Girls, spring is on its way! Renewal, bright colours, inspiration and love! Let’s hurry and cast off the winter blues—and onward, to new heights! Into silk dresses and elegant shoes, into the radiance of smiles and men’s admiration! May your home be warm, your support reliable, your health robust, and your love genuine! The Universe loves us, girls! Happy Women’s Day! Wishing you the tenderness of tulips. May everything be won-der-ful!
We have a real celebration on board: the sun is staring down with all its might, and the sea is blue, blue. This morning there were gifts from the captain—he stocked up ashore, and it’s so touching. Our young sailor received a shark-tooth pendant, the midshipman an African phone case, and the first mate a magical body cream. Southern Africa has very good natural cosmetics. There are even small bottles of non-alcoholic champagne for the table, dainty and beautiful. We’ll raise our glasses in the middle of the day, when we feel like sitting down at the table and singing again. At breakfast we started watching an anniversary concert of The Voice Kids instead of an educational film. And we’re also making a wall newspaper; perhaps we should have started earlier, but March 8 isn’t over yet. Now the female contingent has settled down to write the diaries, while the captain is doing something important at the laptop.
Oh, and tonight, in honour of the holiday, we broke into the final 1,000 miles to Australia. And now there are only 960 miles left. Hip hip hooray! It’s the best gift from the ocean imaginable. Though at our current speed, we’ll be crawling along for nearly two weeks. But there’s always a chance we’ll speed up when the wind strengthens. And in honour of the holiday, we also received a little parcel of new comments from our shore team. Thank you, dear ones—both our team and our readers!
Technical matters
As for the broken shroud, the captain climbed the mast and replaced the diagonal with strong Dyneema rope. It will get us to Australia, and perhaps even farther. Today’s plan includes a festive rummage through the hold, because the engine once again hasn’t started for several days. If it does start, we’ll have a proper bath day—the water will heat up, after all.
At least we finally no longer need the heater. Nobody shivers from the cold in the evenings, and at night we no longer have to sleep under two blankets. For the past five days or so, since we approached 40 degrees, it has become noticeably warmer. During the day it even reaches +19°C outside. Although we still sleep in socks and a jumper, we’re now under just one blanket. And there’s no condensation running down the walls. Hooray!—that’s the chief victory of me, the housewife, working in alliance with the weather :).
The wind is light, and Lady Mary is carrying all sails except the staysail. The latter is lying lashed down in the cockpit. As we wrote before, its halyard needs repairing. It’s a good thing the broken halyard didn’t run out altogether, but got stuck somewhere at the masthead. Guess who’ll be climbing the mast? :). At least the stay we struggled so hard to rig two weeks ago is still holding.
The breakdowns continue to give the captain food for thought and force me to invent explanations for why this is a good thing.
Yesterday’s diary entry:
Diary for March 7
The other day, the third and final iPad gave up the ghost. It had served as our backup navigation device until the demise of the first and second. Once promoted to the main one, it lasted a month and then, just like the first, suddenly demanded a reboot requiring internet access. Our arsenal still contains two working phones and two half-dead MacBooks. The main Mac, which has housed the email programme since the first iPad died (and now the navigation software too), has been secured to the chart table with double-sided tape. And yesterday it shut down three times for no apparent reason. The captain cleaned it, called it names, performed some magic, and cleaned it again. The laptop turned on and even allowed us to receive email. But nobody knows what will happen next. Nastya now works standing at the table (we don’t have a stool for it), so the midshipman has a standing workstation, and finishing the editing of the films she has started will be very difficult while standing. We’re testing a phone—if it proves worthy of serving as a chartplotter, the laptop will become available again. I wonder whether the list of everything that has broken on this passage will fit on a single page?
When it comes to spare parts for every conceivable occasion, Lady Mary’s lockers could rival a small repair works. Electrical tape, wire, and adhesive tape are downright sacred :). It seems the Universe has simply been cheering us on for the second month running: “You know, guys, it’s a good thing you brought this bit of kit along.
Now then, hand it over!” The wind is blowing far too directly astern, so we have to sail either farther north than necessary or farther south. And as everyone knows, one hypotenuse is shorter than two legs of a triangle. So we’re covering a third more distance than necessary.
Walking on Water
Today we’ll probably have an evening of bard songs. I’ve been wondering why this passage is so hard psychologically. It’s because, for some reason, we aren’t singing on it. Usually that raises morale. We’ll put that right. Yesterday, Ladunya and I went for a walk on deck without polar suits, in honour of the sunny weather. While we were making up stories about dolphins and snow leopard cubs, an amazing bird flew in. A booby. There would be nothing surprising about that if we were a hundred miles offshore. But here we’re a thousand miles out! Boobies don’t seem to fly that far. Though who knows. Perhaps they don’t do it en masse, but some booby “named Jonathan Livingston” might.
I wonder what yacht that is, visible on MarineTraffic, sailing 600 miles ahead of us? Two other yachts with solo sailors left Cape Town at the same time as we did. We exchanged contact details so that we could keep in touch if anything happened. The Southern Indian Ocean has a rather dubious reputation—the weather varies, and everything keeps breaking.... We agreed to send a signal only in case of distress, since we use different communication systems. But the captain says neither of them could have pulled that far ahead.
The forecast isn’t promising another storm, so we’re carrying on celebrating March 8. We’ll wash a few small items and finish the Russian-language course with our young sailor. The curriculum at her Geographical School of St Andrew the Apostle is brilliantly designed—it isn’t dragged out over four years; the entire primary-school syllabus is fitted into three grades, just as it was for us. So Lada is already approaching material normally studied at the end of third grade, without any unnecessary marking time. And as a qualified teacher, I find that approach very sensible.
Oh, if only we could show you the wall newspaper too! The picture came out very funny, with the pensive captain in the bow. We promise to show it when we land.
From the 40th Parallel
Our dear friends, thank you for being with us! We can’t reply personally to comments and letters, but we know and appreciate every one of you. You do so much to lift our spirits and morale! Be happy, and may spring fill your hearts!
Special and enormous thanks to our growing shore team—to those contributing to the ship’s fund via
PayPal
and
Yandex Money
Many thanks to Yaroslav V. and Nikita S. Together, we are strong. And may your dreams come true!
Greetings from 40 degrees south latitude. We’re off to change the clocks. Hello to the time zone of our beloved Novosibirsk and Altai!