The headwind is getting stronger. Not everyone can handle an evening movie. The deckhand puts a mandarin on her forehead: — Look, I even made myself a third eye so I can watch with it when the other two are tired.
The main difference between this long passage through the Roaring Forties and all our previous ones
Back then we were sailing with the steady westerly wind that circles the globe. On this passage from Australia to Polynesia, all the following winds stayed between Tasmania and the southern tip of New Zealand, where they drowned in an endless storm. We had our share of fun there (see the previous posts), then turned north and entered the zone of cyclones stuck behind New Zealand. The wind keeps shifting, and the weather map looks like a schematic aster flower with arrows pointing in every direction. For some reason, most of the way those arrows have been hitting us right on the nose. In 24 days we have had only three days like today. A day in which you can actually live. Cook and eat while watching a documentary, let the deckhand do her schoolwork and take biology notes, let Nastya watch video lessons without suffering, and let me write.
There will be an article about a legend of the sailing world
Thanks to the right weather, something important finally happened! I have at last finished a difficult interview with John Sanders, a legend of world sailing. At the age of 81 he returned from his eleventh circumnavigation straight to the Australian yacht club where we were staying. I decided to interview him and, thank the gods, used a voice recorder. John spoke so indistinctly that in person I could catch only the general meaning and missed the details. Then I needed help from friends: several acquaintances of mine — translators who have lived for years with Australian husbands (Lena and Lyuda, thank you!) — tried to decipher the recording. The legendary sailor's speech was so hard to make out that people's patience usually ran out around minute ten of the hour-long recording. Only heroic Alla Salem had enough courage and sense of responsibility to finish this titanic job and produce a proper transcript of the entire interview. Thank you, Alla, our saviour! Then I translated the wall of English text, cut away the excess and, in the nauseating conditions of this voyage, reshaped it into an article. It was the hardest interview in ten years of journalism. It will soon appear in Yacht Russia, the country's leading sailing magazine. It will include wonderful photographs by our Yulia Galushina, taken deep inside the yacht on which the heroic John Sanders sailed around the world during the pandemic.
Other news: a headwind storm is coming
The easy life will end tonight. A 20-knot wind will start blowing straight in our face, and a day later the real thing will hit us. The farther north we can break away today, the less of the storm will roll over us. We have only a few hours left in which we can make northing; after that we will be able to go only east. It is hard to think about it without shuddering, because we have already had more than enough strong headwinds on this voyage. Another piece of news: a few days ago, in this same headwind, water flooded the heater exhaust, and now it will not start — it only smokes. So we will keep sailing without heat until we reach warmth. We are about to cross 40 degrees south. Hooray! — I already go out to reef the sails without a hat! the captain announced as he came down from the deck. On a cloudy day it is 14–15°C outside; in sunshine it reaches +20. Today it is raining. We were sailing under a full genoa (the large headsail) and full mainsail. We are reefing for the night. We will write the continuation tomorrow, once again from a headwind.
Guys, thank you to everyone who is with us! We are always delighted to receive your comments, forwarded by our shore team, Sergey Yakubenko. And we want to publicly hug another saint, Petr Rogov, who is fighting a server problem that has already brought our website down twice in a week. Hugs from 41°03' S, 177°02' W! There are 1,800 nautical miles on the great-circle course to the first atolls where we may finally be able to breathe out. In reality we may cover twice as much if the headwind does not end.
Sent via satellite communication. Thank you to everyone who contributes to the ship's fund through YooMoney and PayPal! To see where we are right now, how we are sailing, the weather and our speed, open the Route tab. It shows the track from the Rockstar Iridium 360 tracker provided by MVS Telecom.