bLogbook of the ‘Single Malt’: United (halluci)Nations.
Some do crack, some get high on weed; my preferred hallucinogen involves utter
exhaustion. Much cheaper than drugs, my friends. Just make sure you keep those leaden
eyelids propped up.
Hallucinations will not annoy day-sailors and large crews with ample watch rotas but they
will certainly sneak up on the worn out single-hander. Since safety aspect is directly
involved, this phenomenon should stand out as worthy of documenting and, perhaps, even
circulating.
Why not, therefore, dedicate to it my first entry in the Project Freedom – ‘Single Malt’,
2015 bLogbook?
While initially appearing as routine Logbook entries, at a later stage the narrative will taper
off only to lend full attention to the hallucinations and the way they were perceived.
19:30 UT+1 – Sunday, October 4th, 2015. Magnusholm (Auda) Marina
Having thanked my good friends Andris and Renate for the excellent farewell dinner (rice
and turkey and red wine followed by a sophisticated plum zephyr pudding) aboard their
cozy and hospitable two-mast yacht ‘Bahia’, I spend the rest of the evening back onboard
my own boat finding optimal storage locations for the 1001 items that have been randomly
scattered around the cabin of my 30 foot ‘Single Malt’ – two sets of wet gear, grab bag
with essentials for offshore survival, tools, instant noodles, jerry cans of spare diesel,
tinned kidney beans, bedsheets and blankets, scotch whiskey, half a cubic meter of books
in English and a handful of Cuban cigars from my friend and ex-colleague – Patrick , main
laptop as a present from my daughter Linda, underwear, secondary laptop as back-up for
electronic charts, jars of honey, my Takamine guitar, tins of mackerel, first aid kit and
various medicine, paper charts and folders, … etc., etc., a Spanish high velocity pneumatic
5.5 mm rifle complete with telescopic sights to even out the odds in case of a pirate
attack…etc., etc.
Shaking hands with my sailing friends had been fairly emotional, – while giving Renate a
hug I even spotted tears rolling down her pretty cheeks. The memory of this mooving sight
along with more valuable stuff brought onto my pontoon by the two of them later on – 3L
of diluted alcohol as heat remover in dressings (tall order), a handheld anemometer to
measure wind strength, around EUR50-worth of antibiotics for offshore emergencies,
enough potato powder and fast boiling barley grains to see me to Jamaica, a bottle of
Hennessy of special value and EUR50 in cash they insisted I have as a rainy day reserve –
has kept me busy (and heavily indebted) late into the night, and when at
01:30 UT+1 – Monday, October 5th, 2015
everything has been nicely (in the sense that I am able to retrieve the necessary item
instantly) stowed away into endless cabinet lockers, nooks and crannies, I feel so elevated
that I dismiss the proverbial ‘prudent idea’ of hitting the sack.
Instead, at
02:00 UT+1
I shake off my mooring ropes, wink an eye at the full moon, switch the Volvo Penta into
action and glide ghost-like across the smooth waters of the marina towards the Daugava
river and Northward into the moonlit path across the Gulf of Riga. Despite the fact that the
wind is but a granny’s breath, I feel excited and happy: the Decisive Jump has been made
and there is no return.
After all, this is my Freedom trip to explore the vast boundaries and uncharted waters of
Myself.
03:42 UT+1
The engine is put to sleep and I hoist the main and unfurl the genoa to embrace the forces
of Nature. Not much of them is around just yet but there is that whispered more wind to
come promise in the shrouds. With the NE wind It looks like a starboard (not to be
confused with ‘star-bored’) tack will take us, i.e. myself and the boat, all the way to Kolka.
03:55 UT+1
A semblance of wind has crept up and our boatspeed is a steady 3.5 – 3.8 knots now. Not
much, but there is no hurry. I’ve got all the time in the world.
When we are off Mersrags, our speed is already a satisfactory 5,2 knots and increasing. The
night is surprisingly warm for October and I am not even considering wearing the thermal
underwear just yet.
07:10 UT+1
The easterly horizon is getting a shade lighter but I do not expect a pronounced dawn to
break through. There are strange dirty-coloured pastels ripping the sky in the Estonian
mainland direction and I can’t remember what the weather prediction books have to say
about them.
…
…
…
Now, considering the topic at hand, I will break away from the routine Logbook style, omit
the straight-forward passage around the Kolka Light later that afternoon and focus on the
highlights of my rather hectic South Westerly passage. This will allow me to describe the
hallucinations phenomenon in more detail.
In accordance with my voyage plan the first stop-over has to be at Malmoe on Sweden’s
West coast. My daughter Linda’s family reside there and it is more or less in line with my
general South-bound route, be it via Skagerrak or Kiel Canal.
Andris had told me that Windity weather forecast indicated 9m/s NE wind in my area of
sailing. Strange, I’m thinking to myself, I am happily making 6.3 knots with merely a
reduced genoa which, given my boat’s hull speed specifications, can only happen at 15m/s
or more.
Approaching the Faaroe island, which lies to the NE of Gotland, the wind is blowing a gale
force and increasing. A bedsheet-sized genoa proves to be sufficient to pull us before the
gathering swell. I am seriously considering trailing my knotted-warps-plus-an-automobiletyre system to help keep our stern to windward and thus relieve the EVO-100 autopilot.
This is my third sleepless night.
The warps seem to do the job even though the autopilot finds some of the bigger breakers
tough to handle.
Opposite Ronehamn Harbour in Southern Gotland I’m starting to hear ‘things’. The distant
voices that distinctly do not belong here are difficult to trace on the background of the
roaring breakers and the hissing wind in the yacht’s rigging. The aft end of my recently built
solar panels rack over the cockpit appears to be the culprit but I find it difficult to reconcile
the findings with common sense. Nevertheless, it sounds like a radio quiz show in Latvian
but too slurred and smudged to make out actual words. Some faint dialogue and then
groups of numbers uttered nervously in rapid bursts. Off the coast of Sweden? This is
crazy.
At one point I grabbed my Logbook and wrote in a jerky handwriting: ‘Dieva brīnumi – no
saules paneļa turpinu dzirdēt Latvijas radio: ‘…159…771…’’.
I even intended to ask someone back home later to check for me through the various
programme archives whether these numbers had actually been pronounced.
In the meantime, weather was worsening: I had furled away the genoa and we were
making VMG (velocity made good stands for actual speed over ground) 5 to 5.4 knots
under bare poles. The mast was rattling heavily and sending convulsing vibrations through
the hull. I had by then checked the guest marinas guide book only to remind myself that
trying to look for shelter at Ronehamn fishing harbour with this height and direction of
swell would be suicidal: I had stayed there twice a few years previously and the entry
through the rocks and shallows had constituted a challenge even in much calmer
conditions than now.
When a portside shroud snapped and flew whipping around the foredeck I was fairly
impressed with my own presence of mind: I crawled on all fours to the foredeck and
unlashed the semi-inflated dinghy from its position on top of the forehatch. I then led its
painter aft along the starboard stanchions to have the dinghy floating next to the cockpit
for easy deployment should things take a nastier turn. I had coolly played all the thinkable
contingencies through my mind and decided to make maximum use of the situation.
It will be a drill. Not unlike those I had been involved in as a member of the Latvian
Shipping Company’s Maritime Disaster Emergency team a few years back.
I placed the main laptop, two external hard discs, passport, the ship’s documents, photos
of kids and grandkids, phone and cash into a watertight bag, attached the PLB1 (personal
location beacon) to my Spinlock life vest, repeatedly read its engagement instructions
(because if you do not properly pull out the sending aerial, you are effectively without
one), pocketed the handheld VHF (the stationary VHF kept hissing in stand-by mode),
drank two large whiskeys to maintain the necessary energy momentum for god knows how
many hours in a dinghy and… kept enjoying the Latvian radio show while it lasted…
Twice in the same night we were pooped (cockpit awash with the swell that overtook us)
and once broached and heeled over, – low enough to cause mess on the cabin floor.
But, back to the theme of hallucinations. I will dwell upon my lack of sleep a little because
this aspect is relevant in the context at hand. I was fairly alert and nimble throughout the
passage so far. My single-handed cruising experience has taught me the importance of
staying awake and remaining fit. I know lots of sailing enthusiasts who would prefer to
spend the night in a marina or at an anchorage. They always thought that I was a little
‘round the bend’ to sacrifice my sleep for the benefit of covering some extra non-stop
stretch of a distance.
The storm was abating finally but the swelI was not. Mostly rollers, some of them breakers
but there came the daylight with its more cheerful outlook. There will be yet another –
fourth sleepless night, because the shipping lanes were for commercial traffic and a small
sailboat had no rights to be there, period. In the circumstances, making oneself scarce is
the name of the game.
We were past the Southern tip of Oeland and running for one hundred sleepless hours
now. Could it really be that the Latvian-speaking guest-workers in Sweden’s Blekinge area
had bought their own FM radio frequency to feature non-stop Latvian programmes?
I tried hard to be skeptical and reasonable. Because by now the sounds coming from the
cockpit had the added tonality of evil to them. They were jeeringly taunting and downright
creepy. Not that it seriously affected me, not there and then. While I remained on top of
my subconscious and able to analyse the issue, the risk to my sanity was fairly remote.
Nevertheless, I found them increasingly distracting and unpleasant.
I had been hearing distant voices, even music coming from the shrouds many times over
the years and had always been able to say to myself: ‘Uldinč, hearing voices is no big deal;
what you must never ever do, is reply to them.’
To prove to myself that I was coping with the situation at hand I tried to think of a way to
establish the extent of the problem.
Was it an objective reality of the state of things or a subjective ‘faulty perception’ entirely
on my own part? What would a scientist do in his field or lab tests to rule out the latter?
I consulted my stowage plan – got my Sony cassette tape recorder, extended the mike
towards the area above the skipper’s quarter berth where the autopilot’s drive shaft
should be and hit the record button.
When I crawled out of the crammed space two minutes later I must have had a cautious
smile on my face. Yes, the method was scientifically brilliant but even brilliant scientists can
be crazy… I can distinctly recall how relieved I felt upon playing back the tape – yes, it was
there all right, all this jeering and spookiness, it was not a figment of my sick brain after all.
How wrong was my method, how wrong was my logic! My tired mind failed to take into
account the fact that one’s hallucinations can continue to build and thrive on any weird
source – even a recording.
The fallacy of my method dawned upon me much later – after revigoratingly long hours of
sleep while safely moored at Simrishamn harbour where my snapped shroud was being
taken care of.
What was actually on the tape was the strained noises of autopilot struggling with the
swells.
You will find it attached and I think it doesn’t require much fatigue to be found ugly. Turn
on the volume and check out what it sounded like, minus the hallucination, of course.
But, before we proceed, – and in order to allow the reader (or the readress) some scope to
work out his or her own hypothesis – let us compare notes on the subject. The following
quote comes from my Cruisers’ Forum precisely on the same theme as ours:
‘We also would hear voices which would sound like a radio talk show taking place in
another room. We could hear people talking but you couldn’t tell what they were saying. I
believe it has something to do with HF radio signals interacting with the shrouds in an
audible level which can only be heard when there is no other sound. We have heard this
sound many times when far from land.’
Two utterly wrong assumptions! These folks rule out the factor of their own fatigue and
therefore are mistaken again allowing the possibility that the shrouds were indeed
receiving radio signals. This is so absurd that, in order to avoid embarrassment and
humiliation, I have deliberately omitted to furnish the name of the contributor.
Firstly, radiowaves are too feeble to ‘interact’ with shrouds that, for a sailboat to be ‘far
from land’, are minimum 6mm diameter steel wire ropes. The wind interacts with shrouds
of all diameters, true, but cannot modulate audio frequency.
Secondly, why should this phenomenon happen ‘when far from land’? The opposite would
certainly make more sense.
The poor narrator has either skipped science classes or forgotten totally what his teacher
must have said. I used to work many years ago as Foreign Broadcasts editor with the
Latvian State Radio and had learned the basics from my technical colleagues.
The ‘programme’ (the spoken word or music played) is much too weak to be broadcast far
and wide. Therefore, the 2000W or so transmitter emits a sinusoid wave that has the
power to travel and is appropriately called the Carrier frequency. The much weaker sound
of the desired contents is then modulated onto the carrier frequency and the combined
effort is what we are able to receive in our radios before it is decoded back to sound
format and then amplified to an audible level via the speaker system membranes.
A much better contribution to the Forum discussion comes from a chap who is smart
enough to perceive the exhaustion as the key factor, and his subtle self-irony crowns the
quote:
‘At one stage (after several stormy days at the helm) I saw my father-in-law at the mast
top. We were both conscious of eye contact, but in no way this experience felt either
alarming or out of the ordinary.’
My hallucinations experience that I have described above has served another, utterly
unexpected purpose. It has reminded me of a previous experience of mysterious nature
that had been left unexplained up until now. Unexplained, because I had not thought of
myself as being exhausted. But I sure must have been, I can see it now.
Interestingly, the setting brings us yet again close to Gotland.
It happened in September, 2007. Kristiana had heard about Gotland’s famous medieval
town of Visby and could not think of a better mode of transportation than a sailing yacht.
My boat lay moored at the Ventspils marina where we were invited to dine aboard the
Orions – a catamaran that also planned to set sail for Visby next morning. Skipper Paulis
Evalds poured us a night cap of whiskey and we agreed to meet again a couple of days later
at the Visby marina.
Next morning was sunny but breezy, which explains why the harbourmaster gave Kristiana
that dubious look.
In short, the weather was slightly too much for Kristiana once we were out in the open sea.
The Orions didn’t like to beat against the wind and swell and chose to sail in the opposite
direction instead – towards Riga, and a german yacht returned back to Ventspils to give up
their intended destination of Pavilosta.
Despite this, we were on our route to Faaroesund, which separates Faaroe from Gotland.
There was swell building up and Kristiana wanted to die, however, when I gallantly offered
to turn back to Ventspils she had enough strength left in her to utter: ‘No, Visby it is!’
With Kristiana safely below in the skipper’s quarter berth with open towels on either side
of her miserable yet pretty face, my tiller watch lasted 35 patient hours up until when we
dropped anchor in the late afternoon at a secluded spot off Ryssnaes in the lee of Faaroe.
Resurrected Kristiana was up and cheerful and offered to cook a substantial dinner. We
were both hungry beyond description.
After the rich meal and a couple of bottles of red wine (mostly my doing) I sent Kristiana to
bed while I decided to take a refreshing plunge. With the transom ladder prudently thrown
out for later embarkation I thought (as a matter of fact my thinking must have missed a
cylinder or two firing) everything was fine and shipshape. Alas, far from it, and that’s a
massive understatement.
Here I must offer a couple of clarifications: Firstly, my customary ‘plunges’ are fairly
extended affairs in terms of both – distance and time. What would you call a reasonably
timed swim in the sea? Twenty minutes, I hear someone say. Yes, give or take. Mine,
however, is closer to three hours, give or take.
Why do I give this circumstance so much attention?
For two loosely related reasons – dusk is rather sudden in September at our latitude and
masthead anchor light had not been switched on.
The consequence is easily described by: I lost my boat! Feeble shouts (from probably miles
away) of ‘Kristiana, uzdedzini svecīti!’ lacked confidence and gradually tapered off to a
resigned failure. It became quite dark after a while, but again, I tried to out-smart the
conditions by swimming yet further away from the island trying to position the supposed
whereabouts of my boat’s anchorage against the westerly sky which is lighter, as you will
know. Futile again, as I found out. A mast with no sail hoisted is but a needle in the
proverbial hay stack against any colour of the horizon.
Nothing doing, I saw the dark blob of my island and swam towards it – I thought I could,
perhaps, find somewhere to lie down those couple of hours until dawn. Unfortunately,
coming out of water I sprained my ankle on a slippery seaweed-covered boulder and
decided to lie down on the sloping beach with my hurting ankle in the cool water. This took
care of my ankle all right, half an hour later it was back in working order, while I felt rather
cold, naturally. Jogging along the beach had to be abandoned – the pebbles turned out to
have extremely sharp edges – like shards of broken glass. When you imagine how
vulnerably soft the sole of your foot becomes after 3 hours of swimming your jogging on
spikey tops of diamonds loses its charms.
In the meantime moonlight had squeezed through the clouds and the island obtained
shape and mood. I soon found a path that led into a grove of funny looking miniature trees
and unknown plant life and then it started. By ‘it’ I mean the fragments of the moonlit
landscape that looked as if taken from ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Nothing was familiar
anymore. I looked up at the sky and it was anything but. Hard as I tried I could not focus on
the skies enough to render them the accustomed and recognizable semblance. Instead, my
skies were dark green (!) draperies shaped into a drooping tent roof of approprite
proportions. Despite the night being cloudless and visibility excellent, alarmingly there
were no stars. They had been replaced by the mockery of shimmering embroidered
patterns standing out from the heavy folds of the brocade fabric. In terms of drug abuse I
was a virgin and all this staggering experience was a bit too rich for me to handle.
Moonlight will occasionally play tricks even on a sober mind, but I had rubbed my
disbelieving eyes too many times to find it funny. Back to earth, the underwood and its
mossy carpet that was so inviting to my recently punished feet led me on and on until I no
longer worried about the discrepancies and irregularities. I distinctly recall coming across a
doll’s cottage (well, a tiny garden house) with its moonlit veranda (I didn’t knock) terracing
down to a sixpence of lawn and a halfpenny pond at its foot. I half expected a garden
gnome to politely remind me of my somnambulous trespassing.
When I found myself back on the torturous beach head, I decided that the sea would be
very soothing to my feet and jumped into the water again. It felt so good that I was free of
any worries concerning the boat or Kristiana. When the dawn broke an hour later, I spotted
the Single Malt, complete with the invitingly lowered ladder. Yes, her anchor rode lay at a
changed angle, – the night breeze must have shifted her.
Kristiana said she had worried about my absence but then was able to persuade herself
that I should be OK after all. Anyway, she did not know whom to phone or how to operate
the ship’s VHF radio.
Good girl. I would have hated to see the Swedish papers with headlines like LETTISK
SEGELBAT KAPTEN (60) FORSVANN I HAVET OCH HANS KVINNLIG PASSAGERARE (22)
HJALPLOS I BATAN!
We enjoyed fabulous two weeks in Visby where I hired a 1.1 litre strong Harley Davidson
bike to take Kristiana along the picturesque coastal roads of Gotland with its 100 churches
and slightly fewer restaurants.
I had no problem explaining to myself the sharp edges of the pebbles on the Faaroe beach.
To offer deeper fairways to larger displacement vessels through the rocky sound, the
dredging method must be explosives. Which accounts for sharp-edged debris poured onto
the surrounding beaches.
Explaining the dreamland effect was more difficult. At one stage I even thought it had
something to do with security. The island of Faaroe had previously been a restricted
military area and my wild imagination was playing along the idea of a screen of specifically
tuned electromagnetic field that would turn an invader helpless. Very much like in my case.
Helpless even to run.
To one chap the father-in-law at the mast top, to another – the brocaded tent roof for sky
effect. Come to think of it, father-in-law is a safer picture than, say, that of Jessica Beal at
the mast top, eye contact or no eye contact.
The recording of the sound of my EVO-100 tiller pilot hard at work is to form integral part
of this bLogbook entry. Its volume, however, must be enhanced prior to playback.
Uldis Ozolants
Skipper of ‘Single Malt’
Cuxhaven City Marina
January, 26th, 2016