Hello from the stormiest place on Earth. We have entered the Drake Passage, the stormiest place on the planet. At the official end of the world in Ushuaia, we acquired outfits and gear. Thanks to the crews of Captain Litau and Captain Gavrilov, Lady Mary now has sets of polar boots for trampling through penguin sh... and warm clothing to wear under our foul-weather gear. Lady Mary has dressed up too: her stern is now adorned with two enormous bright-orange spherical fenders and a plastic drum holding 230 metres of floating line. An Antarctic expedition, no two ways about it.
Yesterday at dawn we cast off. There was not a single waking soul around, so we had to sing “Farewell of Slavianka” together with the albatrosses and elegant grebes—and who came up with such a ridiculous name for such beautiful birds? Before entering the Drake Passage, Lady Mary spent the entire daylight hours gliding like a swan between the borders of Chile and Argentina. The wind would blow, then die away; we hoisted and lowered the sails at least ten times. We started and stopped the diesel just as often. The sun blazed furiously with all its might, and we clicked the camera shutter without pause, trying to capture the snowy mountains, icy water and wild beauty of these places. Then half an hour later you look, and the space from horizon to sky has become a viscous mush threaded with black magic—which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be sleet and rain. Voices on the radio brought us back down to earth: first the Argentine Prefecture wanted to know what was what, then the Chilean Armada asked where we were headed. We passed rocky islets completely covered in sea lions and penguins. Unfortunately, the camera could barely reach them, but through binoculars we could see both perfectly well. ...
By sunset, the last islands of Tierra del Fuego lay astern, and before we had time to take that in, all the girls were seasick. Waves were striking chaotically from every direction. The captain and I lay down on the watchkeeper’s settee: me to die, him to keep jumping up and correcting our course. We reefed a couple of times. Then Ichthyander stopped insisting on a meeting with me, and I took pity on the captain and sat down to keep watch.
Cyclones are tearing through the passage one after another. We are following the tail of one, trying to make it before the leading edge of the next catches us. The winds are twisting as if in a centrifuge, and the waves are behaving the same way. Every half hour or so, a cloud comes over, with squalls rushing out from beneath it. The yacht rounds up into the wind, which makes her try to continue on her way lying on her side. I manage to steer us out of it without going on deck, then sit down again for another half hour. The clouds bring hail and sleet.
By three in the morning, a cloud with more serious intentions reached us. And then it blew! Lady Mary heeled over and began leaping against the wind straight towards Cape Horn. She had been trying to get there ever since sunset anyway—perhaps she missed it? But we do not need to round the Great Cape a second time. I turn the wheel almost hard over, but the yacht charges southwest with the tenacity of a bulldog. ...
We are almost lying on our side now.
“Bear away some more,” Andryukha says, having finally prised his eyes open.
“Yeah... nowhere left to bear away.”
A squall of up to 60 knots (30 metres per second) has hit us. Now that’s what I call a blast, damn it! The captain leaps into the cockpit in his long johns to get the sails down.
“Trousers and a hat!” he shouts. “Hat first!”
Everything is falling off the clothes shelf. In the dark, instead of Andryukha’s hat, I find Nastya’s. Now the trousers.
“Boots!”
Andryukha dresses hastily in the freezing rain.
“Get up here!”
To get the right parts of me into my trousers, I collapse onto the floor, pull on my polar suit and crawl out into the night.
“The wheel!”
Andryukha is by the mast, lowering the mainsail as it strains to tear away into the darkness. A slide jams in the mast track, the boat is almost on her side, and the captain dashes inside on all fours—if it is possible, of course, to dash on all fours—to get tools, switching on the deck light along the way. He picks at the track, and at last the stubborn little plastic fittings holding the sail give way and slide down.
A light from an expedition vessel glimmers off our starboard side, and on autopilot I recite the Mayday call—or, in plain language, SOS. I will have to breathe it into the radio if Andryukha is washed away together with the mast. Still on autopilot, I tie a sheet wrapped around the winch to my waist.
“Come on, my girl, come on, good girl, bear away!” Now I am talking to the yacht.
With one foot on the cockpit sole and the other on the bench, crouching low, we furl the small scrap of genoa, after which the boat finally turns away from the wind. Now we can lash the mainsail, which is thrashing in the wind, to the boom. ...
“Whew, it feels as if I’ve been running for two hours while someone beat me the whole time.” The captain sits down on the bottom step of the companionway.
“Well, that was cool, huh,” I mutter senselessly.
Half an hour later, Andryukha lies down for another nap. I secure the saucepan and kettle dancing on the stove and sit down to continue my watch. Until morning we crawl along at 2–3 knots under a small jib. Some opposing current robs us of a knot or two.
The day passes in nauseated boredom, but overall everything is fine, guys! The children lie around reading; nobody is vomiting up food. Tomorrow we will get a headwind. We have dropped below the latitude of Cape Horn; the flight is proceeding normally. Hugs to all of you, friends, from 56.5° south latitude! Thank you for being with us. ...
Special thanks to the shore-based part of our team, those who keep fuelling our enthusiasm through PayPal.me/TravelyFamily. Thank you to Dmitry I. from Novosibirsk, Dmitry M. from Moscow, Vasily F. from Irkutsk and Viktor S. from Krasnoyarsk. You have become true partners in the expedition!