« San Francisco to Hawaii, Second Attempt. Update #36 | Main | San Francisco to Hawaii, Second Attempt. Update #38 »

October 28, 1998

San Francisco to Hawaii, Second Attempt. Update #37

37. Date: Wed, 28 Oct 98 05:33:14 GMT
Latitude: 26 degrees 36.394 minutes North
Longitude: 136 degrees 39.068 minutes West
Wind NE, Force 3
Heading 240 degrees(M)

Perfect pedaling day; low swell and sunny skies. Kept fresh with wind from stern funneling down hatch onto head and shoulders of person pedaling. I'm feeling back to normal after course on re hydration salts and 9 hours sleep. Steve doing fine -though tired.

So hey!! What's new???

Failed pedal unit turned out to have sheered 1/2" propeller shaft. Due likely to rugged use in for last week against southwest winds and extreme strain of heavy custom stainless propellers. Not worried as we have 3 other shafts (spares, spares, spares -can't have enough of them!). All on the learning curve toward creating the perfect pedal unit! Only black mark on the day was a sudden leakage from emergency water maker. Quick surgery revealed loose pipe -easily fixed. After a particular odious session in the rear compartment stashing trash and retrieving new week's supply of nourishment, equilibrium returned to the good ship Moksha, facilitated in part by 1/2 package of M&M's each and a cup of Tetley's finest FD tea.

We've been seeing and hearing more and more ghosts recently. Not being kookie here, just trying to make sense of strange hiccups of mind experienced recently and suggest possible link between Sensory Depravation and sea myths of old in which returning sailors swore blind to have seen mermaids, sea monsters and the like during long ocean passages; claims that gt short thrift in rational, scientific world we live in today. Standing in the cockpit this afternoon I noticed out of the corner of my eye a huge gray shark not 3 feet from the boat -a few feet below the surface. With a start I turned to face the monster only to find myself staring at a harmless streak of bubbles thrown up by Moksha's bow wake, reflecting light strangely from a cloud overhead.

Likewise on Saturday's 1/2 a flip-flop seemed at first glance to be a deadly scorpion fish. And since the start of the voyage I've been hearing a male voice murmer occasionally from somewhere near the stern, which my rational mind corrects me almost instantaneously as being just a rope rubbing the side of the hull. The shark, scorpion fish and voice all seem as real as the bubbles, flip-flops and rope rubbing on the side of the hull. At least for the millisecond it takes for the mistake to be corrected by the mind. The brain is a large muscle like any other in the body. It is used to processing large volumes of information, which is of course much lacking out here on the ocean. As soon as a sense organ -like the retina in the eye -detects a new and rather unusual stimulus in the external world, an extra sharp and astute part of the brain immediately pounces on it and interprets it with a 'non-sense' label (in this case a shark) before a more rational part realizes the error and replaces it with a a label that makes 'sense' (ie bubbles). The reason that the initial label chosen by the brain in each case was either a dangerous animal or a human is perhaps a throwback to a prehistoric survival instinct to expect the worse in an unpredictable world and prepare the body for 'fight or flight' mode. Each label is as real as the other, at least for the time -however brief -it is experienced by the host. This may not only go some way to explaining old sea myths in which sailors really did for an instance see a mermaid or a sea-monster in a shifting pattern of the waves (ie a ghost), but also add weight to theory that the external world of objects and things that seems so real -is in fact just illusion. The real world is in here, not out there!

Last night I saw a ghost in the middle of my graveyard shift that had me worried though. I was staring at 240 degrees on the red compass light, mind a million miles away, when the "2" on the "240" sprouted a huge set of teeth and took a chunk out of "270's" backside! (The next number on the compass card.) Now I was navigating by a compass that had due West (270 degrees) relegated to be NNE (27degrees). Chaos! Luckily, on the 2nd take, all was back to normal -just as well. Otherwise we'd never find our way to Hawaii.

Fatigue or going doo-la-li? After a month out here

-I'd say both. -Jason

Editor's note: So would we!

Lewis & Smith,
The Moksha crew

Posted on October 28, 1998 6:29 PM