Several significant events happened at once yesterday in our little world isolated from humanity.
Exactly one year earlier, on 26 March, we said goodbye to our Western Australian friends on the pier in Fremantle, where we had spent a year and eight days of eventful land life.
As proper pirates, we took a hostage with us — Yulia.
We carried her off to Rottnest Island, where Seryozha, Mila, Inna and Nick came after her by ferry. It became a wonderful weekend with friends.
The second event of this 26 March: aboard Lady Mary we marked the “median” of the route from Polynesian Moorea to Vladivostok.
And today the distance to the turn north from the southern corner of Japan dropped below two thousand miles.
We hope to cover the distance to that corner quickly, with a quartering following wind.
The final thousand miles from “the corner” to Vladivostok, however, will make sure nobody gets bored.
That is where the strongest wind is supposed to arrive — and it will be against us.
At least it will no longer be hot. Everything just the way we like it.
Lady Mary will then begin zigzagging into the wind, covering perhaps half our usual daily mileage.
After relaxing in the trade winds, that prospect makes the girls and me shudder.
The predicted loss of speed is especially depressing. It feels so good to run quickly toward the goal as we are doing now. Later it may become one step forward, half a step back.
For the moment, at 14° north, it seems slightly cooler. At six in the evening it is no longer +32 inside the yacht — only +29 :).
Everyday life
On easy water, life aboard is easy too: repetitive and not especially demanding despite the motion.
Strictly speaking we are sailing across the wind, which is less comfortable than having it on the quarter.
Lessons, reading, sewing — pleasant when it is presents for friends, unpleasant when it is the torn awning or sail — scrubbing mould from the walls, endless attempts to create order and comfort while also cracking open the hatches.
The attempt to create comfort therefore turns into washing salt from the entire interior with a minimum of fresh water, followed by futile hope that “next time I will definitely close the hatch before the wave arrives.”
Rain squalls have started again. Under a cloud the wind suddenly doubles, and you rush for the wheel and the sails.
The deckhand is finishing *In Search of the Castaways*. Not bad for ten years old.
She reads honestly, without skipping a single historical or geographical description. Her heroes are about to be captured by Māori cannibals. We are waiting for the resolution :).
After Jules Verne, Lada will take a break from educational reading and finish the last Harry Potter books. So far she has read only the first five.
After that the plan includes *Son of the Regiment*, *The Fourth Height*, *The Mystery of Two Oceans* and a whole pile of other interesting children's books.
Nastya and I are reading Akunin; soon we will move on to the classics.
Electricity remains in short supply because the watermaker has priority. It still produces half the water it should while consuming the same amount of power.
We have stopped fighting the mystery of “what is wrong” and simply accepted it.
As a result I write almost nothing — Andrey's laptop uses a great deal of electricity and mine is dead — and we are not editing video at all.
On the positive side, we accumulated enough water for our first proper wash. In celebration we changed the bedding and washed a few smaller things.
Speaking of video: yesterday our Travely Family YouTube channel released a trailer for a new film, *Drift*, about the first part of the endless Tasmania-to-Tahiti passage.
The coldest and hardest section was two weeks in the Tasman Sea.
Watch the trailer. The film is coming soon.
Weather and breakdowns
When we were sailing around the Southern Ocean, people periodically wrote comments such as: “The yacht needs a rest. Something is always breaking. Why are you going anywhere in that wreck?”
We had to explain that if you take a car charging across tundra and rough tracks, every system will wear more than it does on a smooth motorway.
Not everybody understood the argument.
If those who wrote that a yacht that breaks must be unprepared or weak, and that the crew must be careless, are now reading the chronicles of our ocean crossing “along the old Smolensk road”, they may have noticed that nothing is breaking except things already worn out in advance.
The sail is living through its final weeks because we could not replace it in Polynesia.
The watermaker still has questions after repair, but we could not spend €5,000 on a new one either.
Everything else is intact.
Why?
Because there is no permanent storm here like there was in the forties and fifties.
I will repeat it: a circumnavigation through the Southern Ocean and a circumnavigation on a typical route are like third grade and tenth grade at school. They are activities of completely different difficulty.
Sometimes we ourselves are stunned by what we managed to do during the previous three years and by how hard it was.
At the moment of realisation, the line attributed to the classic escapes: “Bravo, Pushkin, you son of a gun!” :)
What am I getting at?
The impossible is possible if you believe in yourself.
It would be good if every impossible thing depended only on us.
Right now we, together with many of you, want an impossible thing over which we unfortunately have no control.
All we can do is wait with hope for good news.
There is none yet.
May it begin arriving.
We wish all of you the fulfilment of your kindest dreams.
Peace and goodness.
Thank you to everyone who is with us.
A message for my mother: Mum, please write to us by email.
Sent by satellite on day 27 at sea.
Coordinates: 14°40′ N, 163°10′ E.
Enormous thanks to Vladimir K., Mikhail P. and the owner of card ending 2855 for supporting the ship's fund and the crew's morale.
Thank you to everyone who contributes to the expedition budget through YooMoney.
Thank you for the comments and messages on the website. Receiving them through our shore team makes us very happy.
You can find our real-time position under the Route tab. It shows the track from the Rockstar Iridium 360 tracker provided by MVS Telecom.