615 Miles to Cape Town. A Month and a Half on Passage

615 miles to Cape Town. A month and a half on passage. Nastya, your birthday is exactly two months from now. What would you like us to give you? I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it yet... Or do you want it to be a surprise? Of course, there absolutely has to be a surprise too! our young sailor enthused. Oh, how about we give you a yacht cruise across the southern Indian Ocean! Get lost! Last time you gave me a cruise across the South Pacific! See how lucky you are? Who else gets two-month yacht cruises for their birthday every year? Nooo! I want to have my birthday ashore! If you remember, our young sailor’s last birthday fell around the twentieth day of a two-month non-stop passage across the Southern Ocean. Today is, I think, day 46 since we last saw another human being. Oh! the captain perked up. You want a surprise, don’t you? We’ll give you the cruise as a surprise! Yes! You wake up in the morning, and Dad and I left Cape Town at three in the morning, and then we shout: “Surpriiiiiise!” You look out of the window, there’s no land in sight, and right then seasickness hits you. Homeric laughter... Anyway, our daughter doesn’t want to celebrate another birthday on a long-haul passage. I wonder why? ...there should be a laughing smiley here, but the satellite won’t even let colons or quotation marks through, never mind brackets. If you took our actual track and stretched it into a straight line, it would be about one and a half times longer than the direct route. So although the distance from the Strait of Magellan to Cape Town is 4,000 miles, including our unsuccessful attempt to approach the Falklands, we have already clocked up 4,600 miles. By the finish, we will have covered at least 5,200 miles—that is, more than 8,500 km. Storms So far they are stirring things up in the far south, while it has been so quiet here for several days that we can devote ourselves to household matters. Sorting through the lockers—an endless task—sewing dresses for the dolls, doing lessons, drawing. We also taught our junior crew member to knit. She is knitting the doll a scarf in Gryffindor house colours. Then she will start on one for Dad: it will soon be the captain’s birthday. A year ago we celebrated it on Moorea, near Tahiti, with the wonderful Maxim, Natasha and their daughters from the round-the-world yacht Blagovestie. This time we are expecting a friend to visit us, while the Russian diaspora in South Africa is expecting us. And that is inspiring. Farewell, succession of lonely celebrations! The wind wanders between 5 and 15 knots, with some days reaching 25. We ran away from stronger winds a couple of times, and now they are offended with us and are blowing somewhere else. Fingers crossed that over the coming week we neither get becalmed—which is unlikely—nor have it blow up hard, which is also possible. There are fewer birds now, and we have not seen any whales since leaving the 50s latitudes. As for ocean wildlife, some little white discs are drifting about, which our junior crew member initially took for a greeting from human civilisation. But since this greeting has been floating around us for a second day now, we decided they must be embryos of some kind of Portuguese man o’ war, those highly unpleasant jellyfish. We came across some relatives of theirs in the Pacific, near the Austral Islands. Those looked like blue plastic baby pacifiers—or, more precisely, like the ring with the disc attached. These are just little white discs, 2–3 centimetres in diameter. Does anyone happen to know what they are? Romance and Everyday Life Tonight, by moonlight, the captain and I took a romantic stroll around the deck together. The wind had picked up by 5 knots since evening, so we reefed the sails. It is warm outside now; we can already go for walks at night without hats. We glanced at the Moon and went to sleep while standing watch. Or stood watch while sleeping. It gets harder every day to maintain the same degree of blissful good humour. The length of the voyage has a negative effect, while the good weather has a positive one. So the Nordic-tempered captain, the teenage young sailor, and the junior crew member and I are all managing to preserve the balance of love, understanding and patience. The fresh apples and oranges are disappearing without satisfying our craving for fruit. We are rationing the potatoes. Even choosing films to watch in the evenings is becoming more difficult. The large film library we got from Arctic Wolf, the trawler alongside which we berthed in the Strait of Magellan, is not all suitable for family viewing. Far too many monsters and gunmen per metre of film. But with some effort, it is still possible to find something gentle. During the day, we listen to Stanford University lectures; yesterday we broke them up with a documentary about the poles. We write and read a lot. That is, I write and everyone else reads. Our junior crew member is composing a saga about the adventures of penguin chicks and has already prepared the first part for publication on the website of the St Andrew the First-Called School of Geography, where she is studying successfully. She will illustrate the saga with photographs of amusing emperor penguin chicks given to us by a meteorologist from Bellingshausen Antarctic Station. Emperor penguins, photo by Vitaly at Mirny Antarctic Station. A Quiet Rising The crew are slowly waking up. The captain has crawled into the wheelhouse and immediately plugged a Spanish lesson into his ears. Ladunya is asleep under the table, hugging her sheep named Argentina, which the cook from the yacht Rusarc Aurora gave her in Ushuaia. We will have our morning tea at around eleven; we cannot be bothered any earlier, as dinner still has not been forgotten. Thanks to the good weather, we have gone back to pies again. Soon we will bid farewell to our figures until better times, when the flour and fillings run out together. But I am afraid that will not happen before Cape Town. Andryukha and Laduska are in no danger of losing their shape, but the rest of the crew are somewhat concerned. I think I’ll go and do twenty push-ups and fifty squats. It will not help, of course, but it cannot hurt. I am trying to get my daily squat count up to a hundred, but so far I am still only managing fifty. I publicly promise to improve and will report back on the results. During a break between lessons, our junior crew member makes shapes out of matches as instructed by her maths textbook. Friends, thank you for being with us! Your letters and comments bring us great joy and support. Without you, throughout this month and a half of self-sufficient voyaging, we would have been in a social vacuum. From the bottom of our hearts, we thank everyone who supports our expedition budget and our inspiration via Paypal.Me/TravelyFamily and Yasobe.ru/na/TravelyFamily! Dear Viktor S., thank you for being part of our shore team. Transmitted by satellite from the coordinates 34° 46′ S, 05° 52′ E—we are in the Eastern Hemisphere! You can follow the progress of the First Russian Three Great Capes Round-the-World Expedition with Children on our website under the Route tab, where our track from IRIDIUM is plotted. The same map, with the track and weather, is available at bit.ly/iridium360 During a break between lessons, our junior crew member makes shapes out of matches as instructed by her maths textbook. Sooty albatrosses