My Story — Up To Now

I met Meg online in 2005. I wrote to her, and we started corresponding.

How Meg lived — no husband, no children, building her own house, traveling — clashed with the indoctrination I experienced in Russia, where a woman is permitted to be only a wife and a mother. Eventually I needed my communication with Meg like air.

Meg was planning to visit Ukraine and suggested we meet there. I was horrified to even imagine the occasion — me spending time with a Westerner and a woman. This was something I would never be allowed to do by my mother. By then I was seeing a young man she had coerced me into dating. I was supposed to marry him and have children with him. I conceived of no other future.

Eventually, the idea of being with Meg and away from my home became the only way I saw myself having a life that would be truly mine. In the weeks that remained, in order to get out and make it to Kyiv, I continued seeing my boyfriend and lying to my mother that we were planning a life together.

Two weeks after my escape to Kyiv, my parents trapped and kidnapped me, intending to take me back to Russia. Thanks to Meg’s intervention and to her being a Westerner, we were released from the police station where all four of us ended up, and Meg and I were together again. That day, while my parents were holding me against my will, my mother stole my passport.

With no passport, I could only go back home, to Russia. At the Canadian consulate in Kyiv, Meg was told I could stay in Canada as a refugee if I got there somehow. Without a Canadian visa, flying there was off limits to me. Meg eventually came up with the idea of sailing to her home in British Columbia, but we needed a sailboat for that.

Once I had my passport back, we immediately flew to Turkey. Within the two months I was allowed to stay in the country, Meg bought a sailboat and prepared it for the voyage to her home as best she could. We took off for the open Mediterranean in the summer of 2006.

We crossed the Mediterranean from east to west, were not allowed to stop in Gibraltar for provisions and repairs, and headed for the Atlantic. We managed to get two weeks permitted to us in the Canary Islands, after which we began our crossing of the Atlantic.

We crossed the Atlantic, then the Caribbean. We passed through the Panama Canal and entered the North Pacific. We were nearly killed by winter storms at the latitude of San Francisco in February 2007. We turned back, spent weeks waiting for the weather to improve, and headed north again. By then it was March. We reached Vancouver Island at the end of April 2007.

We spent five years in Canada waiting for various papers I was getting from the Canadian government. We didn’t want to be in Canada; we wanted to travel. By the time we had arrived in Victoria, we could not see our lives without freedom of movement. Having nothing and nobody in Canada, we left the country and entered the North Pacific again at the end of August 2012.

While waiting for a decision from the Canadian government on my application for a grant of citizenship, we spent years bouncing around North America, up until 2018, when we were informed that the decision was negative. By then we were on the Atlantic coast of the USA, in South Carolina.

We sailed to the nearest place I, a Russian national, could enter — the Bahamas. Then we sailed back to the USA, for which I had a visa. Then back to the Bahamas. Once our time in the Bahamas was up, we crossed the Caribbean, arriving in Panama in April 2019. There, we spent four years that became the most difficult time of our life together. We escaped Bocas del Toro in May 2023, hoping to reach the Bahamas.

Our boat hadn’t been in a boatyard since 2016. It was deteriorating and so were we. With no one in our lives but each other, trapped on a sailboat at desolate anchorages, surviving one winter gale after another, with no clear direction, we were on the edge of total collapse. Knowing that the boat and we would not survive another winter in the Bahamas, we left, planning to reach Grenada, where Russians were allowed and where there were boatyards.

Grenada turned out to be nothing like what we had hoped it would be, and we left in October 2024. We reached Sint Maarten, the Dutch side of the island, in December 2024, where I was allowed in only because I had a PRTD, a Canadian sticker, in my Russian passport. We got Flower into a boatyard. We finished the repairs we needed on the boat and returned to the water in the spring of 2025.

We took off for our second, non-stop, Atlantic crossing, this time from west to east, in August 2025. Eighty-four days later, we arrived at a port in the Balkans.

We remain in that town up until today.