Schooner seeks ocean adventures, plus some positive publicity for Ukraine
gaged on a bold adventure: They have sailed the 29.4-meter schooner Batkivshchyna much of the way around the world.
By now they have sailed a distance equivalent to 1.5 times the circumference of the earth, from Kyiv to Sydney on a mission that combines high-seas daring with cultural outreach: The boat stops in every port it can to spread the word about the country whose flag it sails: Ukraine.
Sailing in the blood
For the ship’s captain, 67-year-old Dmytro Biriukovich, sailing is a “lifetime hobby,” which many members have his family have been involved in.
“There are a lot of people like us – if you have a boat, you’re a captain. We’ve always lived by the river, and we love the water,” says Kyiv-born Biriukovich.
He and his two older brothers built their first boat from wood after World War II, and grew up sailing on their beloved Dnipro. Later, with the help of instruction books, they began to build more sophisticated vessels. Their professional skills helped: Biriukovich and his wife Nina were both construction engineers, and Biriukovich’s brother Kostyantyn was an architect.
In 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev legalized small-scale entrepreneurship in the Soviet Union, the Biriukoviches opened a small family construction cooperative, which dabbled in shipbuilding. They funneled their profits into their labor of love, building the Batkivshchyna. The name means “Fatherland” in the Ukrainian language.
The hull of the graceful gaff-rigged schooner is made of steel reinforced with ferro-cement. It was built to sleep 24 crewmembers, and has masts that can be lowered so the boat can pass under low bridges.
Batkivschyna was launched in 1991; by 1999 the family and various adventurous friends of theirs had sailed all over the Mediterranean.
The traveling was exhilarating, but Biriukovich was frustrated that nobody knew anything about Ukraine.
“No matter where we docked, people asked, ‘Which country is that blue-and-yellow flag from?’ When we replied ‘Ukraine,’ the next question was ‘Where’s that?’”
The Discover Ukraine Expedition was born of this frustration. The Batkivshchyna was stocked with a cargo of educational material about Ukraine: maps, photos, charts and information, with the aim of telling the world about Ukraine’s geography, history, politics, and cultural and scientific achievements.
Dead reckoning
The boat was revealed to the world at the 1999 El Ferrol Regatta, in Spain.
After that triumphant event came a long winter of preparation as the crew – who have never received any funding from the Ukrainian government – busied itself with preparations for their upcoming epic journey. Money wasn’t in abundance, and one crewmember even sold his car to scrape up some cash.
On April 7, 2000, Batkivshchyna started out on her round-the-world trip, with 14 people aboard. The plan was to sail through the Mediterranean, head for North America and participate in that year’s OpSail festival, which was to be held in various U.S. ports on the Atlantic seaboard. The semi-amateur crew included Ukrainian folk singers, a Cossack and two souvenir vendors from Andriyivsky Uzviz. Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Kryzhanovska, now an editor at Korrespondent magazine, sailed from Kyiv to Istanbul on the Batkivshchyna, and wrote of her experiences for the Post.
Biriukovich’s wife Nina was also on board, as was the couple’s 14-year-old grandson Vadim, who made a series of Internet broadcasts in English, to be beamed to U.S. high school students who were following the journey.
The boat was equipped with computer and satellite technology, but the crew learned its limits of it when, 160 kilometers west of the Canary Islands, they suddenly experienced a sailor’s nightmare, losing their radar and communications. Later they found out that their satellite connection provider had gone bankrupt while they were at sea. Severely off course, they took a month to cross the Atlantic, sailing without radar, radio, or communications of any kind.
The Batkivshchyna missed the two initial ports in the OpSail festival, but caught up with the rest of the fleet in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 5, having made one of the longest journeys of any of the participants.
Roll on, Mississippi
That ended the first stage of the boat’s journey. Three more were to follow.
First the boat crossed the Great Lakes and turned down the Mississippi, one of the most storied of waterways.
“I’m proud to have sailed the Lady River,” Biriukovich says. He has great memories of the United States:
“The Americans are a great nation. Nowhere else did we see such friendliness, enthusiasm, willingness to help.”
Down the muddy tide they sailed, seeing the Deep South places made famous by “Huckleberry Finn” author Mark Twain, floating through the Delta past New Orleans before entering the Gulf of Mexico and heading to St. Petersburg, Florida, where they spent the winter.
The third stage began in the Caribbean Sea, with the Ukrainian sailors hitting Cuba, Jamaica, and the island of Curacao before slipping through the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean and sailing along the California coast up to Seattle.
They returned to Los Angeles to winter in its gentler climate, and began the fourth stage in June 2003: Hawaii, Christmas Island, the Cook Islands, New Zealand and Australia.
Everywhere they stopped, they opened the boat up to visitors, and gave presentations about sailing and, of course, Ukraine. There were lines to come on board, with guests including everyone from primary school students to U.S. state governors.
The media took notice. “[Biriukovich] converted his boat into a floating expression of Ukrainian nationalism,” a 2003 article in the Los Angeles Times reported under the headline “A sea of glitches can’t dampen the zeal of a Ukrainian tall-ship skipper and his mate.” Batkivshchyna was also called “the icon of independent Ukraine.”
Publicity and charity
By then, the Batkivshchyna had publicized Ukraine in 70 ports in 14 countries on four continents.
Besides highlighting Ukraine, the boat has been raising funds for charity, and has already handed over around $20,000 in donations to the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund, with the money being distributed to a children’s hospital in Rivne and to Kyiv’s Amosov Cardiological Foundation.
“It is not simply a round-the-world journey,” Biriukovich says. “It’s a long-term multistage expedition. Its aim is to arouse people’s interest in Ukraine as an independent European country.”
Now, facing the second half of its long journey, the Batkivshchyna is expanding its mission. To its old mandate – telling the world about Ukraine – it has added a new one: telling Ukraine about the world.
Next week: Diaspora money comes through in a pinch.
