Two Weeks in the Pacific Ocean. Passage to Easter Island. Calms, a red star, food supplies and little islands of rubbish
In the morning, as usual, I check that everything is where it should be. After all, whichever way you look at it, our home is surrounded by a blue abyss. The captain is wrapped in a sleeping bag in the wheelhouse. The young sailor is hugging her bunny under the table; the other sailor’s nose and heels are sticking out from under a blanket in the saloon. The girls still haven’t gone back to sleeping in the forecabin, even though the wild pounding through the waves stopped three days ago and the mattresses are almost dry.
The morning scenery: the ocean, our yacht, the sky and two heavenly bodies. Off the starboard side, the full moon is making its stately descent towards the sea, while to port the searing disc of the sun emerges. Perfect, blazing, enormous.
And in the evenings, immediately after sunset, we watch the Moon rise, huge and orange, like a second sun. Venus, too, glitters red as it sinks below the horizon just before bedtime. Like the flashing beacon on a snowplough. Except not white and yellow, but orange and scarlet. It looks like the port navigation light of a ship or an aircraft.
During his night watch, the cap caught a squid and a snakefish. Or an extremely elongated pike? The first time one got caught on our handline reel—not a fishing rod, but an actual reel—we let it go: who knew what sort of creature it was? Later, the cap discovered that this fish is a relative of mackerel and tuna. In English, it’s called Snoek.
That night, Andrei cleaned the long carcass, losing only half of it overboard.
“Dad, what, you didn’t even wake Mum? You’re so independent!” the young sailor exclaimed admiringly in the morning.
We wanted to make sushi, but slicing the flesh into strips proved difficult: long, narrow bones hold the snake-like frame together over its entire length. So we had to fry it. The squid, meanwhile, was stewed using a new recipe from the book Gourmet Under Sail, marinated with wine, oil, garlic and oregano. And some lemon, too. Mmm. Breakfast was a success.
The children are busy weaving thread bracelets. Lada is managing with hardly any mistakes now. She and I are also sewing a patchwork potholder for Dad for 9 May. I hope we finally make it to Easter Island by Victory Day. Although the navigator says that if we keep flying along at the same speed—half a knot as I write—we’ll reach Easter in exactly 30 days. In summer. That is, in winter.
For the second day, we’ve had the sails wing and wing; the light wind drops almost to nothing by morning and blows directly astern. But wing and wing, we manage a whole 3 miles per hour.
A little school of tuna with yellow tails and blue stripes along their sides spent half the day circling our bow. In the evening, a huge fish appeared astern, rather like a barracuda, only thick and striped, with the tropical name Wahoo. The tuna fled from it, but then came back—it looked as though they were playing.
We saw a small whale about 200 metres away.
A plastic bottle floated past. Then came fishing buoys strung together in a garland, thoroughly encrusted with shells.
“Hello, civilisation!” the captain cried with a bitter chuckle.
The nearest inhabited land is 700 miles (1,350 km) away.
We crossed the 100th meridian. We’re slowly approaching the Tropic of Capricorn. It’s 4 degrees away, which means 240 miles. I wonder whether we’ll cross it before the end of the week.
The oven smells of the last banana cake of this passage: at last, we have worked our way through 20 kg of bananas, throwing only a few overboard. That’s highly efficient. The young sailor mixed up a quarter portion of batter especially for herself, to gobble down without baking it. She’s eating it with a spoon. When I was a child, I thought cake batter tasted better than the cake too :).
About the provisions. Apples are already being rationed: they’ll last nine days if everyone gets one apple a day. Under these conditions, every bite acquires an incomparably heavenly taste. Today we finished the second watermelon.
Tomorrow we’ll introduce a daily cup of buoy into the crew’s diet—a drink made from baobab powder. Baobab fruit contains six times more vitamin C than citrus fruit. We bought about 6 litres in Africa. To ward off scurvy :).
We have two heads of cabbage in reserve; we’ll make stuffed cabbage rolls. There are about six tomatoes, one decrepit cucumber, a little onion and some garlic. Here’s a funny thing: in the Galápagos, white onions were sold only fully peeled, right down to the white, crisp flesh. Why do they do that? It barely lasted a week. Fortunately, we have a few Panamanian onions in reserve, and they’re absolutely fine—apart from the quantity.
All in all, if we don’t arrive in about 10 days, we’ll be down entirely to grains and tinned food.
And there’s almost no wind. Only after sunset does it fill the sails a little. Thanks to the night sailing, we somehow manage to cover 60–70 miles a day.
Coordinates at the time this report was sent: 20°02′ S, 100°57′ W.
Happy May Day, everyone! Guys, how are things back home?