A family’s free life of ocean wandering flounders in a jail cell

"SAILING Magazine readers found a harrowing tale in the January 1993 issue. In it, Vitali Bondarenko recounted how he and his wife, Marina Ordynskaia, had sailed their 26-foot boat, which Vitali built himself of scrounged materials, from Russia to the Azores, where they joined the 1991 Atlantic Rally for Cruisers voyage to the Caribbean. He wrote of how they crossed the Atlantic with no engine and but one sail, a small jib, and a homemade sextant consisting of a protractor and two rulers, of how they were becalmed for days and nearly ran out of water and food, and how he fell deathly sick with a tooth infection and asthma so severe he became unconscious. The story ended on an upbeat note—after five weeks, they made it safely to St. Lucia—which may have left readers hopeful that this appealing, highly educated though penniless couple might continue their sailing odyssey with better fortune.

That was not to be. The ensuing years were marked by tragedy and misadventure, mitigated by the fact they were able to keep their dream of ocean voyaging alive and face their travails and experience their sailing joys together. Now they don’t even have that to cling to.

Vitali is in jail, held without bail in the Bristol County House of Corrections in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, as an illegal alien. Marina, also declared guilty of illegal entry into the U.S., lives on their current boat, an old Pearson 28, on a mooring in the Newport, Rhode Island, harbor with their two sons, ages 5 and 10.

They came a long way to arrive at this point in their lives where, Marina said, “We don’t live any more, we just exist, blind with tears.” In 1991, Vitali, then 43, who with a doctorate in mechanical engineering had been a professor and a researcher in a government institute, and Marina, a teacher of home economics and English, sold their possessions and set off to live Vitali’s dream of leaving Russia for a life of wandering the world under sail. They began their around-the-world voyage in the Volga River in the boat Vitali designed and built, welding the steel hull, making its spars from aluminum irrigation tubing and crafting turnbuckles by hand.

They entered the U.S. in 1992 at Beaufort, North Carolina. It was there that Vitali learned that his 20-year-old son Maxim had died in Russia of poisonous fumes from a heater. Five years later, his other son, Ilia, who lived in Russia with Vitali’s ex-wife, would die of cancer at the age of 17.

Vitali and Marina obtained work permits, sold their boat, and lived for a while in Annapolis, where in 1993 their son Ivan was born. When the sea called again, Vitali bought a beat-up Bristol 24 for $500 and made it seaworthy. In 1994 the couple and the baby resumed the circumnavigation. Sailing the Pacific for five years, they spent time in the Society Islands, the Cook Islands, Samoa and New Caledonia, made friends and supported themselves with jobs, and encountered the first of the immigration problems that would dog them for years.

U.S. immigration authorities made them leave Samoa. When their Russian passports expired, French authorities told them to leave New Caledonia, offering Vitali a choice of prison or the ocean—a choice American immigration officials would not offer five years later. They sailed to Australia, and there another son, Vasily, was born.

Now a family of four, they left Australia, sailed 14,000 miles on the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and completed the circumnavigation. They re-entered the U.S. in May 2001, this time without valid immigration status, which set the stage for a series of happenings so poignant they might have come from a particularly sad Russian novel.

They were allowed to stay in the country on a temporary permit. With the permit about to expire, they tried to leave America again in June 2002, but had to return to a Florida anchorage when Marina, 47 years old and pregnant, became too sick to sail.

They appealed to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for an extension of their permit, but instead got a notice to appear before an immigration judge in November. The child, whom they named Linda, was born in October, afflicted with Down syndrome and a severe heart defect. “We were terrified of deportation,” Marina said. “There is no treatment for babies with Down syndrome in Russia. We also could not take her sailing across the Atlantic because she needed special medication and heart surgery. The only choice we had to save her life was to give her up for adoption.”

With the baby in the care of a foster family that now plans to adopt her, the Bondarenko family left the U.S. for the Bahamas a few days before their scheduled hearing. Vitali and Marina FedExed what she calls an “excuse letter” to the judge. In their absence, the judge issued a deportation order.

After six months in the Bahamas, they began a second circumnavigation, planning a stop in Nova Scotia before crossing the Atlantic. Along the East Coast, they made a decision that became the last in a series of dominoes that had been falling since they re-entered the U.S. They asked the U.S. Coast Guard for permission to refuel at Block Island. The Coast Guard allowed it, but insisted that they proceed to Newport to obtain a cruising permit.

“We told them we didn’t have visas, but they assured us that no immigration issues would arise,” Marina said.
They went to Newport and were given three-day visas. The next day, Vitali was arrested while standing at a dinghy landing with his sons. He’s been in jail since June 27.

Marina and the boys subsist on rice and canned food she prepares on the boat, which does not have refrigeration, and sometimes get a meal at the Seamen’s Church Institute. Once each week they visit Vitali, making the 60-mile round trip with a car and driver paid for by a New Jersey auto dealer they met in the Turks and Caicos. The same generous man retained a Boston immigration lawyer to plead their case.

The attorney, William P. Joyce, succeeded in getting the deportation order stayed. Still, as this is written at the end of August, Vitali has no prospect of freedom. “He’s charged with illegal entry, which is ludicrous,” Joyce said. “He was forced to enter by the Coast Guard. They don’t have to hold him. It just seems vindictive at this point.”

Marina is bereft. Late one night aboard the faded blue Pearson, she suffered chest pains and passed out. Ten-year-old Ivan called for help on VHF radio. The call was heard by a water taxi service, and EMTs were brought to the boat. Marina rebuffed their attempts to take her to a hospital. “I couldn’t leave the boat. There is no one to take care of the boys. We are so close. We are a family and crew and cannot live without each other.”

They have nothing except that bond and the boat, but Marina says that would be enough if they could have Vitali back and could “sail away from the U.S.A. to continue our voyage.”

Since the Bondarenko family re-entered the U.S., the immigration service has acquired a new home in the Department of Homeland Security and a new hard-nosed attitude, which may help explain why a man whose offense was being careless about immigration paperwork is languishing in jail. It should be obvious to the most blinkered bureaucrat that, even by post 9/11 standards, Vitali Bondarenko poses no threat to society. What’s more, he’s not trying to get into the country, or stay here; he wants desperately to leave.

Let him board his little boat and, in the embrace of his family, just sail away.