How we woke up surrounded by ice. Yankee Bay, Greenwich Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica. At 5 a.m., the alarm traditionally began singing in Vladimir Vysotsky’s voice: Amid guttering candles and evening prayers, amid trophies of war and peaceful campfires, there lived bookish children who had never known battle, tormented by their childhood catastrophes... The mountains answered with muffled rumbles—avalanches. It was rather dark for weighing anchor, so we pulled the blankets right up to our foreheads. All night there had been regular crashes, sometimes right by the water. Those were gigantic chunks of glacier calving into the sea...
The water rocked, then rocked again; something was scraping suspiciously against the hull. Looking outside, I quoted Navigator Klimov’s letter from Two Captains: “...The Saint Maria became icebound while still in the Kara Sea and is drifting north with the polar ice... Congratulations!”
“Whoa, coo-ool...” the captain drawled, glancing at the slush of ice floes surrounding Lady Mary. Trousers, another pair, a sailor shirt, a sweatshirt, a hat, waterproofs, boots. Even with two pairs of socks, my feet freeze in those boots. I had to make insoles out of... sanitary pads. My dad always said they were a sure-fire way to keep your feet warm and dry in ski boots!
Girls, rise and shine! Look, we’ve been hemmed in by polar ice! The young sailor sleepily clambers up to the wheelhouse window, mumbles, “Uh-huh,” and crawls back into her burrow. It is +7°C inside the yaranga, 0°C outside. Pulling on our warmest clothes, we start the engine and heater and head forward to the anchor. The penguin spit is already awake: at least a thousand little barrels with white bellies and black backs stand lined up like sentries as far as the eye can see. The sea lions that played so energetically last night are now disguised as boulders. And right alongside us, a whiskered muzzle pokes out through a lead to gulp some air, then disappears beneath the ice again. And a great deal of ice has drifted in. These are not huge floating floes, but a thick soup of metre-wide chunks. It looks as though part of the ice cap collapsed into the sea in several stages. The wind and current swept all the fragments into our bay. And there stands Lady Mary amid all that whipped cream, like a candle on a cake.
We are not particularly worried about the fate of vessel and crew, because the ice is broken up and has only just drifted in; it will not beset us straight away. Although last year one boat came to grief in just this way, right in the bay by Bellingshausen Station. A yacht sank there: the floes were too large and piled up over the deck. But that was in May, I think, almost winter...
We push the floes aside with a boathook and slowly make our way into clear water. Today’s task is to cover some 60 miles to Deception Island. On the chart it looks exactly like a ring-shaped atoll with a single entrance into the lagoon. It is the crater of a volcano that became extinct a million years ago. We plan to spend the night there and stay through tomorrow. For six hours we try to catch the wind. It is an interesting creature here in the Antarctic. It can blow from a different direction every fifteen minutes. Yesterday, for example, without changing the helm or sail trim, we first sailed due west, then southeast, then west again for a whole hour, and then southeast once more. Today it is the same old song, except that the wind is so weak that we are unlikely to get settled in the bay before dark. It is a shame the season of the polar day has already passed. If only we had arrived here a month earlier...
To starboard, the bases of other islands emerge from the dark-grey clouds. It is a pity we cannot tell whether they are high or not: a smoky dome covers the entire area. Greenwich Island, where we spent the night, is quite high—proper mountains with cliffs and glaciers, and snow avalanches. Blue glaciers descend into the sea. Icebergs calve from them... From now on, I will paint them only blue, perhaps even bright blue. Who paints the ice—that is the question. Yesterday I even thought for a moment that perhaps some vessel was showing blue where it had run aground. I picked up the binoculars—nope. It was an intensely blue iceberg with a blackish side. Wonders never cease.
The captain, the sailor and I keep watch in the cockpit for a long time, drinking hot tea and studying the seals and penguins. How graceful they are once they get into the sea! Just like dolphins! They leap just as high and swim just as swiftly. Sometimes they loll about and frolic. They lazily wave one flipper, roll onto their backs, then onto their bellies. A wave of the other flipper, a curious stretch of the neck, and they nod at us as if to say, yes, I see you there, folks. Whales come by too. And then there is a choice: run for the camera or not? Because of the cold and the stinging sleet, the camera does not hang idly around my neck; I have to go below to fetch it. But as soon as I do, there is nothing left to photograph: either the whales have moved far away or they have dived deep. For the first time, I saw up close how majestically they raise the fans of their tails and slowly lower them into the water. Waterfalls of icy water stream off them. You often see that in photographs.
To port, golden light spreads beneath the low clouds. Bellingshausen wrote in his diaries that this was how the ice glowed. Soon the shining something acquired very distinct, elongated outlines. It is probably that same iceberg, about ten kilometres long, which Nikolai Litau told us about. It certainly looks like it. Meanwhile, the wind remains impervious to all the romance of glowing ice and keeps trying to catch up with us, judging by the ripples astern. But it simply cannot, even though we are crawling along at 2 miles per hour. We are moving not towards our destination, but towards lunch. The latest weather forecast arrives together with the wind and changes our plans. At last, Lady Mary spreads her sails and is ready to fly. With a good wind, we press farther on than planned, towards the next group of islands, the Melchior Islands. From there, only about 160 kilometres will remain to the Ukrainian polar station Vernadsky. We hope the ice conditions will allow us to call in and visit them. We will land on various other islets and on the Antarctic mainland itself on our way back towards the Drake Passage. Fog devours all the beauty and condemns us to standing watch in rain and zero visibility. First Nastya’s two hours, then Andryukha’s and mine. At dusk, we switch on the radar. Now it will keep an eye out for icebergs, and we will keep an eye on it. Tonight inspires a certain unease. Tomorrow we will tell you how it went.
And so, in light of recent events, our family sailing circumnavigation has temporarily been renamed the First Russian Family Antarctic Expedition. We say it as a joke, but to tell the truth, no one has ever sailed this far south as a family with children—not only among our own people, apparently, but anywhere in the world. It turns out that right now we are setting a record. To mark the 200th anniversary of the start of Bellingshausen and Lazarev’s First Russian Antarctic Expedition. Do you know what follows from that? Everything is possible, folks—we are telling you for certain! And sometimes, all it takes to believe in yourself is one small magical step :). Please support us with a share and a like, if it is not too much trouble. It will make us happy, and it may help many others. And thank you for being with us! Hugs to everyone from 63.5 degrees south latitude!
We thank our true shore team—those supporting the First Russian Family Antarctic Expedition through PayPal.me/TravelyFamily. Thank you to Katerina I. from Moscow, Vladimir Sh. from Moscow, and Suren A. from Baku.