The yacht "Apostol Andrey": February and March news

Messages from the board of the yacht "Apostol Andrey":

March 3, 2005
The yacht "Apostol Andrey" interrupts its circumnavigation.

Today, at 3.00 in the morning the yacht lost its ability to operate due to the breakage of the steering control. The yacht had to lie to. When the day start the team examined the steering control and found out that they had lost the rudder blade. The crew started to make a temporary rudder, which would allow them to reach the nearest port. But they did not manage to complete the work before night, tomorrow we plan to fasten a new bladder and to try it in action.

There was made a decision to sail to the New Zealand – the nearest land to our yacht, separated from us by 1300 miles. Unfortunately now the yacht is situated already to the east of the New Zealnd. We have to return to the north-west opposite dominating direction of the winds. In all other respects everything is OK on board. The crew is healthy and does not lose presence of mind. We have enough supplies of fuel, food and water.

February 11, 2005
More than Cook…

One more landmark has been left behind: the 120-th meridian, the third of the Antarctica circle. James Cook had crossed approximately the same number of meridians to the south of the 60 the parallel during his second voyage (when he was sent specially for searching the South Continent).

Cook did not discovered the land and came to conclusion that this probable continent was inaccessible for seafarers and could not be of any use for mankind, but he was mistaken. 45 years later the Russia expedition of Bellinsghauzen and Lazarev reached the shores of the Antarctica and in XX century the regular investigations of the sixth continent would start.

But even nowadays there are a lot of white spots in these latitudes. In the sailing directions one can see the following brief information: "In the coastal zone of the described region there was actually no survey".

The 120-th meridian crosses the shore of the Antarctica in the area of the shelf glacier of the Moscow University. A stripe of icebergs stretches from the coast to the north. This is indicated in the sailing directions with a note "basing on the data of 1963"…

February 9, 2005
During a month to the south of the 60-th parallel.

Today is one month since the yacht "Apostol Andrey" crossed the 60-th parallel. During this month the yacht has left astern 3666 miles and passed over 112 meridians.

The results are not too encouraging – we sailed more miles along the general course, but we had left less meridians than it was planned. This was the consequence of very rare occurrence of favourable winds. There were only seven days during this month when the rate of the wind exceeded 10 m/sec. And we met a lot of calms (to our great surprise). We met the last one on previous Sunday, when the yacht "Apostol Andrey" did not manage to sail even 50 miles in daytime. All favourable winds are weak. Fresh wind as usual are adverse – you have to traverse, what makes our route longer, but does not bring us closer to our goal. But we had the following things in abundance: icebergs, fogs and snow. Yesterday the snow storm covered our rigging and sparring, filled up the dinghy.

The magnetic declination reached 90 degrees and the compass's arrow points now at west-east instead of north-south. To be more exact, its second end points at the South Magnetic Pole, the region where we are going, and now there are less than 700 miles separating us.

Yours sincerely
Nikolay Litau

14.03.2005