16 Days in the Ocean. Passage to Easter Island. Headwinds Again
A foggy morning in the Pacific Ocean. The headwind has started up again.
“Tea, Andrey?” the first mate asks gloomily, anticipating another bout of pounding to windward.
“Yes.”
“I think I’d rather have cocoa,” the young sailor announces politely. Such lofty diction—we’re among the intelligentsia, no less.
“Off I go to make cocoa, then—how can I refuse?”
At night, the captain catches squid; then we eat them all day and by evening ask the cap to get some sleep this time. Another long, snake-like pike takes the night fishing line, but we let it go.
The flotilla of children and adults that left for the Marquesas is making progress two or three times faster than we are. Some complain that the finish is already close, yet they haven’t managed to do even half of what they planned for this passage. We can say the same about ourselves: our writing and editing plan is not even halfway complete yet.
All week, the crew leads a monotonous, uncomplicated existence. With the arrival of the headwind, this humdrum existence is beginning to wear us down. How wonderful it is to have a following wind, after all! No heeling, no wild bucking. You can live without constantly swallowing the lump in your throat. And that’s not even mentioning the flying plates.
The ocean is fairly deserted. We haven’t seen any ships for two weeks now, and no dolphins either. Sometimes small shoals of fish swim nearby, with tiny jellyfish among them, the size of a one-rouble coin or smaller.
It’s funny—Easter Island keeps Chilean time, the same as the mainland. In other words, despite being farther west than the Galápagos, we put the clocks forward by an hour, as though we were travelling east rather than west. It makes for a rather silly time paradox.
Ladunya has started keeping a diary, decorating it with stickers and drawings and recording her entire day in minute detail.
“Mum, what did I do yesterday afternoon?”
“Lazed around and read.”
“No, that’s not true!” the young sailor cries in righteous indignation.
But that is exactly what happened.
The whole crew is doing a lot of reading. Nastya currently has Walter Scott and marine navigation on her agenda (the former is progressing more successfully and with much greater interest). I have Thor Heyerdahl and Anton Chekhov.
Thor Heyerdahl spent about six months on Easter Island during his first expedition alone. His book contains so many descriptions of the islanders that you feel as though you can see every one of them in the flesh. I became interested in the rongorongo script mentioned by Heyerdahl. It turns out that Irina Fyodorova, a student of the famous Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov (the Soviet scholar Knorozov deciphered the secret of Maya writing without ever leaving Russia), worked intensively on deciphering it. She used the same methods as her teacher; however, in her interpretation, the rongorongo tablets revealed rather mundane records of yam planting, and the international scholarly community did not accept Fyodorova’s research.
The young sailor is engrossed in the Prostokvashino saga and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The cap is devoting himself to books about the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic (what could that mean?).
Today the cap decided to do the laundry and accidentally poured about 100 litres of fresh water into the sea. It’s a good thing we have a watermaker now! Otherwise, that would have been a significant loss.
Every day, the entire crew does exercises. Lada has learnt to do proper push-ups, Nastya feels extraordinary strength in her muscles, and my youthful flexibility is returning.
The long-awaited cool weather has arrived—and during the daytime too! We haven’t had weather like this for more than two years, not since Senegal: weather when you can keep your T-shirt on during the day and even occasionally cover your legs with a blanket.
Today, with Nastya’s help, the young sailor cooked her first batch of oladushki. In the evenings, we watch the new adaptation of War and Peace—the loose Hollywood interpretation of the great classic has prompted me to reread Tolstoy’s immortal work yet again. Tomorrow I’ll finish Chekhov and start War and Peace. And soon it will be time to introduce the junior crew member to it as well.
Judging by that series, St Petersburg high society 200 years ago seems closer to Sodom and Gomorrah. Though Natasha Rostova is good.
Lady Mary is not producing cosmic speeds, and with this new headwind we risk being unable to lay a course for the uninhabited island of Sala y Gómez. Though we are honestly trying—we really ought to see for ourselves whether there is any vegetation on that rocky scrap of land. It is 290 miles away; Easter Island is 470 miles away.
We are still covering 60–70 miles a day thanks to our nighttime forced marches. Though today we have been making about 5 knots close-hauled since early morning.
There have been few comments on our posts, and it even seems as though we have lost some enthusiasm for our daily trips into cyberspace via satellite ). News from the mainland is inspiring and delightful after all, despite our proclaimed independence from it. Write to us, friends!
Coordinates at the time of sending this post: 22°09′ S, 102°50′ W. Sent via satellite link, so no pictures for now.