When we first started planning on doing this cruising thing, we knew we would have to figure out how to handle David’s propensity for seasickness when conditions are rough. Last summer, we did an overnight ocean “test ride” and David used the scopolamine patch behind his ear. He also used the patch when we first bought the boat and brought her down the Chesapeake Bay in rough conditions. The patch seemed to work great for his seasickness with no ill side effects except dryness in his mouth so we thought we had a solution and David loaded up on the prescription patches.
So when we set off for this passage to the Bahamas, David put the patch on around midday on the first day, about 5 hours before we hit the ocean. My first sense that something was not quite right is he woke me up during his night watch because “there were some stakes in the water that weren’t on the chart” and he was afraid he was going to hit them. That sounds reasonable except that we were about 60 miles off the coast by this time in ocean water about 3000 ft deep! There were no stakes in the water! I went back to bed with a somewhat uneasy feeling. It quickly got more interesting. He began hearing and seeing people and having full conversations with them. Even while he was sleeping, he continued to talk to people and gesture with his hands. He imagined that a boat had thrown an anchor over our stern rail and was just attached to us with people staring at us. The myriad of lines on the boat turned into faces, the people often dressed in old timey clothes. Several times during his off-watches when he was supposed to be sleeping, he came out to the cockpit to ask me bizarre things like how many nights we were going to be home since he was packing his clothes, what the people wanted who were on the foredeck, did I know the people were here to do the work on the boat, etc. He kept thinking we were still at the marina in New Bern and at one point packed his shower bag to go up to the clubhouse to shower. He wanted to make a list of parts and equipment we still needed to buy before we left-completely oblivious to the fact that we were already a hundred miles out in the middle of the ocean. Twice he turned us completely around headed back to New Bern, but wasn’t aware of it.
At first I was pretty frightened. I knew this was the result of the scopolamine, but I didn’t know how long it would last and how much worse it was going to get. I tried to talk David into taking the patch off, but there was no way he would do that. Having him seasick wouldn’t have been a help either. What I was mostly concerned about is he would just walk off the boat thinking he was going up to the clubhouse at our marina back home. We have a rule that we have to wear life jackets when not below and at night we have to be “tethered in” (attached to a fitting in the cockpit) so we can’t fall overboard. Instead of the 3 hr on/3 hr off watches we had planned, we did 1 hr watches for him every couple hours. I told him the auto pilot had everything set so he didn’t need to touch anything (which he later told me hurt his feelings a bit!), just to watch out for other boats or lights.
By the fourth day, the patch was wearing off and he was somewhat his old self, although he did see faces in the hammock of produce over his head in the sea berth at night! He wanted to put another patch on and I was adamant that he not do that! I began to tell him the stories…he had some memories of these things, but some of them he had no memory at all about.
Luckily, the worst that happened was we had to backtrack a few times and I was really, really tired and a bit stressed! It is certainly a story we will remember about the beginning of our cruising adventure! And David will NEVER use another scopolamine patch again!
David here – my perspective: I had no doubt in my mind that the people I saw were real and were on board with us. At one point, as people were coming and going from our boat (although as Mary Beth said we were well into the Atlantic, so I admit now it seems unlikely), there were 3 women on board and I had difficulty determining which was Mary Beth. I have no idea who the others were, although one of them looked a bit like my sister Judy. This was the first and hopefully only time where I was truly unable to distinguish reality from “fantasy”. I have sympathy for people with serious mental illness for whom this is a daily problem, and prior to this happening to me I would have said that it’s not really possible to lose the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, but I know better now. The worst thing in retrospect for me is that I missed the experience of my first ocean passage. I have only snippets of memories and they are distorted by the alternate reality that I was in. At some level I knew something wasn’t right, but I could not tell the real from the imagined.