A Desert Island and Drifting Along the Edge of a Storm
More chronicles via satellite. We’d like to stick a map in here so you could see where all this desert-island stuff and the edge are. But we can only have one photo, and even that can only be this tiny. We chose a photo where the island is playing ghost. So off you go! Everyone to geography class. Find Henderson Island, coordinates: 24.20°S, 128.20°W. Now I’ll tell you about it.
From the southeast, the island appears at 7–8 miles as a low grey strip. How much nicer it is to see high, forest-clad mountains. But here we’re expecting an unremarkable flat green scrap of land. However. Once we rounded the island from the north, we badly wanted to stay here for at least three days. Better still, a week. I won’t shower you with Robinson Crusoe analogies, especially since his island was bigger and higher, but rocky shores with caves, palm trees and white sand at the edge of turquoise waves—you get the picture.
The only downside to Henderson Island visible from offshore (apart from the swell and the onshore wind) is the uncertainty about the seabed. Because when the depth suddenly jumps from 100 metres to six, it makes you suspicious. In the island’s wind shadow, the saucepans stopped flying around, and we rushed to exercise and wash. Though we didn’t rush straight away. First we greedily drank in the shore, the water—where at a depth of 30 metres you could already see the bottom clearly—the grottoes and the beach. We hove to right there, without moving away from all that beauty.
Pre-European Polynesians once lived here, but that was a very long time ago. They left some evidence of their presence on the island, such as petroglyphs, but the lack of a freshwater source and isolation from the rest of Polynesia left the little island uninhabited once again. Of the trio in the Pitcairn archipelago, Henderson is the largest, roughly 6 by 9 km, and accounts for 86% of the total land area. From which we conclude that I lied about Pitcairn’s actual size in the previous post )). Pitcairn itself is tiny, 1 by 2 nautical miles.
Landing on Henderson Island is forbidden not only because of the weather. It is, after all, a territory of the British Commonwealth, and on top of that the largest marine reserve in these waters. It even has a dedicated satellite assigned to it, which immediately reports who has shown up in these waters and what they’re up to. The only legal way to land is this: you go to Pitcairn, clear in with a descendant of the mutineers, take one of them with you, and only in their company can you revel in this British desert-island bliss.
And how sweetly the leaves and flowers smell! How invitingly the birds call, and someone else too, with the voice of the little ghost from Vazastan—wild, but cute.
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Rain clouds swept in, and this was exactly where we went off to exercise while we were slowly being drifted away from the shore. Normal people exercise in the morning, but we’re sloths, so ours is in the evening, before dinner. Fifteen push-ups are the final exercise.
Now, about the storm and the drift. The storm was brought to Pitcairn by an anticyclone, not a cyclone, as you might be more used to. The captain explained the anticyclone’s isobars to me, and now I’m going to dump it all on you:
We’re travelling along one of the anticyclone’s outer isobars; our atmospheric pressure is 1025, which produces winds of up to 30 knots. The centre of an anticyclone can be windless and clear (like the eye of a cyclone), while around the edge of the centre, near Pitcairn, where we aren’t heading yet, things are already beginning to swirl. The pressure there is 1038, with winds up to 40 knots according to the GRIB files, though in reality it may blow up to 50 knots. So we’ve got it lovely. At night and in the morning, the wind is 27–30 knots, gusting to 35. Over 24 hours, we drifted 31 miles in the right direction on the favourable edge of the storm. Andrey’s precise calculations.
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On the way from Easter Island to Bounty Island, our casualties so far are the pressure cooker’s broken handle—it had no business flying around like a bomb—a handy container smashed to splinters by that same pressure cooker, and now the glass lid from the large frying pan. Strange that it managed to survive aboard our vessel for 4.5 years. But now it finally gave up and shattered to bits. The Cap says when we reach Pitcairn, we’ll renew our fleet of frying pans and pressure cookers. We crack up. I reckon they import one pressure cooker every five years, allowing for the population and depreciation.
We drifted for 40 hours. During the day we set a small jib and are crawling along at 3.5 miles per hour, but that’s too fast; the captain is frowning. Somehow we need to contrive to cover 40 miles in 24 hours, no more. There are 30 left now, so we’ll stretch them out over the whole night. We hope everything will have calmed down by then.
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Guys, thank you for the feedback! We cracked up over “There’s no weather, but hang in there,” and read all your lovely words twice over. It really is an anti-stress remedy :). We’re hanging in there; things are fine now, the wind is behaving like a mouse and not blowing above 20 knots, but it’s coming straight up our backside. The rolling continues. Oddly enough, a following wind isn’t the most comfortable; paired with a following sea, it makes us roll from side to side. The best wind is 15–20 knots on the left or right—pardon me—half-cheek.
Tomorrow—yes, tomorrow—we’ll approach the top of that extinct volcano where the loneliest people in the ocean live, people with the most romantic history. If only we can anchor successfully and get ashore. It’s fun and games there too, with the swell and exposed anchorages.
We’ve set the clocks to Pitcairn time; if we haven’t got it wrong, the difference from Moscow is now 10 hours. Our young sailor is jumping for joy right now at the thought of seeing land soon and at how much she has got done today: she made a fluffy chick out of thread, two little good-luck dolls to bring money, and sewed eyes onto some other chicks. And she’s already done 80 squats. I think I’ll go and exercise; it’ll be night soon anyway )).
Summer joys to everyone!
Current position: 24.41°S, 129.29°W.