20 Days in the Ocean: The Unvarnished Truth About the Romance of the Sea A cyclone, then an anticyclone, then another cyclone keeps spinning around beyond New Zealand. In this automatic washing machine, we are tracing crazy zigzags across the chart and drawing the mark of Zorro. The wind changes several times a day, and more often than not it is right on the nose. At first Bounty Island loomed relentlessly in our path; now it is Chatham Island. People live there—New Zealanders. But there is no chance of that for us. During the night we skirted a storm, leaving it to the east, and caught only 30 knots of wind right in our faces. Tossing sleeplessly between alarm calls for my night watch, I remember the swings from childhood. That feeling when you soar upwards and your insides remain somewhere in mid-air while you are already flying down. Only, unlike in childhood, this brings no pleasure whatsoever. It feels as if our 14-ton yacht takes off over a wave and then comes crashing heavily back down.
“The night was awful,” I announced instead of saying good morning.
I desperately want to reach the trade winds. This relentless pounding to windward is exhausting, forcing us towards our destination in steep zigzags. Working on a laptop is impossible, and that demoralises me because I have commitments to editors. Zero romance, zero pleasure. If I had stopped getting seasick by now, I would probably be more optimistic. As it is, we just have to get through the day and hold out through the night.
Outside there are waves and fog. Very high waves and thick fog. Though, to give it its due, every day the sun emerges from the fog. As for wildlife, there are petrels, albatrosses and something resembling Arctic terns. We are carrying a reefed mainsail and genoa; when the wind eases, we set the mizzen as well. During the night the wind indicator began reporting the weather on Mars, and then died altogether. The connection at the masthead has probably been flooded, or the mounting has been torn off. We will have to climb the mast in a calm and investigate.
Those were lines from my diary, written after twenty-four hours of strong headwinds.
In bad weather, our priorities are reading, a film in the evening, a cartoon in English in the morning, and videos of the winning entries being defended in the “Discovering Russia and the World Together with the Russian Geographical Society” competition—for afternoon tea. Yesterday, before the wind strengthened, the captain taught us to play Thousand. At this rate we will get as far as Preferans.
The Good News
Still, we have already reached 44 degrees south and are stubbornly making our way north. It will take about a month and a half to reach Tahiti, including a visit to the equator. Suwarrow Atoll lies on our route, about three or four weeks away. We think of it longingly, although, like all the Pacific islands, it too is closed because of Covid.
The day before yesterday we crossed into the Western Hemisphere! And we would already have crossed the International Date Line if the islands of New Zealand did not extend so far east and did not have to remain in the New Zealand time zone. Our ship’s time, however, has already changed, and our date is now yesterday’s. In other words, instead of being 9 hours ahead of Moscow, we are now 15 hours behind. We are writing to you from the past ).
The heater is running reliably on its lowest setting and keeping the crew’s spirits up. If it were still +7 inside the yacht in the mornings, I have no idea how we would console ourselves.
It seems we have ended up with very resilient children. They hardly complain at all. Our young sailor bravely stands his watches at the helm and deliberates seriously about which route we will take to Tahiti, how long it will take us to get there, and what will happen afterwards. He sums it up authoritatively:
“Well, I think we can do it. It’s not as scary as it seems.”
Right now we are carrying out a special operation to save the pears—we let them get overripe, so we are making jam and baking charlotte with them, and the result is simply magnificent!
Recently our website suddenly went down. You probably saw it? Many thanks to our dear friends Max Ivanov, Pyotr Rogov and Sergei Yakubenko for alerting us and helping to restore it! It turned out there had been a server glitch.
While I was writing these queasy chronicles, the wind fell into harmony with the waves and, overcome with joy, died away. We are crawling slowly north; the frying pans have stopped flying around the galley, and the sun has plopped its rosy side into the ocean. We have more than half a day before tomorrow’s strong wind-on-the-nose arrives.
The radar detector squealed: a little fishing vessel is sailing not far from us. Hooray, we are not alone! Life is looking up!
Hugs to everyone! Thank you for being with us, guys. Your letters and comments, sent to us by Sergei from our shore team, are genuinely one of the main events of the day.
We thank everyone who contributes to our difficult expedition via Paypal and Yoomoney . Hugs to you all!
Where are we right now, how are we sailing, what is the weather like, and what is our speed? See the Route tab. It displays the track from the RockSTAR Iridium360 tracker supplied by the world’s best company, MVS Telecom.
Transmitted by satellite communications from the Southern Ocean: 43°57′S and 178°50′W. Outside temperature: +12 during the day, +8 at night.