Waves struck the distant reef rocks with loud slaps. Though he was too far away to hear them, he could imagine the sound.
The waves that occasionally washed onto the beach glittered in the sunlight, too. The fine sand had been washed clean by the sea, and from a distance, little flecks of reflected sunlight sparkled on it.
Ye Yaodong watched the distant beach as he steered. Distracted for a moment, he went a little too far, but so be it. When he came back to his senses, he simply stopped where he was.
Father Ye noticed he had overshot, too. "We're already past the submerged reef..."
"Here will do. I've explored the seabed around that reef plenty of times. Since we've gone past it today, we might as well stay here. I'll go down and take a look. If it's too deep to reach the bottom, we can move."
"All right, then. You decide. Be careful going down, and take it slowly. We're some distance away, after all, and we don't know what it's like underneath. You have to be careful somewhere unfamiliar."
"Mm."
As he lifted the cloth and nylon bag covering the machine, he glanced over the surrounding sea. From this position, the submerged reef completely screened his fishing boat from Brother A-Sheng's boat in the distance.
On the way over, he had kept an eye out to see whether they had taken their boat farther away. They had been sensible and hadn't gone wandering around. They were trawling in this same stretch of water, working nearby just as they had during the night and that morning.
Now, however, the reef blocked his view of their fishing boat. By the same reasoning, they probably couldn't see his boat either.
For the moment, it served as a natural