Day 83
The wind is favourable, it changed to North-Westerly for a day and I am trying to move South. This morning I was at 46’30 degrees latitude, and Cape Horn is at 56’00. It is almost 10 degrees to the South, or 600 nautical miles. The difficulty lies in that with the approach of Autumn, there is less and less Northerly winds and more cold Antarctic Southerly winds. Similarly, back home in Russia, where Autumn brings winds from the Arctic (more accurately, the northerly winds bring Autumn with them). So now I have another problem added to the growing list of issues – how to get to Cape Horn in predominantly Southerly winds?
These past days have been relatively calm, ignoring the cold, torrential rain. I’ve read your messages send via the Iridium 360 satellite system. I thank you for your many kind words and wishes, and ask for your forgiveness that I am unable to answer all of them.
A frequently asked question seems to be – why and for what are you doing this? Why are you crossing the Southern Ocean in a rowboat in the 21st century?
I guess the question isn’t directed at myself alone, but also to the sponsors whose logos are visible on across the sides of the boat. When it comes to me, it’s easy. I am doing this because it’s my way of life. May my sponsors forgive me (although they already know this) – I go into the ocean to pray. This is my seclusion, and the boat is my cell. I don’t get paid for my expeditions. How can you get paid for crossing the ocean in a rowboat, circumnavigating the globe in a hot-air balloon, or climbing Everest? You pray, so that God will allow you to fulfil your endeavours and for the Ocean to let you pass through. And when you find yourself in a roaring ocean in a 9-metre boat and there is nobody around you for thousands of miles, you pray very diligently. It doesn’t come that way in the city. On my return from expeditions, I paint and write books. That is how I make my living.
If I am moving along my course right now, it means some people see the need of it. Try to complete a project nobody needs and you will not achieve anything. I have tried it myself. This voyage was needed for those people who designed, built, and fitted out the boat – this is the professional challenge for them, too; as well as for my sponsors financing the construction of the boat; for the organisations who provided the equipment; and for all those who wanted to become a part of this story.
On such expeditions there is room for spiritual work as well as technology. Here, 83 days into this unforgiving journey I’m continuing to test these expeditionary equipment samples: pliable solar batteries; satellite communication phone and text; a new type of autopilot; a desalination apparatus; equipment for extreme weather conditions, etc. A rowboat in the Southern Ocean is a laboratory, and I am the test-pilot.
I have many projects in development: a flight into the stratosphere in a hot-air balloon; double circumnavigation of the Earth in a hot-air balloon; a journey into the Mariana Trench; a solar-powered airplane circumnavigation of the Earth; the erection of a statue to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker Mysgornovsky, etc. But there are projects which do not garner support, which I am forced to delay. I never become upset at my sponsors for not supporting an idea. It means it didn’t interest anybody except me, and I have to accept that.
Often young people approach me in Moscow and say that if they had sponsors like mine, they would also be going on expeditions. My dears, I don’t have any administrative resources and nobody owes me anything. Same as for anyone else, it takes me years, even decades to prepare for an expedition. For example, I started preparing for my circumnavigation of the globe in a hot-air balloon in 2000, only able to complete it in 2016. I dreamt up the idea of taking a rowboat around Cape Horn in 2008, when I was circumnavigating Antarctica on the yacht “Alye Parusa”, only beginning the attempt in 2018, ten years later. And so it has been for my whole life. It is unfortunate that a person only lives about 70, or in good health 80 years.
Therefore, if at the present moment I find myself at the following coordinates: 46’30 South and 123’23 West, – it means that this was needed and required by a large number of people.
Greetings to all.
Fedor Konyukhov