Preparing for Life Aboard

Summer is over, and so is its sultry bliss... Everyone else’s sailing season is drawing to a close. With us, everything is back to front. We’re getting ready. We spent the holidays at home, on dry land. But for us, everything is only just beginning in early September. For me, this is always a time of new beginnings. The captain flew out to the yacht today. Lady Mary has already been waiting far too long for her crew in the Canary Islands . Andrey will be preparing the boat for ocean passages. We need to purchase and install additional equipment, then leave Las Palmas de Gran Canaria by 30 September. From 1 October, all the marinas in the Canary Islands prepare to welcome yachts and sailors eager to take part in the world-famous transatlantic rally for cruising yachts—the ARC regatta from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. Marina berths were snapped up as early as spring. So our plan for October is a passage to El Hierro , hauling the boat out and spending about three weeks on highly artistic scraping-and-painting work . Every year, specimens of the local marine fauna and flora have to be scraped off the bottom, and the hull below the waterline painted with antifouling. Otherwise, a trailing tail of shells and seaweed will slow us down considerably and conjure up images of sunken pirate brigantines. We had planned to do it together with the captain, but circumstances are keeping the rest of the crew ashore for another month or two. So Andrey will have to shoulder it alone. Meanwhile, we are preparing to set sail for several years. The Whole Caravan Goes to Sea Because of this, we have made the difficult decision to turn our home in the Altai Mountains into ... a hotel. We are burying all our personal and especially valuable belongings in the garden while simultaneously packing bales of children’s clothes “to grow into.” They say textile goods and other necessities are hard to come by in Africa and Oceania, so our current move aboard Lady Mary will take place under the slogan, “Make way for the shuttle trader.” Food for Thought. A collector’s edition of Eugene Onegin and an enormous book called Russian Landscape have already migrated to the yacht. There promise to be plenty of intellectual soirées on long ocean evenings. Only another 133 books to go, and then we’ll have to charter a cargo plane :). The Gingerbread House. We are discussing the details with the trusted people who will be managing our home . We are giving away the children’s ice skates and winter clothes, saying goodbye to the mountains, and basking in the warmth of our loved ones. The children are preparing to repel raids by sea pirates and are walling up their treasured possessions in their secret headquarters beneath the roof. Nastya has started school, knowing that it is only a short break in her holidays. So she is not particularly bothered by the school year ahead. Plans for Distant Voyages We will leave the Canaries by winter for Cabo Verde (the Cape Verde Islands). After that, our plans include The Gambia and South America. Who knows what things will be like in five years’ time? Nastya will be a young woman, Lada a schoolgirl, and we... Our friends predict that I will turn up at our next school reunion with a crutch, a bottle of rum, and a parrot on my left shoulder. ...Strange—for some reason, no one is willing to picture me as a bright-eyed mermaid :).