What inspires us. The crew answers your questions. We decided to use this sort of epigraph for our reports, for everyone who has only just joined us. Friends, our circumnavigation has not veered off course, been interrupted, or even slowed down. It is currently tropical storm season south of the equator. Instead of quietly waiting it out in wonderful New Zealand or on an equatorial atoll, we decided to sail round Cape Horn, while conducting a scientific and practical survey of the phantom islands of the South Pacific, including the Maria Theresa Reef made famous by Jules Verne. You can find the expedition’s chronicles and results in our previous reports. By the end of hurricane season, we plan to return to our route and continue westward across Oceania. We simply wanted so badly to fulfil a childhood dream! That’s why we decided to make a 10,000-mile detour.
Day 48 of the passage. The magical day of Christmas. 1,230 miles to Cape Horn, the Everest of the sailing world. It’s +11°C inside our floating home. I can’t be bothered to get up, so I’m doing my utmost to, like, catch up on sleep. Every half-hour I look at the iPad and go back to sleep. We’ve become like bears in this cold: all we do is sleep and sleep. But the children are much better at it in the mornings, so in the evening I can’t make it through a film with them—I conk out. Yesterday they finished watching something cosy and Christmassy on their own, with the fairy lights twinkling. But from the middle of the night onwards, I have to force myself to sleep. By dawn I no longer have the strength to force myself, so I switch on the heater and get to work on an article for a magazine. It’s amazing what people can get used to—even their own long-suffering patience. After the heater has been running for half an hour, the temperature in the saloon rises to 14.5°C, and suddenly it feels downright warm!
We’re almost in Antarctica now. Yesterday we were looking at Antarctica in a seventh-grade geography atlas. It marks all the polar stations, and it’s easy to trace the route of the Russian all-terrain-vehicle expedition in which Valdis Pelsh is taking part. The rest of the world is shown in just as much clear detail in this atlas. On the page showing foreign Asia, in the Himalayas, on the border between Pakistan, China and India, my eyes happened to settle on Chogori, also known as K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. Next to that black dot on the map it says 8,611 m. My dad is there. He died during the descent, at an altitude of around 8 km. And the place where he was last alive is marked on the world map to within a few hundred metres.
I’ve been thinking about him since last night. At first I didn’t realise it straight away; it was simply Vysotsky’s song with the words, “And in this world there are no peaks that cannot be conquered...” playing in my head. Only later did I understand that all that time I had been thinking about Dad. And about how he was a hero. And about how my sister and I sat in Pakistan in 2005 over the previous year’s expedition barrel with Russia written on it. Inside were Dad’s belongings, his plane ticket and his notebook...
And also about where the Order of Courage my father received for climbing Everest might be. This question has been on my mind for so long that the first thing I’ll do when I get home is turn every possible family-heirloom storage place upside down... It’s awful to think that you might have misplaced something so precious...
You asked about the songs that inspire us. Vysotsky’s songs open the shortlist. When you’re a little nervous or scared, or longing for your comfortable den back home, Vysotsky is your psychotherapist...
“And now the trembling in my hands is gone—upward, upward! And now fear has plunged into the abyss—for ever, for ever...”
This song somehow, incomprehensibly, brings together the sea and the mountains. As a child, I only ever heard the mountaineering version, because all my parents’ close friends were mountaineers, not sailors. “The Ballad of Struggle” is Vysotsky too. We use it as our alarm. It immediately makes you want to get up and perform heroic deeds. Vysotsky holds the record for songs that pull your steely inner core out of the murk of doubt and fear.
Our young sailor is inspired by the great song from The Adventures of Elektronik: “You are human, you are strong and brave.” We belt it out together whenever we need to boost morale. And there’s also a clip from the film Territory. First the actress Ksenia Kutepova says that most people are too afraid to live their dream. Then “The Ballad of the Children of the Great Bear” begins.
“Put your back into the oars, my friend. Wave, have mercy on the swimmer!”
And it makes you want never to give up. Gorodnitsky’s sea songs are lyrical. There’s that line about how “at forty, dreaming is foolish, to say the least...” The recipe for reviving a life built around a childhood dream probably goes like this: you listen to Gorodnitsky singing about the island of Guadeloupe, then immediately blast Vysotsky singing about the mountains and the sea. Top it off with “The Ballad of Struggle.” You square your shoulders and go and accomplish the thing you once closed the door on. Our young sailor suggested another inspiring song, “Conquer the Sea,” by the Novosibirsk band Provereno. Our friends wrote that song specifically about our circumnavigation, at the very moment of decision when I was tearing up my roots, flesh and all. My whole beloved little world on land had to remain in my former life.
There is also a song that simply states the reality of our lives now. On New Year’s Eve at the Pole of Inaccessibility, we struck it up on the guitar, and suddenly every word rang out as if it had been written about us. It was Anna German’s “Hope.” “An unfamiliar star is shining; once again we are torn away from home.”
And now let’s put the lyricism aside and return to reality, which, damn it, is not entirely hopeless! The wind has shifted and we’ve altered course southward. 53 degrees south. The pressure is creeping down; the rain and fog have returned. The yacht keeps rounding up into the wind, which makes the waves rather entertaining: this morning I’ve drenched myself in tea four times and in jam once. Good thing my little ones can’t see me—I’m always telling them to be tidy. Talking with Andryukha over tea, we suddenly realised that we will be the first family with children in Russian history to undertake an expedition like this under sail. It really is wonderful that, despite being together round the clock for years on end, you still have things to talk about, dream about and howl with laughter over with your own dear husband! And as for arguing—now that’s a real treat. I can grumble that he splashed salt water into my cocoa. Then at the children because they didn’t turn their mattresses upside down to dry during the day. Then the captain drops a sheet off the helm again and doesn’t notice. I mean, honestly—how can you do that?.. Nastya laughs at the way we supposedly argue. “I love you so much,” she says. “You two are so funny!” And just like that, all the tension melts away...
Oh, that’s a great idea, actually. We haven’t howled with laughter all over the yacht for about five hours now. One person is writing, another reading, another editing video. Maybe it’s time to have an argument to warm ourselves up? Or would it be better to switch on the heater?
Yes, this has turned into quite a post: I sing whatever I see. I think I’ll leave it there and bid you farewell until better times.
It’s all because your heartfelt comments made me relax so much. I want to talk to you as if you were my closest friends. Perhaps I shouldn’t read your warm greetings immediately before writing the diary? Otherwise this kind of muddle is what comes spilling from my pen. Guys, we love you! Thank you for keeping our morale up across such an enormous distance, here in this cold Southern Ocean. Many of you are practically members of our family already, even though we’ve never met!
And an enormous thank-you as well to those who have helped fuel our expedition through PayPal.me/TravelyFamily: Vyacheslav Shch. from Novosibirsk, Alexander Z. from Veliky Novgorod, Olga F. from Zlatoust, Vladimir P. from Moscow, Nikolai S. from St Petersburg, Irina B. from Omsk, and Konstantin T. from Krasnoyarsk. Can you feel yourselves becoming not merely readers, but partners in an expedition for the glory of our nation’s fleet and geographical discovery? Hugs to you all from 53 degrees 10 minutes S, 101 degrees 59 minutes W.