How to Avoid Cabin Fever: Tom Cunliffe’s Column

Keeping your cool, and recognising the signs of the onset of cabin fever before it festers is a skill worth learning if you want to avoid unpleasantness among the crew.

Tom’s Podcast on How to Avoid Cabin Fever – Give it a Listen!

How to Avoid Cabin Fever

‘Love, soft as an easy chair…’ sang my watchmate for the tenth time since eight bells, following with a whistled version of what he imagined to be the next line. I thought how much better Barbara Streisand delivered the number and ground my teeth silently. 

The wretch was clearly missing his girlfriend, but why he had to load up his angst on the rest of us was beyond me. ‘Why doesn’t he finish the song,’ I thought. ‘Or better still shut up?’ 

Spike, for that was his name, and I were signed on as gash hands aboard a beaten-up vessel headed south for better weather which had so far eluded her. It was February. The gales blew, the mainsail was so old that only regular attention with the needle saved it from blowing out of its bolt ropes, and the main topsail set like a pensioned-off pillow case outward bound for the rag bag. There was simply no excuse for our skipper, a paranoid hater of his fellow men; the mate was a manic depressive while the cook could only be described as a human mistake. Faced with such morale-busting circumstances, we focsle hands had every reason to be nice to one another, yet even in our small world the atmosphere was strained. These days I can see that Spike probably disliked the way Bert left his kit lying around. I didn’t care for it myself, but Bert was an amiable sort of guy. I don’t suppose my shipmates were crazy about my practising the harmonica either but, like so many before me, I fancied myself without sin, placing responsibility for the tense ambience firmly on Spike and his endless repetition of that single tuneless phrase. 

Sailors have always had a superstition about whistling. The popular explanation is that the malefactor will whistle up a headwind, but I’m convinced the truth is different. Any vessel far from land is a potential hothouse of cabin fever. We can’t escape our companions and they are certainly stuck with us. A snatch of tune whistled over and over again can provoke reprisals varying from a quick-acting dose of paraffin in the morning tea to a shove in the back near the rail on a dark night.

The chandler’s shelves are crammed with useful instruction manuals, but no author offers simple advice on dealing with a shipmate ripe for a punch on the nose. Yet grief between humans obliged to live cheek by jowl goes back a thousand years to the days of the Norse sagas and no doubt far beyond. If you haven’t experienced aggravation on a boat yet, never fear. Sail with friends or strangers for long enough and you will. Here are a few pointers. 

Unhappiness is catching. Put one misery guts in a crew and you’ll soon have a handful more. The classic sign of impending cabin fever and conflict on an extended passage is when one shipmate becomes uncharacteristically quiet and introspective. Unless the sufferer has a nasty attack of dyspepsia, he is either worried about his business or, more likely, he has a wife or sweetheart back home. Either he’s feeling bad because he’s having all the fun and she’s slaving away paying the mortgage, or he’s convinced she is even now getting it on with the plumber. In either case, he’s decided he shouldn’t be here at all. The fact that he’s obviously depressed loads you, the skipper, with the suspicion that you have fallen short in leadership when you have probably done nothing of the sort. The knock-on effects are inescapable and, whether it’s sex or the office, you have a dying duck on your hands who will wear down the spirit of the troops as surely as a Jonah. It’s your job to take steps, and the best answer is somehow to get Mister Longface talking. It’s a lonely world when you’re worried, and most discontented people can’t wait to cough it all up once they find a friend. Having rooted out the problem you can at least reassure the victim. Tell him his plumber is an ugly weirdo with nasty habits, or that his wife is probably as happy to have a quiet week or three on her own as he is. If being a confessor just isn’t your bag, delegate the job to a sympathetic crew member, but you must recognise the signs and act.      

Manners are another area of concern. When my daughter was four and still susceptible to the influence of her seniors, I shipped a young man who, among other unsavoury traits, used to pick up his wooden plate and lick it clean at the end of dinner. Although an undeniable vote of confidence in the victuals, we didn’t want the child to grow up imagining this was normal behaviour. Although inherently a decent lad, his wide array of unacceptable antics was worse than irritating. At twenty years my junior, all it really needed was a firm private word, and once I bit the bullet I was surprised at how readily he accepted the advice to clean up his act. The rest of the summer passed in comparative harmony and I was spared a stretch in the Scrubs for violent crime.

A third classic point of conflict and cabin fever occurs when people’s motives and aspirations fail to concur. On varying scales, such misunderstandings lead to divorces, boardroom brawls and wars between nations. At sea things are much the same. A ship can only go one place at a time so, if two parties want something different, one is going to be disappointed. Not having the option of stepping off onto a passing wave, the aggrieved party will generally be entered onto the list of undesirables by becoming alienated. This is bad news if the unhappy soul expected a jolly week’s yachting with nightly frolics in convivial anchorages, to find instead a prolonged session with half a gale in deep water. It’s even worse if a teenage daughter fancies an afternoon in the pricey marina handy for the boardwalk shopping mall when you want to drop the hook in a quiet creek for free. 

The best solution to cross-purpose aggro I ever heard of was dreamed up by a crew who circumnavigated from South Africa. Before committing to the trip, they sat down at the saloon table and thrashed out where they would go, why they would go there, and how long they might stay. Next they agreed who would be responsible for what, how much each would pay, and so on. The consensus was then written up as ship’s articles which they all signed. When the first rumblings of trouble sounded somewhere down in the Pacific, the skipper had only to summon all hands and lay out the agreement to which all were bound. End of problem.

As a postscript I must return to the provocation caused by the evil habit of whistling. If someone came up on deck, whistled or sang a tune from beginning to end just once, then went below again, nobody would mind at all. They might even enjoy it. It’s the unspeakable repetition of a disembodied phrase that does the damage. People don’t even know they’re doing it. 

Not long ago I was visiting a marina washroom. A lifetime had elapsed since that awful voyage with Spike, Bert, the misanthropic skipper and his mad mate. As I shook off my oilskin, a sound I recalled with horrid clarity came warbling from behind one of the loo doors.      

‘Love, soft as an easy chair….’

I slumped over the basin with a sense of déja vu before the flush sounded loud and long, and a grey-haired Spike appeared at the toilet door, somewhat stouter, but cleaner by far than ever he was in the old days. It beggared belief not only that he was there, but that the phono needle in his brain was still stuck on that same phrase. I thought of hiding in the next cubicle, but instead I manned up, shook his hand and bought him a pint. 

I’d been wrong about Spike all along. He might have been a dodgy shipmate, but once ashore he stood the next round like a gent. By the third pint, we were laughing our wellies off about that awful cook. 

‘Never hold a grudge’ isn’t bad advice either.

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