The Captain’s Birthday: Plenty to Celebrate

The Captain’s Birthday: Plenty to Celebrate. Some people are celebrating Halloween today, dressing up as all manner of evil spirits. Our crew is celebrating something else. “Forty-five—Dad’s a berry again!” the young sailor wrote in her birthday card... While the “berry” is asleep, I sit down to write my own birthday card. And first of all, I’ll post a photograph here of the captain’s greatest achievement 🙂 Daddy’s girls :). Mediterranean Sea, January 2014 . Meetings in Cape Town We timed the end of the third leg of our Round-the-World Voyage via the Great Capes and Antarctica very well indeed. Ten days ago, we arrived in Cape Town to celebrate the birthday of our team’s leading member on solid ground. Our friend Pasha, whom we were expecting so we could celebrate the Birthday together and round the Cape of Good Hope, was turned back at the border in Moscow. We were upset, then set our minds on waiting for him for another two weeks. Pasha, come! During these ten days in Cape Town, we had a wonderful meeting with fellow Russians, supported by the Consulate General of the Russian Federation (a recording of the meeting is available in the Facebook group); we visited Tanya and Tom at their wine farm, and Dmitry, the press attaché at the Consulate General. Then we went to visit Natasha and her daughter Nesya in their cosy flat. We haven’t had this many get-togethers since Russia itself. There’s only one photograph from the meeting that was almost at the Consulate; the others haven’t made it onto the laptop yet. And this post has to go up urgently, before the birthday is over :)) And here, at the end of the earth, we also met some people from our hometown of Novosibirsk. Vadim and Alexey turned out to be part of the “Our World” round-the-world motoring expedition. We crossed paths briefly at the meeting, received two tins of boiled condensed milk as a gift, and are waiting for them to visit us again. And with Sveta and Yura Vinokurov, the inspiration behind and organisers of the TEDx Novosibirsk conference, it turned out that we not only had mutual friends, but also another hometown in common— Zlatoust . That is where my parents were assigned after graduating from the Kazan Aviation Institute in 1967, and where Sveta’s parents were sent about twenty years later. What are the odds! We’ve been utterly charmed by Cape Town and haven’t given up hope of taking a road trip around the surrounding area when our Pasha arrives. But for now... Forty-five—Dad’s a berry again We celebrated the last birthday with Maxim, Natasha, Ksyusha and Polina Ivanov—the crew of the Blagovestiye round-the-world sailing voyage near the island of Tahiti , on Moorea . The film about the mutiny on the Bounty was shot on that paradise island, base jumper Zhenya lived in a treehouse there, and fields of pineapples grew there. And mountains shrouded in ringing jungle ripped through the plump clouds. Since then, a new life has begun. A different page, and everything is different... According to the original plan, we should now have been approaching Thailand and Malaysia , having covered the second half of the Pacific in a year—some 5,000 miles westward, with the trade winds weakening. Instead, everything turned out the other way round. All because one day, 20 November 2018 , at 153 degrees west longitude, the captain said to me, “Marinochka, we can still turn towards the 37th parallel and Cape Horn !” A seamanship lesson back in the Mediterranean about five years ago The result: 15,000 miles in high latitudes, a sailing expedition to Antarctica , about seven severe storms, one of them veeery severe . The first Russian rounding of Cape Horn and voyage to Antarctica by a family crew with children , and a meeting with Fyodor Konyukhov and his incredible team. Wintering in Tierra del Fuego and fjords among the glaciers , the Strait of Magellan and the most difficult passage of all—from there to the Cape of Good Hope in strong winds. None of this would have happened if, after long deliberation over whether the plan was realistic, the captain had not said to us: “We can do it.” . What exactly is this “we can do it”? —It means great responsibility, and great teamwork too. It means the captain is confident that, in an emergency, the three of us girls—the youngest of whom is only eight now—will not become hysterical, hide in a locker and squeeze our eyes shut in fright, but will hold firm. I’m glad that the girls and I have reached the point where our captain can dare to make a decision like that. Can take responsibility for our lives as well. Because, however you look at it, aboard a vessel the captain is responsible for everything that happens. And I know dozens of strong men who tell us they would never risk their children and wife. I think it’s wonderful that Andrey’s case is different. His wife and children are capable of a few things themselves, so despite the skipper’s enormous responsibility, we do share the risks after all. Between two oceans at Cape Agulhas, the southern tip of Africa It is a great joy that we met one day, and that the twists and turns of life—of which there have been plenty—did not, in the end, place us on opposite sides of the barricades and of the things that matter most. Thank you to Andrey’s mother, Galina Vasilyevna, for being the best mother-in-law and support team in the world! Thank you to Andryusha’s daughter Natasha for being able to love me as one of her own, and for always having been, being now, and forever remaining our eldest daughter. I thank Heaven that we are a family and a team. And that we have a solid backbone—our husband, dad and CAPTAIN. The captain with his elder daughters when they were still little Thank you, Andrey, for your strong shoulder, your humour and patience, and for the fact that our quarrels pass quickly and rarely happen. Thank you for being the one who turns a dream into reality. Simply and very matter-of-factly. Not everyone has that gift. Be with us always! We love and cherish you. Very much. To all the wonderful people in South Africa The captain wants to celebrate on Saturday, 2 November, on Table Mountain. God willing, there won’t be a strong wind—the one currently whistling tirelessly at about 30 knots. The plan is to take the cable car up Table Mountain at around 11 in the morning, walk and wander about the summit, have a picnic if we aren’t blown away, and then either descend into the forest at the foot of the mountain or gradually migrate to the RCYC yacht club. And may the important match involving South Africa’s rugby team not stop you from coming, even if only halfway through the celebration :). The young sailor invites everyone to Table Mountain from the “summit” of Kilimanjaro—a landscape model at Cape Agulhas And then the serious repairs to our Lady Mary , battered by wintering and storms in the high latitudes, will begin. To Our Team! Friends, thank you for being with us! Thank you to Natalia Klochkova, Dmitry Samoilov, Sergey Yakubenko, Andrey Shtykh, Evgeny Mamontov, Mikhail Tarasov, Dmitry Davydov, Vasily Volkodav and many others for your wide-ranging technical, moral and physical support from ashore! You can give the captain a length of rope, a piece of sailcloth or a roller for the mainsheet traveller through Yasobe.ru/na/TravelyFamily or Paypal.Me/TravelyFamily . We send our warmest regards to Maxim F., who has already made our morning joyful and full of presents! We give a big hug to everyone who motivates us in this way. Thank you for your tangible support. We also thank our first partners: JSC MVS Telecom . Thanks to them, you can see our IRIDIUM track and the details of our voyages on the map, while we can send and receive short messages. A big hello from a second-grade pupil, also known as young sailor Laduska, to the Geographical School of the Holy and All-Praised Apostle Andrew the First-Called , its founders and teachers. We promise that photographs of Cape Town and its surroundings, African adventures and the peculiarities of this land of contrasts will appear on the website soon. It’s all coming. For now, though, here are various photographs of the birthday boy and company 🙂 During the regatta In Mexico At Cape Agulhas. The Indian Ocean is on the left, the Atlantic on the right The young sailor in the waters of two oceans—the Indian and the Atlantic