The unforgettable Jacques Paganel in Jules Verne's novel sent the yacht *Duncan* to New Zealand instead of the east coast of Australia back in 1865.
Remember? “Landia, Landia… Zealandia!”
The geographer's mistake ultimately helped the whole enterprise and saved everyone from the prospect of becoming dinner for Māori cannibals.
Following my idol's example, in the previous post I sent every reader into the Southern Hemisphere instead of the Northern by calling the Tropic of Cancer the Tropic of Capricorn :)).
The Tropic of Capricorn is in the Southern Hemisphere. We crossed it four times during the last four years. The Tropic of Cancer, on the other hand, we had crossed only once, on our way from the Canaries to Senegal.
And a few days ago we finally crossed it again.
I woke during the night in a cold sweat, like Mendeleev, having clearly seen a globe in my dream and the words *Tropic of Cancer*, not Capricorn, above the dashed line north of the equator.
I grabbed a torch and rushed to the chart.
Then said: — Ooooh… We have really come to this.
So please excuse me.
How to explain this performance I have no idea. I will blame magnetic storms. Or holes in the ozone layer, especially since it seems we may be passing beneath one right now.
An ozone hole?
At least that was the conclusion the captain and I reached after spending more than a month on a tropical and equatorial ocean passage, half our time on deck without getting burned, and then suddenly both getting sunburnt one after another while sitting in the shade beneath the awning.
Same place, same time of day as always.
Throughout the voyage I had been amazed that I could even sunbathe for part of the day and not burn at all.
Then an hour or an hour and a half in the shade — hello.
First Andrey came inside glowing beautifully red. “Why does nobody aboard ever burn except you, darling?”
A day later I crawled out to read and ended up lying down with a headache and red skin myself.
How do you explain that?
Is solar radiation stronger farther from the equator?
Fortunately today is our first cool day. Nastya and I have even put T-shirts on. So we are happily watching the sea through the panoramic wheelhouse windows, which on the shaded side are no longer covered by opaque blinds.
About the typhoon
A cyclone south of the equator. A hurricane in the North Atlantic. Around Japan, the same kind of storm is called a typhoon.
Yesterday, softened by heat and calm, we received a message from our friends Helma and Bob, the crew of a junk-rigged yacht called *Sunny Spray*.
They wrote that a cyclone with winds above sixty knots — hurricane-force wind — is moving from New Guinea toward Japan, and in about a week all that beauty will cross our track.
Andrey requested a weather forecast and we became thoughtful.
Here we go.
“If we don't speed up tomorrow, we'll head south and let the cyclone pass in front of us.”
Heading south while trying to go north is not exactly an attractive direction.
But safety costs more.
Fortunately, by night the wind heard our complaints and finally switched on those fifteen knots we had been seeing in the forecast all week but had not seen in the actual ocean.
Lady Mary accelerated from roughly one kilometre per hour to seven or eight, and there is hope that we will receive only a couple of days of headwind on the tail of the typhoon near the southern corner of Japan.
We are not relaxing, though.
High cirrus clouds have already begun floating above the cumulus — advance messengers of the approaching cyclone.
In about three days we will be ready to remove everything unnecessary from the deck.
And of course we keep monitoring the forecast.
The main thing is not to lose speed.
There are 760 nautical miles left to the corner of the Land of the Rising Sun, then another roughly 750 after the turn, and we will be in Vladivostok.
The Mariana Islands remained two hundred-odd miles to the south, still untouched by us.
But signs of civilisation have kept appearing since that memorable 31 March when we encountered the first ships.
A plastic crate overgrown with weed drifts past. Then a torn piece of net or a fishing buoy.
Once a shoe sole floated by in such a convincing way that we told the girls the sole was still attached to a foot sticking upward exactly level with the sea, while the owner of the shoe was underwater.
Yes. That was black humour.
Yesterday a standard large MSC container ship passed about two miles astern on a route from the Panama Canal toward Southeast Asia.
At one angle we could clearly see that the containers on deck were not packed tight together. They stood in columns and rows with broad, straight “streets” between them.
The rows looked like the wide teeth of a comb bristling into the sky.
The deckhand very much wanted to sail over the Mariana Trench.
But because the islands will not let us stop, we abandoned the idea of even looking down into the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the World Ocean, eleven kilometres below.
Another time.
God willing.
Friends, thank you very much for the warm comments and words of support.
We read everything our shore team forwards.
Enormous thanks to everyone supporting the expedition during this difficult period through YooMoney.
Our heartfelt thanks to Alexander D., Evgeny, Dmitry, Viktor A., Natalia D. and the owner of card ending 0732.
You are now part of our shore team too.
May your dreams come true.
Sent by satellite on day 40 at sea.
Coordinates: 26°01′ N, 144°03′ E.
P.S. You can find our real-time position and track under the Route tab. It shows the path from the Rockstar Iridium 360 tracker provided by MVS Telecom.