A Winter Apart, or Siberian Frosts Without the Captain

#lifeaftercircumnavigation November 2022 I promised to write about how we’re surviving in a Siberian village while the captain resuscitates the yacht in the Philippines. Our house in the Altai Mountains waited eight years for its owner. Can you imagine how many jobs had piled up that needed a man’s hand? Everything from the hydronic underfloor heating system, where the pressure needs balancing, airlocks need eliminating, filters need replacing, and heating elements need repairing, to gaps in the walls; buying, chopping and carrying firewood and coal; sealing and insulating everything—from doorways and window openings to the gaps between the timbers, as well as insulating the floor from the basement side. And the first -35°C frosts arrived before the calendar winter had even begun. There are three of us living here: the young sailor, who spends half the day studying and also goes ballroom dancing and skiing, and my mother, who fractured her spine. I brought her here to live with me. Nastya is in Novosibirsk now, staying with her other grandmother. She’s studying and dancing. The bitter frosts have eased, although it still gets down to -28°C at night. In the mornings, the house is no longer +12°C but a whole +16°C, and if I get up around five or six and stuff the firebox full of wood and coal, it won’t drop to 12 degrees at all ). My morning routine: rake out the hot coals along with the ash and clinker. Sweep, scrape out every last corner, carry it all outside, light the stove again, scrub the soot off my hands and face, and throw my work clothes in the wash. I managed it all in two hours. Three buckets of ash had accumulated in three days. That’s because when it was -30°C, we kept the stove going almost around the clock. I brought in the coal, the young sailor brought the firewood... breakfast, school, my book. Trips to the hospital: there are some health concerns. I only figured out how to warm up the car after it had frozen solid. First I scrounged extension cords from the neighbours, then I got the car thawed out and drove to the district centre for a 50-metre extension lead. Lada and I covered the coal pile with a tarpaulin, so there’s hope we won’t need the crowbar now. Finger-wide gaps have been packed with twenty rolls of jute tape. Holes in the old expanding foam have been foamed up again. For the third month running, a jigsaw has been lying on the coffee table—in place of a bedside book. I cut boards into fancy shapes and use them to cover the foamed window reveals. Huge amounts of heat are escaping through the windows—the rubber seals have dried out—and through the ground-floor roof opening onto the loggia. That’s an area of 2.5 by 10 metres. We’ll buy foil-faced thermal insulation, and when Nastya comes back from Novosibirsk, the two of us will line the ceiling with it. It’ll be all metallic, like a submarine. We’re making plans for sea and land. The main thing is that The Road to a Dream—the first book about our circumnavigation—is very actively in the works. It will come out this spring. An illustrated gift edition will be released at the beginning of next year. I have to make it happen. It’s going to be a really fantastic book. I’ll soon tell you how to buy it. Meanwhile, the question is: when do I sleep, and do I even need to? And don’t ask whether there’s time for walks and yoga ). 23 December As of today, this is how the crew and yacht are distributed between the hemispheres: In the Northern Hemisphere are the girls and I, as well as our Lady Mary. Admittedly, she’s a long way south—she has stayed in the Philippines in the care of our kind friends @artkoz and is slowly being repaired. The captain is in the Southern Hemisphere. A week ago, he ended up in Australia. Cap flew into our beloved Perth for twenty-four hours—the city where we lived for a year because of Covid. He spent the night at our best friends’ house, then headed off to the east of the country. He’s the only one of us who has ever been/is there. He checked in at Brisbane and the Gold Coast and is now preparing for a sailing project. Soon the captain will head out into the ocean. Until May. We’ll share the details as soon as the time is right. Since autumn, the young sailor and I have been stoking the stove like mad and caulking gaps in our mountain village; the frosts began in mid-November. Whenever the bitter cold was switched off, the young sailor learned to skate and ski. I was writing—and am still writing—the book, while Nastya was studying and dancing in Novosibirsk. Siberia For the first time, Nastya celebrated her birthday without us ). The three of us met in Barnaul, halfway between Altai and the capital of Siberia, and held a heart-kindling gathering at Club W. From there we raced off to Novosibirsk, armed with skis, three pairs of skates, and Napoleonic plans: “We’ll attend a real school in the mornings, then our geography school online in the evenings. At weekends—the skating rink and the ski trail! And it would be nice to go to the theatre too...” Our plans went completely down the drain because the young sailor ran a temperature of 39.5°C and was flat on her back for a week. Yesterday she got up for the first time, and I went down with it. She’ll physically go to school on another visit. Of the plans that haven’t yet fallen through, the Napoleonic ones remain: Ilya Averbukh’s Ice Show and Vladimir Kuklachev’s New Year’s fairy tale with cats. And we still haven’t celebrated Nastya’s birthday together. We can’t let twenty-one candles go to waste ). And then—into the night, a blizzard, and ten hours on the road. Meanwhile, back at our house, Sasha—the stove man and handyman—is languishing in captivity. We need to set him free. New Year is almost here. Good health shall prevail! Frosts, hold off for a while ). Will you follow the captain out on the ocean? What interests you more—the captain’s sea stories or the girls’ Siberian tales? Or all of it together?