By Slats Grobnik

Chapter 5: The Formosa, the Dutchmen, and the Dinner Table Debate

There’s a little secret I kept buried in my previous logs, mostly to throw the three-letter agencies and their satellite-tracking suit-and-ties off my scent.

If you read my early dispatches, you’ll remember me mentioning a cramped, thirty-foot sloop named the Passagio. Well, that was disinformation—a dummy decoy for the powers that be who’d love nothing more than to sink a truth-teller before he even clears the harbor.

The real vessel that carried me into the Great Beyond wasn’t a thirty-foot tub. She was a 1976 Formosa 41-foot Ketch, a heavy-hulled, teak-decked beauty built like a wooden fortress. And she had history. Before I got my hands on her, she was owned by members of Fleetwood Mac back in their late-seventies heyday. You could feel it the second you stepped down the companionway—pure, unfiltered good vibes radiating from the rich, dark teak cabinetry.

The interior was a floating time capsule of gold-era rock ‘n’ roll and old-world craftsmanship:

• A sprawling aft cabin with a carved teak berth where Stevie or Mick probably hummed early versions of Rumors.
• Deep green velvet upholstery along the settee.
• A heavy brass gimbaled stove that had cooked hundreds of late-night meals at sea.
• Intricate dragon carvings along the bulkhead, and brass oil lamps that cast a warm, amber glow over my sea charts and research logs.

She wasn’t just a sailboat; she was a haven.

For weeks, she sat docked in Ensenada Harbor, Mexico, undergoing final preparations. The only problem? I had never sailed a day in my life. I knew political corruption, local machine bosses, and press deadlines—I didn’t know a jib sheet from a halyard.

Enter Jan and Minke, an old Dutch couple parked in the slip right next to mine on their well-weathered aluminum cruiser. They were veteran mariners who had spent forty years sailing every drop of salt water on the globe. Seeing me struggle with basic knots, they took pity on the crazy American and spent three days giving me a crash course in heavy-weather sailing, reefing the mainsail, and keeping a ketch on a steady course.

The night before my departure, Jan and Minke invited me into their galley for a farewell dinner of beef stew and heavy dark beer. It didn’t take long for the main topic to surface.

“Slats, my friend,” Jan chuckled, filling my mug. “You are out of your mind. We have sailed around both capes, crossed the Atlantic six times, and tracked satellite navigation across the equator. The Earth is a sphere, my friend. A giant, spinning ball.”

“Jan, open your eyes,” I countered, leaning over the table. “You’re trusting instruments programmed by the very globalists who profit off the illusion! Have you ever actually seen the curve with your own bare eyes? Or did your eyes just hit a perspective limit while your GPS—run by the U.S. Military—told you where you were?”

Minke smiled gently, shaking her head. “We do not need military signals to know the sea, Slats. We watch the stars rise and fall. When we sail south, constellations disappear below the horizon behind us, and new ones emerge ahead. How do you explain the Southern Cross if we are on a flat plate?”

“It’s a localized optical canopy!” I argued, tapping my mug. “The dome works like a giant Fresnel lens. As you move across the stationary plane, your angle to the ceiling lights shifts. You’re not rolling around the underside of a ball; you’re just walking under a different section of the theater ceiling!”

Jan laughed out loud, slapping the table. “Ah, Slats! You have an answer for everything! But when you hit the open Pacific and find no wall, only more endless water until you reach Asia, remember this crazy Dutch couple who told you to keep your bow into the waves!”

We drank late into the night, disagreeing on the shape of the world, but united by the sea.

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Chapter 6: Fog, Ghosts, and the Long Night Before

I couldn’t sleep a wink that night.

I lay flat on my back in the Formosa’s aft cabin, staring up at the teak overhead, listening to the gentle clack-clack of the rigging against the mast and the low harbor swell bumping against the hull. My mind was racing like a stolen Chevy on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

As the hours dragged toward dawn, a feverish haze of memories washed over me—a surreal movie of my entire chaotic life playing on the inside of my eyelids.

I saw myself back as a young kid on the West Side of Chicago, dodging Mayor Richard J. Daley’s precinct captains, throwing wrenches into the cogs of the Democratic Machine, and writing underground leaflets about rigged land deals.

Then the dream shifted, growing darker. I was back in the early 2000s, caught up in a shadowy nightmare after poking my nose too deep into the Carlyle Group and military-industrial land grabs. I remembered the unmarked van, the black hood, and being stashed away in a secret, off-the-books Gulf Coast holding facility—a private gulag orchestrated by operatives connected to the Bush dynasty. I remembered the cold concrete floors, the endless interrogation lights, and the hushed voices in the hallway discussing secret black budgets before I managed to pull off a bizarre, miracle escape through a laundry chute and an offshore fishing boat.

Then came the Vatican years. My mind drifted back to my time hiding out in Rome under an assumed name, spending long, quiet hours in ancient archives and dusty taverns near the Piazza Navona. I recalled my encounters with a renegade Jesuit scholar who, over carafes of cheap red wine, laid out the centuries-old history of secret societies, papal astronomy, and how the Roman church had guarded the secret of the firmament since the Middle Ages to keep humanity dependent on institutional gatekeepers.

Chicago machine bosses, Texas oil dynasties, and Vatican archives… it was all part of the same long chain. The same hand pulling every string.

By 4:00 AM, the alarm went off.

A thick, pea-soup fog had rolled over Ensenada Harbor. The air was cold, damp, and heavy with the smell of brine and diesel. I threw on my heavy oilskins, fired up the Formosa’s diesel engine, and cast off the lines. Jan stood at the end of the dock in his bathrobe, waving a silent, sleepy salute through the mist.

As I steered the 41-foot ketch past the breakwater and out into the open Pacific, heading dead West toward the unknown, the coast of Mexico dissolved into a wall of gray vapor.

Within thirty minutes, land was completely gone. There was no shore, no lighthouse, no Jan, no sound except the rhythmic thud of my engine and the hiss of the cold ocean against the hull.

Panic hit me right in the chest like a lead weight. I looked down at my hands on the teak wheel. I had never sailed a boat alone in my life. I was heading into thousands of miles of empty, stationary water relying on a few hours of advice from a Dutch couple and my own stubborn Chicago grit.

“You’re gonna die out here, Slats,” a voice in the back of my head whispered. “You won’t last a single day.”

I took a deep breath, gripped the wheel tighter, and set the course due West. The Wall was out there. And no amount of fog was going to stop me from finding it.