‘Not scared about our life’: sailor rescued from catamaran reveals he had been attacked by sharks before
September 7, 2023
By Andrew Messenger
Russian sailor and lifelong adventurer Evgeny Kovalevsky admits to being scared when his catamaran was damaged by sharks hundreds of kilometres from the Australian mainland, but it wasn’t his life he was worried about.
Kovalevsky, who was rescued by a passing container ship on Wednesday alongside fellow Russian crewmember Stanislav Beryozkin and Frenchman Vincent Thomas Etienne, is determined to fulfil his dream of circumnavigating the world in an inflatable catamaran.
And that’s what was running through his mind as a school of small cookiecutter sharks attacked their boat on successive days.
“[We were] not scared about our life. We [were] scared about the finishing of expedition,” he told Guardian Australia.
Amazingly, it’s not the first, or even the second, time Kovalevsky has been attacked by cookiecutter sharks in an inflatable vessel.
He’d come under attack from the tiny sharks earlier in this voyage – but first encountered them 12 years ago in the Atlantic. That was also an inflatable boat, though it survived.
The tiny sharks, 15-50cm in length, are known to attack boats and inanimate objects like submarines and undersea cables with their sharp teeth. Though they have taken bites out of people, no human is known to have died as a result of a bite from a cookiecutter shark.
Arriving in Queensland on Thursday, the crew plans to stay with supporters until the Russian Ocean Way expedition can obtain another vessel. It will be the expedition’s third boat.
The first, a trimaran, was lost in heavy seas in the Pacific Ocean when they were struck by twin cyclones in March. Their rescuers were Ukrainian.
“We started in St Petersburg, and we have to finish in St Petersburg. We are determined to continue but now we don’t know how to do it, it’s a challenge,” he said.
The expedition was launched in 2021 in honour of Russian explorers who circumnavigated the world in the 19th century. The sailors have also educated children about Russia’s maritime history on their voyage.
Kovalevsky has already spent nearly two years at sea, and now doesn’t expect to back in St Petersburg until 2024.
They plan to sail home either by the notoriously stormy Cape of Good Hope or via the Suez Canal and then the Black Sea.
Either way promises potential danger.
“[Going] around Cape of Good Hope with inflatable boat is very difficult,” Kovalevsky said.
“The Mediterranean Sea, this is not the easiest [because of] Somali pirates. If you go to the Black Sea it is military conflict with Ukraine and Russia.
“And if we [go] through the European country, the Russian flag … is not allowed to come to the European countries’ ports.”
The trio arrived back in Mooloolaba, on the Sunshine Coast, on Thursday after being picked up by Panama-flagged vehicle carrier Dugong Ace. Their rescue was coordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority after the crew activated a distress beacon.