moved online, he came up with two throw poles. This time, let's try the fishing boat on a voyage to see who can catch the fish.

This is not a fishing boat that stops to fish, it is difficult to fish on a voyage, Bok Al and Velikro happily went to the stern with a throwing rod, stood behind Eriksson and started a fishing competition, bragging about whose fishing level was high, and it was time to have a grilled fish meal at night.

Claude was too lazy to get up, which meant he was sitting on the deck halfway up against the boat, looking at the blue sky and the white clouds, and the golden sun was falling on him, just feeling warm. The distant waters sparkle, the sailing dots of the fishing boats, the nearby lakes are microwaved, and the breeze is like a beautiful landscape painting.

Soon after, the noise of Bok Al and Velikro broke Claude's pleasant leisure time. The two idiots somehow wrapped the two threads around each other, accusing each other of not.

Erickson said helplessly, "Claude, you help me steer the wheel, and I'll help these two guys untie the line. ”

Speaking of livelihoods on the boat, none of the fellows had the soul skills of Ericsson, who was born to eat on the water. Claude has heard sailors and old sailors at the pier praise Erickson more than once, saying that he is only sixteen years old, comparable to a skilled sailor who has been at sea for five or six years, and has been succeeded by the Otruni family.

Perhaps the sailors and the old crew praised Ericsson in the face of Captain O'Truney, but if they couldn't, they couldn't even praise him. No, Bok Alvin and Verikero had a half day fight, and the line couldn't be broken. It didn't take a few minutes to separate in Eriksson's hands. After checking the hooks and pendants, Eriksson let them fight one by one by the side of the boat, not again.

“I think we can fix the rudder too. Anyway, the lake is so big, it's only going in one direction, there's no need to keep people watching.” Claude said.

Erickson stood next to Claude and laughed: "No, sailing, most importantly, steering, not just a question of direction, but avoiding collisions or reefs. Although we are now in Lake Beringa, where there are no reefs, there are many fishing boats, and it is best to keep them 100 metres apart so as not to affect each other's fishing operations. In addition, sometimes there are lots of underwater dark streams in the lake, and some fishing boats drop their nets in the underwater dark streams to see if there is any harvest at intervals, so that our boats are careful to avoid floating wooden cylinders on the surface, which is the responsibility of the helmsman. ”

Claude nodded: “So that's it. I didn't know there was so much discipline at the helm. I always thought I could just point it in the right direction. ”

“Oh, don't get used to it.” Erickson extended his finger and tried the wind direction in the air: “You take the rudder first, I'll adjust the sail, now the wind is a little higher and the boat speed can be faster. ”

The two of them took turns at the helm, and Claude, by the way, taught Ericsson some of the sailing experience. Time passed quickly, and it wasn't boring. It was Bok Alvin and Velikoro who had not caught a fish for two hours, but used up a bucket of red worm bait that Ericsson had brought.

Far away, a ruined stone castle was seen on the banks of a distant lake, and a stone outpost was approaching. Hundreds of years ago, pirates were said to be rampant, often landing along the coast to plunder fishing villages, burning and looting, and the town of Bai Lu naturally could not escape being plundered by pirates.

Later, Bai Lu Town organized a militia to build such a stone fortress at the entrance to the waterway. Beginning with vigilance, when pirate vessels were found entering the waterway, they fired a warning of wolf smoke to remind the residents of Bai Lu Town to evade in a timely manner, so the stone fortress was called the Stone Sentinel, a name that has been used to this day.

Later, when people discovered that pirate ships had lost flexibility and initiative when they entered the narrow waterways, they set a trap and ambushed pirate ships, knocking them all out with stones and rockets.

Since then, the Stone Sentinel has become a barracks. When Sterling IX struck the first shooting in White Deer Town to revive the kingdom, a gun guard battalion belonging to the Baron of the Sealed Land of White Deer Town was stationed at the Stone Sentinel, but they rescued it too late, and Sterling IX had attacked White Deer Town and the Baron of the Sealed Land had been taken prisoner.

Then the gun battalion accepted Sterling IX's offer and turned from a local battalion to the first officially prepared battalion under Sterling IX. That is, since then, the barracks of Stone Sentinel have no longer been manned by the army, and it was not until Sterling IX's arrival that official communications were issued to abandon the barracks.

“Let me do it.” Ericsson took over the wheel, and at the end of the cruise he was needed to steer the wheel.

“You see, across the waterway, opposite the stone outpost, there's a recess, there's a little river inside, and we follow the recess into the river, and the boat stops there at night.” Erickson held the rudder with one finger and showed it to Claude.

Claude thought about it and said, "I don't think the entrance to the creek is big, so let's put the grid there. So we can come back the day after tomorrow and see if there's a catch, maybe an unexpected surprise. ”

Erickson nodded for a moment: "Okay, that's it. ”