Tristan da Cunha and Weather Anomalies

Tristan da Cunha and weather anomalies. What bliss it is to be at anchor! Sleeping like a baby. From six in the morning, I’m bursting with energy for great deeds, such as washing out cupboards and drying mattresses, doing the small laundry and making big plans. But in fact, on our first morning off the coast, while everyone is asleep, I make myself coffee—banned during passages because it doesn’t agree with me when the boat is rolling—and go out on deck to greet the sun. The cliffs, albatrosses, bushes and... I nearly wrote waterfalls... greet it with me. But someone switched the waterfalls off overnight. At first I thought that once the sun went down, the glaciers above stopped melting, and that after midday the silver streams would flow again. But no. They won’t. Apparently, our two waterfalls are purely seasonal spring affairs, drying up along with the melting mountain snow. During the day, the chickens came swimming over again, as the captain affectionately calls the sooty albatrosses. Their yellow-billed cousins are busy circling above the sea and incubating eggs in their nests, while the sooties appear to be child-free. And fishing does nothing for them either. Otherwise, why would they hurl themselves like lunatics at every helping of onion skins thrown overboard from the stern? And here they are now, sitting with yellow bands around their left legs. Waiting for lemon peel or onion skins—I’m not even sure which they dislike more. “Oh! Marinochka, fancy some chicken?” “Yeah,” I say. “Then let’s shoot a couple.” “And who’s going to pluck them?” “We’ve got a blowtorch.” “Nah, let them live. Look how trusting they are, not afraid of people at all—how could we?” “Well, some MacNabbs shot birds like these with his carbine.” “But that was MacNabbs. And when was that? They had no other food.” “And us?” “We did!” I open a tin of sweetcorn. We’re doing just fine as vegetarians. Besides, I’m no hunter—not even much of a fisherman. I feel sorry for them, God’s creatures; let them live. Incidentally, there is less and less wildlife in the sea and along the coasts. Soon humanity will have scooped every last resource out of the ocean and the bowels of the earth, and we’ll be eating money. There’ll still be plastic, of course, in the form of bottles that once held everything under the sun. Plastic is eternal. Our great-grandchildren will already have gone to God, and it will still be lying under a bush in the forest, winking at our descendants with its red cap: “Greetings from your great-great-grandfather-rrr!” If there are still any bushes left, or descendants.... We watched the film Planet Ocean the other day. A beautiful, spectacular film. Whales swimming, shoals of fish wheeling in glittering spheres. And once again it was painfully sad and frightening to see what we humans are doing to the environment. As if there were no tomorrow. I remembered WWF Russia’s recommendations, “How to Reduce Your Ecological Footprint.” I did an internship there while writing my thesis at Saint Petersburg State University. Look it up online, guys. We need to—really, really need to. Because if not us, then who? The unforgettable Jules Verne wrote that in the 1860s there were countless seals on Tristan da Cunha. Before that, he said, there had been whales beyond number, but they had all been slaughtered even then. Well, here’s the latest: now the seals have been slaughtered too. We spotted only one today off the coast of Tristan da Cunha, swimming quietly some distance behind us. That was when we were fleeing around the corner from the weather anomalies—if a round island can even have corners... And the wind at Tristan da Cunha is having a wild time. It’s blowing from the west, edging slightly north. We are anchored in a spot where the high island gives us solid protection from any gusts. But since yesterday a massive front has been advancing from the west, and it is blowing hard beneath it. The whitecaps are positively dancing. There is wind on the southern side too, and whitecaps there as well. The north-westerly front has driven in a swell that kicks the yacht in the stern. But the wind is blowing from the south-east, so we are stern-to the swell and bow-to the wind. And the whitecaps are drawing ever closer. 3 October “Andryukha, come and look—the monster from yesterday is coming in, it’s practically hanging right over us now. And the whitecaps are kicking us under the stern.” Along the edge of the front’s shadow on the water, spindrift is racing along. Across the water, that is. It twists, sparkling in the sunlight, and forms a delicate mini-tornado, broad at the base. The first time you see something like that, you don’t know it will disintegrate into crystal spray a couple of minutes later. And you think: what if this grows into a killer typhoon—and where on earth do we run!? When we were sailing for Colombia through the outer edge of Hurricane Irma in the Caribbean Sea, we saw a powerful waterspout astern. Thank God it didn’t head towards us, but passed by. That put us on edge. Terrifying. This time no waterspouts developed, but several of those twisted veils raced along the edge of the front. After breakfast, the foaming crests reached us. In a 40-knot gust, we smartly weighed anchor and fled farther around the corner. We reached the whitecaps and took another look at the forest; the place with the forest is marked as Sandy Point on the chart. Under the canopy, we spotted a white cottage and cows in a meadow. The only access is from the water, which means the cows must once have been brought here by sea as calves. And that means someone lives in the cottage. And there is water not only in the sheer seasonal waterfall, but on level ground too. Those, more or less, were the investigations and deductions made by our young sailor while Lady Mary cruised along the coast in search of a new refuge. We tucked ourselves closer to the cliff, under the nominal shelter of two projecting headlands. The wind, wrapping around the island from both sides, misses only a small triangular patch, and that is where we hid. Feeling our way towards a place to anchor, we came very close in, to a depth of four metres. This quite harmless-looking little beach might prove difficult for our dinghy to land on. Judging by the curling breaker, the bottom drops away steeply just off the shore. And if the dinghy gets caught in that breaker, it could capsize. We have a post from Cabo Verde entitled How We Capsized in the Dinghy. No one is eager to repeat that merry experience in cold water. So instead of an illegal landing, we decided to repair the sail. It turned out that on this side of the island there are waterfalls that have not been switched off, and very full-flowing ones at that. Beautiful, soaring steeply upwards, and wild. It seems there is no one on the island except birds and... a few cows. Oh no, there are flies too. Their wings fold neatly along their backs, like those of a tsetse fly. It transpired that during the passage, a little squid had leapt onto the deck at night and become mummified beneath the harpoon shaft. And the captain decided to dry it. The flies liked the idea best of all. We had to throw it away. The flies are still crawling hopefully over the coachroof, feeding on invisible molecules of squid slime. But our sooty albatross-chickens were not tempted by the mummy. 4 October, morning In a couple of hours, the savage wind will curl around our corner, and we need to leave. The anchor chain is scraping and jerking; it seems to have snagged on rocks. There is a place on the south-western side of the island called Stony Beach, but also known as The Anchor Stuck Fast. Let’s hope this beach does not have to be given the same name after our visit.... A cloud covers the sky in gloom, and the near-gale that has besieged Edinburgh of the Seven Seas throughout all three days of our stay at Tristan da Cunha is reaching our secluded corner too. Gusts of up to 40 knots suddenly tear in, and on that cheerful note, heeling together with the yacht, we lean into a wall of rain. The captain encourages us: “Don’t worry, girls. It’ll blow 50 knots in a moment and we won’t need to weigh anchor—it’ll all happen by itself.” And in the next gust, it blew 50.... To be continued. Our heartfelt thanks to Sergey D. for his indirect participation in the expedition and for topping up the ship’s kitty through Yasobe.ru/na/TravelyFamily! You are a tremendous source of motivation. Thank you so much! The whole crew sends you our warmth! Many thanks to Pavel from the Travel Library for his letter, his warm words of support, and his regards! We hope we don’t end up becalmed on the approach to Cape Town.... Friends, as always, we eagerly await your greetings and comments. We are heading out into the ocean again, and receiving your messages during a passage is the happiest moment of our day. Stay well, and thank you for being with us! Thanks to MVS Telecom JSC, you can follow the progress of the First Russian Round-the-World Expedition, Three Great Capes with Children, on our website under the Route tab, where the track from IRIDIUM is displayed. The same map, with the track and weather, is available at bit.ly/iridium360