It would seem that what could happen on the shallowest in the world, the warm and calm Sea of Azov? Alas, the tragedies of recent years, including the current swimming season, confirm that the Sea of Azov, despite the external peace and grace, is fraught with a lot of mysteries and dangers
Quite recently, in the village of Yuryevka, located fifty kilometers from Mariupol, a tragic incident occurred, which is called out of the ordinary. At a depth of only about a meter, twenty meters from the shore, a twelve-year-old boy almost drowned. Two adults, physically strong thirty-year-old guys who came to his aid were able to push the boy out of the water, but they themselves became victims of the deep sea.
It was nine in the morning, the adults were sober, relaxing on the beach with their families. How such a tragedy could have happened is incomprehensible to the mind. The surviving boy says that he was playing with his uncle in the sea with a ball and suddenly the sand began to suddenly disappear from under his feet. He began to shout, his uncle rushed to the rescue, who walked away at that time for the ball that had flown aside. Uncle arrived in time, pushed the boy aground, but he himself began to sink. Seeing such a picture, another man rushed to the rescue. They and the rescuers who arrived in time pulled the boy out of the water, but unknown naval forces pulled two adult men under the water. How could this happen? What is the cause of the tragedy?
Is this a one-of-a-kind case? Let's try to understand these issues in order. One of the versions is sea currents and the eddies caused by them. Yuryevka is located between two spits of Belosaraiskaya and Berdyanskaya.
When two currents meet in the Yalta Bay, seawater swirling forms, which often leads to eddies. Fishermen say that sometimes the boat turns so that it is difficult to get out. Local residents do not remember the cases when the boats would sink due to the whirlpool, in the worst case they were carried into the sea. That is, there is no need to talk about any huge whirlpools on the Azov. According to the head of the recreation department of the regional landscape park "Meotida" Andrey Kiyanenko, currents and eddies are strong not only in the Yuryevka area, but especially at the ends of the Azov spits - on Belosaraiskaya, Berdyanskaya, Dolgaya, Sedov spit, and others, unique in their formation Azov braids.
Tragic cases when people were carried out to sea not only on inflatable mattresses, but also without them happened before. Even athletes who were quite prepared for big water drowned on the spits. So, exactly twenty years ago, if we count from the day of the tragedy in Yuryevka, on July 15, 1989, the crews of 9 ships of the city's Club of Young Seamen left Mariupol. After a twelve-day voyage, the Orion training vessel, 2 motorboats and 4 boats returned back, and two vessels with seven adult crew members and five cadets had to sail further to make a circle along the Sea of Azov, calling at Yeisk, Kerch and Berdyansk. At noon on July 28, the executive committee of the Mariupol City Council received the first alarming information: the ships are at the Dolgaya spit, the crews are missing.
An extraordinary commission of the city executive committee was created without delay. The vessels of the Azov Sea and Volga-Don River Shipping Companies located in the water area, rescue vessels of the Black Sea Fleet rescue service, life-saving equipment of fishing collective farms of the Krasnodar Territory, military aircraft and helicopters, aviation of the traffic police of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Donetsk region were involved in the search for the missing. from Rostov-on-Don, military pilots reported: in the area of the village of Kamyshevatskaya, not far from Yeisk and the Dolgaya Spit, bodies were found nailed to the shore by waves.
Soon - new message: 5 more bodies were found. And only in the second half of the next day, the tenth dead crew member was discovered. The surviving two passengers of the yacht - an eight-year-old boy and a seventeen-year-old girl - did not clarify the course of events. When asked where the others were, they said they had slept and had not seen anything. At the dawn of perestroika, this mysterious case was discussed in the press for a long time and never left the lips of ordinary people. Some believed the culprit of the death of the whole team was UFOs, others were poachers, whose illegal fishing was allegedly witnessed by young sailors. We will not comment on the first assumption … Another is unlikely. If the poachers so simply destroyed ten young lads, then in those days they would certainly be found and simply drowned somewhere nearby.
Hardly anyone would have raised a hand to carry out such a blatant atrocity. It remains to look for the cause of the terrible riddle in the sea. As the two surviving children later said, they woke up simultaneously in the middle of the night with a feeling of inexplicable anxiety. The sailors' clothes were scattered around the deck. The depth in that place was negligible - the yacht sat aground, where the bottom could be seen from any side. The yachtsmen with whom we talked believe that strong sea currents along the tip of the Dolgaya Spit, caused by a surge wave, could be the cause of the death of the guys. Most likely, the guys got down into the water to push the boat from the shallows, got caught in the current, the rest rushed to fall down and were also carried away into the sea one by one.
I would not like to turn to mysticism, but in all these accidents, there are still several fatal coincidences and magic numbers. A boat that, perhaps indirectly, caused the death of the crew in 1989, at that time it was called "Arktos", exactly 13 (!) Years later, and, what is more incredible, again on July 25, converted by this time into a yacht with a new name "Mariupol" drowned five passengers and sank itself. In the area of the village of Melekino, she skated vacationers. Despite the fact that it was designed for only 10 people, the captain took on 38 passengers.
From a small wave one and a half kilometers from the shore, the yacht capsized. The ship fell on its side and began to sink slowly. Of the 38 passengers, 33 were saved. Interestingly, after the tragedy, the yacht was lifted from the bottom by a floating crane of the Mariupol port, kept on the port territory for about a year, and then taken out in an unknown direction, its further fate is unknown to us. Will it be restored and launched again? It is quite possible, although the yachtsmen with whom we talked believe that such an unhappy yacht must still be looked for and it would be best to simply destroy it, burn it, and scatter the ashes over the sea. But back to the topic of our main question.
Spit Dolgaya, if anyone does not know, is located on the opposite shore of the Azov Sea, in the territory of the Russian Federation. In the Soviet years, when there were virtually no borders between our countries, Mariupol yachtsmen often went on the other side of the sea. If you look at the map of the Sea of Azov, it is noticeable that the Dolgaya spit is located almost directly opposite the Belosarayskaya spit. Thus, the flow of the water mass in this place passes through the neck of a bottle and increases accordingly.
With a surge wave caused by westerly and southwesterly winds, the sea level in the Taganrog Bay area sometimes rises to two meters. When the winds weaken, the water rushes back, and in a rather rapid flow. An acquaintance of the author of these lines was recently personally convinced how dangerous the extremities of the Azov spits can be, - he saved a girl of about twelve years old at the tip of Belosarayka. While her parents were chatting enthusiastically on the shore, she went about fifty meters from the shore on the shallows, otherwise you can't say - into the open sea, because at the tip of the spit there is the sea from almost all sides. The depth for her growth was just above the waist, but at the same time she could not get out of the sea on her own.
She managed to get exactly at the junction of the two currents, this was clearly indicated by the waves rolling over each other from different sides at an angle of about fifty degrees. “In the beginning, she did not understand that the matter was wrong and calmly jumped over the waves, but then horror appeared on her face,” said a friend. - She tried to walk to the shore, and the sea dragged her back. Surely, in such an unequal struggle, her strength would not last long, especially since physically the girl was clearly not an athlete. When I approached it, despite the relatively calm surface of the water, I felt a mighty river flowing along the bottom. The current was so strong that I could hardly keep my feet. Frightened in earnest. He told the girl to hold on to my hand and so, step by step, we gradually got out into shallow water, and then ashore.
If it were a little deeper, I would not have overcome the current … ". Such is the strength that lives in the "gentle" Sea of Azov. The author of these lines, as an admirer of recreation on the Belosaraiskaya Spit, has himself repeatedly tested the strength of this current. At the very end of the spit, it is better not to swim at all, but without reaching its last point, you can. The main thing is to be all the time no more than ten to fifteen meters from the coast, and so that the depth is not higher than the belt. You can get interesting sensations. You just need to relax, lie on your back and the current itself will carry you along the coast at about the speed of a person walking at a brisk pace, - it has been checked. Although such a strong current is not always the case. Such is the river in the sea - exotic! But this exotic would be good if it had not ruined so many people.
According to Andriy Kiyanenko, there are fewer cases of drowned people on the spits than in other places, only for the reason that the number of tourists on them is much smaller. And on the Sedov spit, the guards of the Meotida Landscape Park generally do not let vacationers at the end of the spit, they guard the nesting places of birds. The situation is worse on the Belosara Spit. Every year more and more tourists come here, to the tip of the spit, and many of them do not even suspect about the danger that this beautiful place conceals in itself. But the sea currents cannot be blamed for the tragedy in Yuryevka. First, near the coast, at shallow depths, they are not strong enough to drag and drown two young physically strong men who can swim. Secondly, Yuryevka is located practically in the Yalta Bay and the currents here are extremely weak. For some reason, no such cases were noted in the neighboring villages of Yalta and Urzuf.
Moreover, there were none not according to official data, but precisely according to the words of local residents, including employees of "Meotida". The most dangerous place, according to the people of Yuryev, is located on the outskirts of Yuryevka, from the side of Urzuf, in an area with a self-explanatory name - Cape Zmeinny.
Yulian Mikhailov, the head of the Mariupol public ecological organization "Clean Coast", seaman and yachtsman, does not believe that currents were the cause of the tragedy in Yuryevka. “There’s a muddy bottom, almost a swamp, what strong currents can there be? - He asks a question. - I have been doing yachting for many years, I know the sea as my own and, believe me, I have not met even in the open sea, not to mention the Yalta Gulf, funnels that can pull an adult who knows how to swim under water. The sea routes (handbooks for sailors) also do not mention strong currents in this area. I can only guess about the causes of natural anomalies in Yuryevka, but the sea currents are not to blame for them."
Olga Shakula, head of the nature department of the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore, agrees with the opinion of the yachtsman-ecologist. According to her, the reason lies rather in the fact that just in the area of Cape Zmeinny there is a global geological fault between the bedrock plates at a depth of about one kilometer. It crosses the entire Azov Sea and creates seismic activity in Crimea.
In the course of geological movements, the plates overlap each other, crumble, and shift the upper soil layers. By the way, the release of debris of these rocks appears on the surface in the ill-fated, widely known radioactive "black" sands, which are based on radioactive thorium. In addition to the release of sands, the geological instability of the area also contributes to massive movements of the upper part of the earth's surface, including leading to mudflows and landslides that occur not only on land, but also under the seawater layer. According to Olga Shakula, it is possible that these features of the change in the state of the soil became the cause of the tragedies in Yuryevka. Mud muds are a low-density mass of solids, consisting of silt, clay and sand.
This mass cannot withstand the weight of a person. Soil activity, faults and cracks also contribute to the formation of underground rivers. Where these waters wash out the bottom surface, dips are formed. Locals say that during the construction of one of the buildings of the boarding house in Yuryevka, during the driving of the first pile, it simply fell somewhere deep underground and the idea with the piles had to be abandoned. “Five years ago we were vacationing in Yuryevka with families and employees of our museum,” says Olga Shakula. - Our colleague almost drowned at a shallow depth, before our eyes she began to fall into the sand, screamed, we realized from her face that she was not joking, my husband would not have time to swim, and therefore threw her a children's inflatable ring. Everything happened in a matter of seconds, a colleague still believes that the circle thrown by her husband saved her life. Another phenomenon has a place in Yuryevka - the release of gas to the surface. Locals say that in winter, when the sea is covered with a crust of thin transparent ice, accumulations of gas bubbles under the ice are very clearly visible. Children even have fun - to drill a small hole in the ice and set fire to the gas that comes out of it.
Experts note that there have been no extensive scientific studies on the impact of a geological fault on the ecology of the Sea of Azov in its northern part.
The seashore is fraught with a lot of unsolved mysteries. Unfortunately, some of these mysteries lead to dire consequences, and therefore, in our opinion, deserve a closer, detailed scientific study. The number of tragic cases in Yuryevka has already exceeded the mark when it is time to deal with the issue in an adult way. Indeed, until now, a significant part of cases with drowned people are attributed to their drunken state and to the carelessness of behavior in the water. What percentage of them corresponds to the real state of affairs, nobody can say today. Now the beaches of the Azov coast are checked by the Commission on Technogenic Safety of the Ministry of Emergencies of Ukraine. The beaches of the village of Yuryevka also fell into the sphere of her attention.
There are no official results of the investigation, according to representatives of the local Emergencies Ministry. Meanwhile, vacationers are dying at sea under the most mysterious circumstances.