After spending 254 days at sea, Tarini crew women now eye solo sailing

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After successfully spending 254 days at sea, the six-member crew of the Indian Navy's sailing vessel "Tarini" are now looking forward to solo sails. The crew became the first all-women naval crew to have circumnavigated the globe and India cannot be more proud than this.

On Thursday, naval officers Lt. Commander Vartika Joshi, Lt. Commander Pratibha Jamwal, Lt. Commander Swathi Patarpalli, Lt. Aishwarya Bodapatti, Lt. S.H. Vijaya Devi and Lt. Payal Gupta were presented with the Nari Shakti Puraskar 2017 by Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi.

Sharing their future plans, the women officers said that they were planning to go for solo circumnavigation and also talked about the difficulties faced by them during their journey.

"The most difficult stretch was probably the south Pacific ocean where we faced winds which rose close to 120km per hour and the waves were as high as 89 meters. It took us almost 90 hours to get out of the zone," Commander Jamwal said.

Another trouble the team faced was that when they were hardly 2000 miles short of India, they had to take a detour and sailed the boat to the nearest port, Port Louis in Mauritius.

However, not just the hurdles that they had to face, the members also had good moments during the course of their journey.

"We did miss our families but we had made a family of six members in the boat. We cooked, did stitching, even baked cakes and celebrated birthdays inside the boat," Bodapatti noted.

Starting their journey on September 10, 2017, the team landed in Goa on May 21 who was received by Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba and other top naval officers. On Wednesday, the team also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

(With IANS inputs)