Six smart women, officers of the Indian Navy, have set off on a voyage of discovery and adventure on the high seas.
The plan is to set sail from Goa on Independence Day, navigate their boat around the world for a good 21,600 nautical miles and weigh anchor in Goa. Crossing six seas in a span of seven months is no mean feat and the officers are aware of this. But the spirit of adventure calls.
It’s for the first time in Indian navigation history that six women are daring the high seas in a sail boat for a trip around the world. The voyage, Sagar Parikrama, a symbol of women empowerment, fraught with pride and prestige, will see the young women navigating the sailboat INSV Tarini. Twenty-eight-year-old Lt Commander Vartika Joshi from Uttarakhand is the team leader. She’s been with the Indian Navy for seven years. Others on the team are: Prathibah Jamwal, from Himachal Pradesh, P.Swati, from Vizag, S.Vijayadevi, from Manipur, B. Aishwarya, from Telangana and Payal Gupta, 26, from Dehradun.
The voyage will traverse the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, Austral Ocean, the Great Australian Bight, Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Once the sail boat leaves the Goan shore it will call on only four ports during the course of its long voyage. The first lap is scheduled to cover the distance from Goa to Western Australia. It would take between 35 to 40 days to cover the stretch. The second lap will cover the seas from Western Australia to New Zealand and is likely to cover 20 to 25 days. The third lap to the Falkland Islands is expected to take 40 days. The last lap is set to touch base in South Africa, a sail which may take close to 35 days. The team will sail back to Goa from Cape Town in South Africa.
The biggest challenge before the team will be the unpredictability of the seas, especially while tackling the waters in the Northern Hemisphere which are a zillion-fold more turbulent than the seas in the Southern hemisphere. Even though they are equipped with the latest in weather forecasting, the “as unpredictable as the weather” phenomenon will be another challenge. All said and done, the fact that they have to face it alone on a wide, wide sea with no one around to call out to is a stark reality.
The officers will be on a do-it-yourself exercise. They will have to fix whatever snags the sailboat may run into. The striking characteristic of such continental voyages is that mariners have to cross the meridian lines. It was the sail boat Mhadei which was the first to circumnavigate 1,25,000 nautical miles on a cross-continental voyage. Now, Tarini is all poised to be the second.
It was in 2009 that a team led by Cdr Dilip Dhonde that Mhadei circumnavigated a voyage with just four stops. He left Mumbai on August 19, 2009 and sailed Mhadei into the same harbor again on May 19, 2010.
Mhadei was later put on the waves by Lt Cdr Abhilash Tomy for his historic, single-handed, unassisted, non-stop circumnavigation under sail. But this time, it’s going to be a totally different maritime script. Designed in the Netherlands and built in Goa, Tarini is a 56-ft sailboat. She’s been named after the Tara-Tarini temple in Odisha and is equipped with all support to withstand strong winds and high waves.
The officers hope their daring venture will attract more women to such sea trips charged with a spirit of adventure and the quest to seek and learn more. It’s after two years of rigorous training that began in April 2015 that Vartika and team setting sail. They were trained in navigation, seamanship, communication, and metrology in Kochi and Mumbai. They did a trial sail from Vizag to Goa in February 2016.
In July 2016, in a second trial run, they crossed 4,000 nautical miles to touch Mauritius and clocked 5,000 nautical miles from Goa to Cape Town in yet another trial. In January 2017, two from the team took part in the Cape to Rio race.
Read the original in Malayalam here
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