Friday, July 14, 2006

Lloyds of London Shipping Advisor Raymond Scott (right) and Professor Maxim Ivanov

Vigilant monitoring of the radio airwaves from Cayman Brac resulted in another lost sailor finding safe harbour, this time a Russian scientist on a round the world adventure.

This was the thirty-ninth rescue of vessels in distress coordinated by Lloyds of London Shipping Advisor Raymond Scott, who said he received the call from Professor Maxim Ivanov, alone aboard the sailing vessel, at 11:30 pm Tuesday night, 27 June.

En route from Cienfuegos, Cuba, heading to Jamaica, the engine of the boat had failed and, with low batteries, he had no proper navigation lights. The distress call was "intense" and the signal weak, so Mr Scott assumed he was in serious trouble.

The Russian sailor had left Cuba eleven days earlier and was running low on food and water, living mostly on rice and beans.

The Filoque was then about eight miles off the coast of Cayman Brac, and after he had been given the coordinates for the Brac - the nearest land - Professor Ivanov said that he would try to make it under sail, recalled Mr Scott.

The boat made it in two and a half hours, arriving on the north shore of the Brac around 2:00 am, where it since remained, moored opposite Mr Scott's house close to Cemetery Pier in West End.

Mr Scott is continuing to help Professor Ivanov and is searching for parts to get the engine starter for the boat repaired to continue a journey that has so far taken him from Russia to Europe, the Canary Islands, Senegal, Barbados, Grenada, Columbia, and Cuba.

Though currently traveling single handed, Professor Ivanov, started out 24 August, 2002, aboard a catamaran, the Blagovest, with eight crewmembers - psychologists, philosophers and two actor/drama writers - skippered by Captain Andrey Fomintsev.

A former lecturer in the psychology of spiritual culture at the Institute of practical psychology "Imaton", St Petersburg, Russia, Professor Ivanov and his wife, Natalia Konshina, stayed in Columbia to have their baby daughter, Ksenia.

There, they purchased the Filoque, and carried on their journey together, thought the trip from Columbia to Cuba proved the most dangerous leg of their journey so far, he said.

About one hundred miles south east of the Sister Islands, Ms Konshina spotted a ship approaching and called to her husband.

They switched on all their lights, but the ship did not change course and eventually passed about 60 feet away from them, dangerously close to ramming the Filoque or tipping it over.

The boat was in the same passage used by Cuban migrants en route to Honduras, noted Mr Scott.

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