Breaking Records for Breakdowns There has been no time for posts or letters. Here is a list of our activities over the past few days: an attempt to repair the engine and revive the heater, repairing the freshwater pump, repeatedly emptying out our three-cubic-metre hold—the full package; rescuing the stay, the sail, and then the stay again. Plus little things such as replacing the windvane steering cable, which required the captain to hang over the stern in a harness twice. Add to that the household chores, surviving the post-storm swell, lessons, and bath day.
Sails of Our Dreams In the previous report, the inner forestay parted because the stainless-steel shackle holding it had snapped. The steel had corroded inside the yacht’s hull and, judging by the colour of the fracture, had been hanging on by a thread for quite some time. The risk of losing the mast was minimal because we have two forestays. Thank heavens it broke after the storm, so we did not have to catch the sail together with the rest of the rig in the churning water, at the risk of leaving part of the crew behind in it. The jib moved into the forward cabin until better times, turning it back into a storeroom rather than a children’s cabin. In place of the broken shackle, Andrey threaded an ultra-strong Dyneema-type line through the holes. Supposedly, if you could find a fulcrum, you could use it to turn the Earth. A thicker piece of Dyneema replaced part of a shroud for us during our South Atlantic passage.
“Hold the stay!” the captain ordered as soon as we had taken down the sail. Hanging from the masthead, the stay looked like an eleven-metre pendulum. I tried to hang from the furler, which was acting as the bob. In the swell, the pendulum kept lunging beyond the guardrails. Jumping in time with the high swell, I shrieked:
“Aaah! Andryusha, I’m going to fly awaaay!”
Andryusha decided to add more weight to the bob, so now Nastya and I were both hanging from it. Our task was to pull the whole assembly down so the yacht’s hull and the stay could be secured together with strong line. We had to hang with great dedication and mostly to no avail. I looked like a koala. I already had bruises on the insides of my legs. Nastya pressed down from above with her hands and body. And there we all were, swinging together—a very comical trio indeed. By lunchtime, after two hours of working as a koala, the job was done, although the arrangement looked flimsier than it had with the shackle. Nastya and I suggested not putting the sail back up after we had furled it and dragged it into the forward cabin. But the skipper ordered, “Bring it!” And our brave jib soared skywards once again. We withdrew to put compresses on our bruises, while the captain stayed close by to keep watch. An hour later, a jaunty whistle rang out from the deck. We rushed out just as we were:
“What happened??”
The ultra-strong line had snapped. The stay became a pendulum once again, and the sail was hurriedly hauled down from it onto the deck.
Sisyphean Labour, Part 2 And so I was a koala again, Nastya was the one pressing down, and Andrey was tying the stay with a thicker Dyneema line. For the next two hours, sometimes laughing, sometimes whining weakly with exhaustion, we pulled the stay towards the deck. Who would have thought it could be so difficult? We rigged tackles to the bowsprit and anchor windlass, and things began to move along more briskly. The sail was neatly furled again and dragged off to the bow. The midshipman and I managed to persuade the skipper to make do without the jib for the time being. The captain still had to climb into the hold. We opened up the yacht’s innards, and a procession of jerrycans and bicycles once again crawled through the saloon. The engine and starter once again refused to respond to the captain’s coaxing, and by the time we had put the hold back together and sat down to dinner, it was already dark. Trembling hands poured tea, bodies anticipated sleep, and the night promised to be calm.
11 p.m. Nastya and I had been blissfully enjoying our beds for exactly two minutes while the captain made his rounds on deck.
“Girls, get dressed. The line has snapped.”
That very Dyneema which had once managed to serve as a shroud had now failed to hold the stay and had chafed through. And it all began again. For the umpteenth time, Andryukha rummaged through our stores in search of anything even vaguely fit to serve as a shackle and found a piece of metal of a different design. The metal contraption was modified with a hammer and a winch handle until it assumed a suitable shape. We hung from the stay like koalas. Andrey brought its lower end, the deck, and the shackle together at a single point in space. To do this, he had to slacken the backstay. The deck lights turned Lady Mary into a tiny firefly in the black infinity of the ocean. And on the bow of that firefly, Nastya and I dangled, telling ourselves that this would not last all night and that “thank God, the weather is calm.” Our young sailor waited patiently for us in the wheelhouse so we could read him the evening news from Prostokvashino, but eventually fell asleep before we returned.
By midnight, strange as it seemed, the modified shackle was firmly in place. Another hour of adjustments and tidying up on deck, and we could try to sleep again.
The next day, the holds were opened up once more. The captain made his fifth attempt to resuscitate the engine and fixed glitches in the bilge pump and watermaker.
Force Majeure and a Change of Plans In the morning, the freshwater pump failed again. Once more, the hold had to be emptied down to the very bottom. Something had broken inside a cast component of the pump—the pressure-drop activation switch. The captain thought for a long time and came up with a “push-button” system. He installed switches for the pump on the wall beside the basins in one of the heads and in the galley. The wires were taped to the wall with electrical tape. This improvised push-button drive should get us as far as Australia. By nightfall, the hold had been put back together, the saloon looked like a little home again, and Nastya had made lasagne.
So far today, in honour of the holiday, nothing has broken. But the day is not over yet. It is now absolutely clear that we will sail straight past Kerguelen because the heater and engine are out of action. At this time of year, temperatures there range from +1 to a sweltering +9. Every 3–4 degrees of latitude brings about a six-degree drop in air temperature. Accordingly, after moving from 45° to 42°, we now have +16 in the wheelhouse in the mornings instead of the previous +11. And we are doing quite well without the heater. At 49° latitude, of course, it is possible to survive without one, provided you resign yourself to streams of condensation running down the windows and walls, and to wearing mittens and boots indoors and even in bed. But what do you do without sun? Unable to recharge the batteries with the engine, the yacht would lose power in the fog, leaving us without navigation or communications.
So, we are crossing the southern Indian Ocean non-stop. Australia is 2,310 nautical miles away as the crow flies. Today is the thirtieth day of the passage. A whale has just come by to congratulate the captain. The yacht smells of Nastya’s apple cake :).
Happy Defender of the Fatherland Day! Dear men! Congratulations on your holiday! May your eyes shine and everything you undertake go smoothly; may you always have a Muse and inspiration, health and love! We wish you a strong home front, dependable friends, and tender girlfriends! And may you never—do you hear us, never—have to take up arms. Peace and kindness to everyone! And peace again!
From Your Comments In honour of the holiday, a gift arrived from shore HQ with your comments :). Thank you for your warmth and support, friends! The moment when, after a communications session, the captain calls everyone into the wheelhouse with a cry of “Morning post!” is one of the best moments of our days at sea. Hugs from the whole crew!
Do We Have Internet? We only have access to email: one satellite mailbox for everyone, through a single device. We can use it to request and receive weather forecasts and letters from loved ones, and to send publications to the website. No pictures, links, or attachments. Reports from the site are posted automatically to the VK group and, I am afraid, without a photograph. The magical Katya reposts them manually to the Facebook group. She also adds an archive photograph. Sergey, our eyes and ears, sends us comments from the VK and Facebook groups. We cannot access the internet from the ocean in the usual sense of the word. Or rather, it is theoretically possible, but it costs astronomical sums—and we are sailors, not astronauts
Risk.ru and Olga Buzova This comment on Facebook left us puzzled: “So, Marina has been likened to Olga Buzova over on Risk!... Marina, settle this for us: is Buzova a compliment or an insult?...” We had a good laugh. We asked Nastya: Who is Buzova? I cannot for the life of me imagine how, cut off from the internet, I managed to earn such a comparison. The irony of the “compliment” is that we have been without internet for a month now, and my previous activity on risk.ru was very modest. Perhaps someone is creating things under our pseudonym? 🙂 If that creativity earns us even 5% of Buzova’s monetisation, that would be awesome. And we would—Ta-Da!—repair the boat from stem to stern, buy genuinely waterproof suits, and visit our mothers more often than once every three years. ...Although Risk is not really the platform for such experiments.
As Andrey says, thank God we have not appeared on Boats and Yachts yet—we would learn plenty of kind things about ourselves there too (please, just do not start exploring Boats and Yachts under our name, all right? :)).
May your day be a good one!
Thank You! We thank the following for helping sustain the expedition via PayPal and Yandex Money: Mikhail M., Yan A., and an unknown sender. Friends, you have become part of our shore team, and we appreciate it enormously!
Until next time. Transmitted by satellite.
Our position in the Southern Ocean is in the “Route” tab, from the Iridium tracker supplied by MVS-Telecom.