40 Days in the Indian Ocean

Do you know what my signature move is? Taking on an impossible burden and dragging it to the finish line on a tight deadline, while that proverbial rooster is pecking me—you know where. And then saying: “Phew, freedom!” A week ago, it occurred to me that the world needed an article marking both the Year of Antarctica and 8 March—and that I should dedicate it to the heroic Russian women’s polar ski team Metelitsa. They were the first women to ski to the South Pole and the South Geomagnetic Pole, where Vostok, the harshest polar station in the world, is located. I had five days for the whole thing, including an interview with one of the heroines. And there was no internet apart from email and text messages—mostly one-way—via the Iridium tracker. The satellite connection in the southern Indian Ocean proved unreliable, and we spend hours standing there, pointing the antenna north, balancing so as not to fall over, and patiently waiting for our device and the satellite to cross paths in space. Sometimes the connection would drop out, and the correspondence would move to text messages. The texts are set to send and receive once every four hours, which could stretch the turnaround time for a conversation to eight hours. The storm hurled Lady Mary from crest to crest, the engine wasn’t working, and there wasn’t enough battery power to charge the laptop. A lull brought the sun, then soon carried it away again. For two days, on and off, we sailed without instruments; even now, incidentally, only the chartplotter is switched on—to conserve electricity. But I did submit the piece yesterday. It’s a good thing there are night watches and insomnia. Thank God for friends! And thank God my friends share my thirst for discovering the world. Evgeny searched for the heroine’s contact details, Dmitry for foreign articles about women in Antarctica, and Sergey for the expedition’s Antarctic diaries, which aren’t available online :). People, you’re the best! Besides that, in my own stockpile I had nine articles about the team and their Arctic diary. My conclusion after all that work is this: you know, friends, as long as people like the Metelitsa team exist, all is not yet lost for the world. There are great goals and great people who inspire others to achieve them. And there is friendship, mutual support, and warm hearts. The article about the first women’s ski expedition to Antarctica will be published on 6 March on the Moya Planeta website. So all of this, it turns out, is its preview. Chronicles of a Circumnavigation By lunchtime today, the weather had cleared up; the rain retreated to the horizons, and the sun even peeped through. As usual, this coincided with a dead calm, and we are crawling towards our destination at a snail’s pace. The girls have been working on their diaries since morning—drawing beautiful things, gluing in collages, and writing down their impressions: Nastya is probably writing about how utterly fed up she is, while Lada is delighted with new ways to decorate the margins, draw little frames, and record everyday goings-on. We have fewer than 1,300 miles left, and we have already passed the longitude of Novosibirsk. Though we are still living on Omsk time. These geographical connections to our home time zones are putting us in an increasingly wistful mood about home. Sometimes it feels as though we miss it to the point of physical pain. And it is impossible to believe that Australia, and then Russia, will actually happen in the near future—we have been sailing across the ocean for so long. For so long there has been no hint that land or humanity even exists. Coronavirus People everywhere are writing about this terrible scourge. And we are worried that it may throw our plans into disarray. We hope that by the end of spring, the epidemic and the quarantine will have receded, as they should. It’s curious: why do all the avian flus, coronaviruses, SARS outbreaks, and even the Hong Kong flu of the distant 1970s come from the direction of China? Does anyone know anything about this non-geographical phenomenon? We are expecting stormy weather tomorrow. Afterwards, the captain will climb back into the hold to resuscitate the engine. It has been working intermittently. The other day, Andrey climbed back into the bowels of the boat, took the starter completely apart, and discovered that its base had rusted through after the flooding. He cleaned up everything he could. The engine started. The next day—it didn’t. Today we emptied the hold again. Once again it started—then didn’t. Basically, this is going to be our quest all the way to Australia: hauling the contents of the hold around the boat, then sitting inside the empty hold for half a day. Maybe our approach to Australia will coincide with one of the days when the engine starts )). Navy-Style Noodles This is probably the one dish we never cook. You’d think we have a navy and we have noodles... Apparently, it’s the minced meat we’re missing. )). As for the rest of the provisions, almost everything is in good order: we still have three small pumpkins, half a bucket of potatoes, almost a crate of fresh apples, and enough onions and garlic. We ate the last pears yesterday, and used the last cabbage for borscht and cabbage rolls. We are gradually switching over to grains and tinned food. We snack on dried fruit and nuts. We miss berries and tomatoes with fresh herbs (incidentally, the tomatoes were hardy this time and we only finished them last week). And we’d love some Russian sour cream and ryazhenka! And pelmeni, of course, yes. We aren’t fishing. At first it was cold, then it was absolutely freezing, then it was stormy, and now we can’t be bothered. Considering there is only one fish lover aboard—me—there is hardly any need to catch it. If we save one fish, it will produce a thousand eggs and a hundred adult fish. If fishing vessels are destroying the world’s fish stocks wholesale, we’ll preserve them one by one. The ocean is still empty. Just albatrosses, petrels, and us. That’s all. Sunset at Sea Today it is hidden by the clouds. Yesterday it was hidden by fog so thick it seemed the yacht would get stuck in it. In the fog, we long for shore even more and watch documentaries about the Soviet era and the secrets of military intelligence. And with that, we bid you farewell. Thank you, friends, for being there for us! Many people have written to say they are receiving our postcards from Cape Town! Hooray, hooray! Those 20 letters made it through ))). We hope they reached everyone they were addressed to. Congratulations on the arrival of spring, and may it be a bright one. We’re off to do our evening exercises. We hug you all and look forward to hearing from you! We are grateful for contributions to the expedition’s shipboard fund via PayPal and Yandex Money A huge thank-you to Matvey S. and Alexander P. You are doing so much to keep our spirits up. Welcome to our shore team! Yours, Andrey, Marina, Nastya, Laduska, and Lady Mary, from 41 degrees south latitude!