Sometimes the cards have rules printed on them with homebrew in mind, like Black Magga having stats even though you never encounter her.
I agree it's a little weird to have not closing locations be an essential part of the scenario, but to not explicitly define it in any way. But only a little weird, since space for rules on the scenario card is limited, and maybe they thought "well since the henchman needs to be at the top of the deck, people will inuit that you can't close the location."
My wife and I finally ran this one last night. We had 3 locations with Enemy Ships on top after 3 turns. The first had an Enemy Ship when Jirelle examined the location after her move step. The second didn't but then Merisiel shuffled and explore, encountering an Enemy Ship henchman, which she defeated. Likewise at the third location with Oloch, encountered and defeated after the shuffled.
We took it slow the rest of the scenario, getting our fourth closed after only a few more turns, and always making sure we never did anything to risk our locations being shuffled. We only encountered one non-Enemy Ship henchman, one of the Hurricane Winds, and use everything we had to totally guarantee it would be defeated to not mess with our other locations. We had them all set after about 15 turns.
We have still not encountered Hirgenzosk.
I have to say that the regatta with 6 people running is ludicrously easy. Or maybe we just got lucky, we had all the ships set up with about 12 turns to go at least (maybe more) so we simply went to a location with only three cards left, and kept defeating the ship over and over again, ending up with 29 loot cards!
We never did run into Hirgenzosk and only ran into one of the storm henchmen, so I guess luck had a big role in it, but if you do get this set up early, it becomes like shooting fish in a barrel for loot.
This thread was invaluable to figuring out how to play this, because frankly it's a bit silly that there are henchmen there that allow you to close locations, which auto fails the scenario.
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My fiancé and I squeaked this out on literally the last turn - one card left in the blessings deck, and I was on the brink of death with Lini(0 cards left in deck but no need to draw). One location left to sort and we managed to find the ship in the 3 explores we could muster.