There are those captains that come to ride the waves like other ponies navigate similarly massive, temperamental spouses. Day by day they court the tides with knowing looks, intuition and the experience of years. Such captains, always respected for their abilities, tend to keep to themselves, and in the strange, insular world of shipping take on the role of prophet as much as commander as they dance with a moody and rolling partner, one step ahead of her wrath and always ready to grasp the gifts given up by whimsy.

Captain Nautica was not such a captain. Her head did not swim with the romanticism of the waves, and her method of courting the ocean came from the same mindset with which other ponies worked over the fine details of a well oiled machine. A means to an end. There was wind and wave to consider for making the best speeds, the charts and landfalls, the weather for distant storms. It was special and complicated, but nothing more.

On board her vessel there was more than enough to occupy a productive mind. The well being, and more importantly, subservience of the crew to her command, and a thousand quirks of shipboard life to balance out that would otherwise make a group of mares living aboard a floating box work efficiently rather than go off, as it ‘twere, the deep end.

On a boat in the wide blue sea, the deep end was always very close, and it was very deep.

When a commotion amongst the crew roused the Captain to her decks, she did not take the little raft off her bow to be a portent anything supernatural, only something to be addressed accordingly. It did, however, still put something of a damper on her day; the vague threat of interesting and disruptive new things that otherwise got in the way of the smoothly running routine of the ship’s life.

On as clear and calm a day as this, where the breeze could only be cajoled for so many knots and the going was steady, every crewmate somehow found a reason to be out in the sunshine’s warmth. The mares, unicorns, pegasi and earth ponies alike gathered at the foredeck.

This far out from anywhere, the little raft that caught their eye struggled through the slightest ripple of water. If it could be called so much as a raft. From the looks of it, the shipwright responsible for its sad existence had set upon making it with the sort of inspiration usually only accompanied by a delicate touch of froth about the lips and a certain wild, inattentive gleam to eye. It was flotsam, huddled together for company against the wide expanse of blue.

With a firm swipe of her hoof, Nautica sent the ship’s filly to fetch her viewing scope, a task to which the little pony bounded off to hurriedly. The captain drifted to the front of the crew and in short order the excited little pony returned with the telescopic device, all polished wood and brass, now only slightly dampened with spittle along its length.

The time honoured ritual of extending the scope (amended slightly to brush off the worst of the saliva) brought the distinguished captain to the crew’s attention.

‘What dya see, Cap’in?’

‘Hmm.’ it was too fine a day to waste with some crew-mare overstepping her bounds, but none did. They crowded about, but kept well back from that invisible sphere known as The Captain’s personal space.

The looking glass filled Nautica’s eye with bright shimmers, dazzling and just a little painful, but she looked past them to the dull, twisted shape beyond.

Wreckage: the sort where water and rocks have bared toothy grins at one another one stormy night, crackled their joints and laid into an innocent ship to shake it upside for its small change. Bits of splintered planks stuck out at strange angles and only the sheerest coincidence seemed to allow it to float at all.

Ponies waited on The Captain’s assessment. Despite how it rankled her to see anything suggesting ship had been so abused, Nautica made sure to be thorough. Something useful might yet be clinging to the wreckage.

Not likely, she admitted to herself, unless some snarls of rope and shreds of canvas, stained to the shades of musty coffee took a sudden and unexpected value in more exotic ports. Just as she was about to dismiss the rubbish entirely, it flopped over in a wave.

In motion, what seemed bedraggled canvas reappeared to The Captain’s eye as stained pony, all the more bedraggled. The pony slipped into the ocean without struggle, almost peacefully, and it did not surface.

‘That’s a pony gone in the drink!’ Nautica shouted.

Through the gasp of the gathered mares, three pegasi flung themselves from the riggings, tearing along the length of it with amazing speed. Nopony breathed for the harrowing seconds, not even The Captain behind her looking glass. A pegasus dove head first into the water with a violent splash that capsized the raft and sent it to its watery doom.

Nothing happened, and the last of the ripples faded away into the calm rolling of the ocean as if nothing had happened at all. The ship’s filly tried to stifle a sniffle.

Then the pegasus burst from the water, the placid stranger held tightly to her bulky chest. The gasp from the ship bound ponies could have swelled the sails, had they but been facing them.

Everpony could see the action, but with distressing detail only Nautica witnessed helplessly to the struggles of her best pegasus, Harpoon, flapping her sodden wings for some purchase against the surface, struggling just to keep both their heads up. Determination burned across the glints of her eyes.

Harpoon couldn’t manage to keep the unconscious pony upright for long, but she didn’t need to. The other two pegasi descended on them like guardian angels. With uneven and harsh flares of their wings they forced the ocean to give up what it had taken. The water sleeted off the two drenched bodies as if they might never be dry again.

Nautica lowered her telescope as the pegasi made their way back, and the crew bristled with apprehension. Crew-mares rushed to take the limp body from Harpoon’s iron grip. As soon as she gave up her prize, whatever fierce energy had kept her hanging on broke and her soaking body collapsed to the deck with a wet thud, panting hard for breath.

The other pony was lost to sight for all the mares that crowded around, chattering and babbling back and forth. Cutting through the chaos came a horrendous, gurgling choke and a gasp for breath so hoarse it could have scoured barnacles from the hull itself.

‘He’s alive!’

Everypony breathed. The white unicorn male with the blue hair did so very fervently indeed.