Weighed Anchor. Set Sail for French Polynesia

Weighed anchor. Set sail for French Polynesia. Night. Mizzen and a scrap of genoa. Course set for the Gambier Archipelago. Our young sailor devoted the evening to crying over parting with Bounty Island and the islanders, while we gaze mournfully at the receding lights of this unique scrap of land, with its terrible romantic history and generous soul. By the way, do you know what Bounty means? Generosity. And the islanders live up to that name a hundredfold. .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, Twelve days on the tiny island of Pitcairn have added up to a whole lifetime. Enough material for a book. Even two, if we split it into travel and yachting on the one hand, and history and psychology—people and their fates—on the other. Nowhere else on our voyage has the crew experienced such a concentration of adventures against a backdrop of such close contact with the local people. At least five unpublished reports about Pitcairn and its people have piled up in the journal. This community truly is a people: they even have their own Pitcairn language, born from the rough sailors’ slang of their eighteenth-century forefathers and the lilting cadences of their desperately brave Tahitian foremothers’ speech. .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, Here is what else we have not yet written about in the ship’s log: — The day after the blood-chilling swamping of the dinghy (see the post before last), the captain did finally right it. He launched himself like a swallow into the foaming surf while we were under way and dragged it upside down to the jetty. Half the country helped repair our outboard, including the man at the very top. — We taught a Russian culture lesson at Pulau School on Pitcairn, where we made a traditional Slavic Bell protective doll with the schoolgirls and Swedish sailors, following all the rules. — We climbed down a precipitous mountainside to a natural volcanic pool, where the surf pours in like a waterfall and geysers hiss up from the bottom. — We climbed the rock to Christian’s Cave, from where the mutineers scanned the ocean, afraid they might see a ship bringing punitive British justice. — We attended another lesson at the school, where we listened to all Pitcairn’s anthems accompanied by ukulele and learned to weave a crown from pandanus (a particular kind of palm leaf). — We visited a local home, stuffing ourselves with a delicious dinner of traditional dishes while chatting with our hostess. — We spent several evenings with the island’s female police officer and her family, and learned how, on the 200th anniversary of the Bounty mutiny, her husband retraced Captain Bligh’s route. He covered almost 6,000 kilometres from the Kingdom of Tonga to East Timor in 10 weeks aboard a replica of the 23-foot boat in which Captain Bligh and part of the crew sailed. — We attended a Saturday service at the Seventh-day Adventist church, where almost the entire country gathers in its best clothes. Singing and everyone hugging everyone else are mandatory parts of the programme. — We postponed our departure so we could celebrate Pitcairn Day with the people, going fishing with half the country and then having dinner in the main square. .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, It is such a shame to have to describe places and events like these via satellite, when not only can you not attach photographs, you cannot even post the text with the proper punctuation (the satellite deletes quotation marks, brackets, colons, and sometimes even dashes and full stops, according to a system known only to itself. To say nothing of paragraph indents). I am fervently hoping for a miracle: that somewhere we will find internet access that will let us post readable reports with photographs on the website. For now, we are saving everything in our journals and archives. They say there is Wi-Fi of dubious quality on the island of Mangareva, which is where we are headed. .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, .. ,,,,,,,,,, . .. ,,,,,,,, . ,,,,,,,, Tomorrow we will send the website an account of our last day on Bounty Island—what else is there to do on passage? So far, we have covered more than 120 miles in twenty-four hours, with 160 to go to Mangareva; we are sailing on a scrap of genoa and the mizzen on our favourite (damn it) close-hauled course (wind right in our faces—it has now blown up to 25 knots). We had 2 bites during the day; the second one was really huge! But both, alas, got away. The galley and saloon have each been flooded by a wave only once; nobody has any appetite for eating our kilos of fruit because of the rolling. Even the fresh borscht went down well only with the captain. I am reading Pitcairn newspapers and almanacs, Lada is devouring The Adventures of Dunno, Nastya is reading a book called The Psychology of Lying, and the captain, with a profoundly thoughtful expression, is studying Nansen’s journey to the North Pole in the book Farthest North. This makes us glance at him anxiously, while he looks back at us with a promising air. The cap went to grab a nap before his watch, saying: — Nastya, you won’t have to do anything; we’re holding steady. If we speed up past 6 knots—which is unlikely—we’ll reef. While the cap napped for half an hour and I wrote, it blew up savagely to 30 knots right on the nose; the forecast said up to 25. Water is lashing over the coachroof and through every crack; we had to furl the genoa, set the staysail, and reef the mizzen. Now we are flying along at 6 knots under a handkerchief of staysail and a corner of mizzen. Lady Mary’s coordinates: 24°28′ S, 132°16′ W. Happy July, everyone!