Ukrainian ship rescues Russian trimaran. So the law of the sea beats war

The law of the sea is stronger than any war. In the South Pacific, a Ukrainian manned ship rescued the Russian trimaran “Russian Ocean Way” which, following a storm, was drifting ungovernable with a broken rudder.

Ukrainian ship rescues Russian trimaran

The inflatable sailing trimaran, engaged in circumnavigating the globe in the footsteps of the great Russian navigators, had set sail with its crew of three Russians in July 2021 from Kronstadt. He had traveled more than 13,000 miles so far: at the end of February, he had set sail from the Chilean port of Talcahuano in the direction of Easter Island. In the middle of the South Pacific in mid-March, the storm and rudder failure, impossible to repair.

All seemed lost, the South American coast was now more than 1,000 miles away, the crew radioed SOS. Responding was the Panamanian-flagged commercial vessel Sounion (a bulk carrier, i.e., a ship used to carry non-liquid, non-unitarized cargo in containers or pallets) with a Ukrainian-Philippine crew.

Rescue not easy

After a five-hour search at sea, made even more difficult by weather conditions, with waves more than three meters high, the rescue was successful: “To get to the ladder dropped from the deck, it was necessary to wait until the trimaran managed to parse alongside the ship. We had only a few seconds to grab the biscagline and jump on it” recounted trimaran skipper Stanislav Berezkin. The operation took about two hours-the fact that the Ukrainian captain of the Sounion spoke good Russian made it easier.

Once the crew was recovered, the Ukrainian ship hooked up and tried to tow the trimaran, but there was nothing they could do. As TASS reports, the multihull sank. The Sounion s then headed toward the coast of Chile. Only after the operation was over did the Russian Ocean Way crew realize they had been rescued by Ukrainian sailors. The captain of the Sounion, who asked to remain anonymous, is originally from Mariupol, which he abandoned as a result of Russian bombing.

A Russian crew member told reporters, “I was in a place where there are no races and nationalities, where you are helped regardless of the language you speak, the color of your skin. At sea, we are all at the same distance from God, at arm’s length. The one who saves you“.

The Sounion arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile, on March 25.

The Russian sailors told TASS that they will continue their circumnavigation in April aboard a catamaran (also inflatable) loaned to them by another Russian sailor, Dmitry Trubitsyn.

The circumnavigation of Russian Ocean Way

On July 1, 2021, Siberian navigators Evgeny Kovalevsky and Stanislav Berezkin set off along the route of the first Russian expeditions around the world in the 19th century: Ivan Krusenstern (1803-1806), Yuri Lisyansky (1803-1806), Otto Kotzebue (1815-1818, 1823-1826), Vasily Golovnin (1817-1819), Fyodor Litke (1826-1829), Thaddeus Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev (1819-1921). The Tomsk Regional Section of the Russian Geographical Society’s international project “Following the Russian circumnavigators” is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of Krusenstern and the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica by Russian sailors.