Translated material
16 year old captain
A shipwrecked young American woman is about to sail around the world again.
16-year-old California resident Abby Sunderland, who six months ago went on a solo circumnavigation of the world (and almost got into the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest traveler to circumnavigate the globe), was rescued during a storm by French fishermen three thousand kilometers off the coast of Australia . As Agence France-Presse reported last Saturday, on that day the girl was safely taken to Reunion Island (a French possession in the southern Indian Ocean). Here Abby was met by her brother Zach - by the way, also an avid adventurer: the 17-year-old boy recently successfully went on a solo trip around the world. Abby, who decided to follow her brother's example, does not regret that she only managed to go halfway. “I enjoyed every minute of being at sea,” the traveler told reporters upon arrival at Reunion. As for the storm that seriously damaged Abby’s yacht, then, as the girl stoically noted, “any sailor, going out to the open sea, must be prepared for this kind of risk.”The young American, who set off on her yacht Wild Eyes from the Californian Marina del Rey on January 23, encountered unexpected obstacles more than once during her journey. In early February, the ship had to make an unscheduled stop in one of the Mexican ports, after which Miss Sunderland headed back to California in order to restart the non-stop circumnavigation of the world. However, this stop was not the last - she had to be laid up in Cape Town, as a result of which the traveler had to go ashore for a long time. Meanwhile, it turned out that Abby would no longer be able to set the record. On May 15, her peer, 16-year-old Australian Jessica Watson, completed her voyage, whose journey took 210 days.
In early June, which is known to be the beginning of winter and stormy season in the Southern Hemisphere, Abby Sunderland contacted her parents and reported rapidly deteriorating weather and rough seas. During the conversation, the satellite radio connection was interrupted, which led to suspect the worst. Search ships from Australia and the aforementioned French island of Reunion were sent to search for the Wild Eyes yacht. On June 10, the Australian Coast Guard recorded a distress signal. Soon Abby managed to call her parents by satellite phone - the girl reported that the yacht was caught in a storm, a 9-meter wave broke the mast, and after the storm the ship lost control and began to drift. Soon after the traveler made contact, the yacht was spotted from the air by an Australian Coast Guard aircraft. Abby signaled with a flare gun. After 40 hours, a French fishing ship approached the ship in distress, which delivered Abby Sunderland to the nearest land - one of the islands of the Kerguelen archipelago, and from there a French patrol ship took the traveler to the inhabited island of Reunion.
The wrecked 40-foot yacht had to be abandoned in the open sea. Upon her return, the 16-year-old yachtswoman plans to write a book about her travels, in which she plans to tell in detail how a teenager feels when he finds himself alone on the ocean. “I’m definitely going to sail around the world again,” Abby promises. True, the girl admits, she does not yet know when she will have such an opportunity.
Abby Sunderland is not the youngest conqueror of the seas. Last December, 14-year-old Laura Dekker from the Dutch city of Utrecht, who had disappeared from her home the day before, was found on the island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean Sea. The police found out that an 8-meter yacht belonging to the girl was moored in the island’s port, and the fugitive’s parents stated that 3.5 thousand euros had disappeared from the family bank account. In August of the same year, the Utrecht court prohibited Laura from going on a solo circumnavigation. However, the traveler did not want to be under the supervision of the authorities in her parents' house, and ran away in order to set a world record. The young navigator’s justification can be the fact that she was born not on land, but on board her parents’ yacht, which was cruising off the coast of New Zealand.