ON4AXA/MM: The Belgian Raft That Crossed the Atlantic

A voice on 20 meters before work

Early on December 27, 1974, Jules “Lew” Freundlich, W2JGR, was listening to 20 meters at home in Malverne, Long Island. His new transceiver sat on a card table on the second floor. Before leaving for work, he heard a man speaking English with a strong accent and identifying his station as ON4AXA/MM.

The operator was Fons Oerlemans. His station was aboard The Last Generation, a Belgian raft crossing the Atlantic from Safi, Morocco, toward Trinidad.

Freundlich began listening every morning and recording the contacts. On January 8, 1975, he finally worked the raft himself. The reported position was 9°37′ N, 55° W. For the man at the card table, an ocean crossing had become a voice he recognized and a journey he could follow.

The recollection that prompted this article belongs to Freundlich, whose amateur-radio memoir is preserved on AA5AU’s website. His account supplies the personal thread. Contemporary DX reporting, the Belgian coastal-radio record and the VRT archive film add the wider story.

ON4AXA/MM and the three men aboard

The Last Generation—De Laatste Generatie in Dutch—left Safi on October 26, 1974. Oerlemans sailed with fellow Belgian Raoul de Boel and Moroccan fisherman Hassan Cribatou, whose surname also appears as Chribatou in other accounts. The crossing ended at Port of Spain, Trinidad, on January 16, 1975: 82 elapsed days after departure.

The raft was roughly 8 m long and 5 m wide. A later interview with Fons and Kee Arens in Practical Boat Owner describes a structure made from reclaimed dredging pipes, with a central shelter, a sail and movable leeboards. It was an engineered steel vessel built around Oerlemans’s determination to make the crossing.

The sail gave the crew some influence over their movement, while wind and ocean currents largely determined their progress. The final approach would demonstrate the limits of that control.

For radio amateurs, the identifier carried its own information. ON identified the Belgian callsign; /MM indicated maritime-mobile operation. Anyone copying ON4AXA/MM could associate successive reports with the same station as it moved across the ocean.

The callsign was already in the DX bulletins

There is a particularly useful contemporary record in the West Coast DX Bulletin of November 19, 1974. Its opening page identifies ON4AXA/mm as the station of a raft that had left Morocco on October 26 with two Belgians and one Moroccan aboard, bound for Trinidad. It reports activity around 14.208 MHz and an anticipated arrival around January 1.

The notice predates Freundlich’s first reception by more than a month. Operators already had a callsign, a frequency and a route to follow.

The anticipated arrival was a forecast. The actual arrival came more than two weeks later. Keeping both dates makes the story more revealing: people ashore were following an expedition whose progress remained at the mercy of the Atlantic.

Listen to the expedition in the VRT archive

Watch the original Dutch-language documentary on VRT Heimwee’s YouTube channel.

• 05:20 — Radio equipment and early contacts.
• 08:20 — Fons explains the expedition’s purpose.
• 16:50 — Radio amateurs and the recovery.
• 25:27 — Arrival at Port of Spain.

The people listening ashore

Freundlich names ON5KL as a home contact and Pam, ON4QP, as the QSL manager. His recordings followed their exchanges with the raft. A QSL manager gave correspondents a practical route for obtaining a written confirmation while the operating station was still at sea.

Alongside those amateur contacts stood the facilities of Oostenderadio. Roger Arnoys and Gilbert Ghyselbrecht’s 100 jaar maritieme radio in Oostende, printed pages 123–124, records the coastal station’s involvement and Jan Van Rompaey’s Sunday links for the BRT program Jan & Alleman.

The history also describes a steerable log-periodic antenna at the SCRE transmitting site, directed toward the vessel’s last known position. Its following page reproduces an illustration credited to the RTT’s 1974 annual report, placing a photograph of the raft above a shore operator at his radio console.

Amateur contacts, coastal-station communications and public broadcasting served different purposes. Together, they let individual operators and a much larger audience follow the expedition.

Why a morning on 20 meters could reach the Atlantic

Freundlich’s preceding memoir entry identifies his new rig as a Yaesu FT-101B SSB transceiver, still connected to his vertical antenna. Those details describe the station in New York; they do not identify the raft’s radio.

The 20-meter band is in the HF range. Under suitable conditions, the ionosphere returns HF energy toward Earth, allowing communication well beyond the geometric horizon. A receiving station does not need to see the transmitting vessel. It needs a usable propagation path and enough signal relative to noise and interference.

That path changes with frequency, time and ionospheric conditions. NOAA’s explanation of HF communications describes how ionospheric changes can alter or even block those links. It helps explain the value of listening regularly and arranging repeated contacts. A missed call alone does not establish what has happened aboard a distant vessel.

The surviving accounts establish successful contacts; they do not supply a complete engineering record of the raft’s transmitter power, antenna dimensions or received signal levels. The important achievement here is the working connection between people, supported by equipment they could operate over a long and demanding voyage.

The “Maritime Mystery” in a Long Island newspaper

Freundlich told a local newspaper columnist what he was hearing. The resulting column, titled Maritime Mystery, opened with a question:

“Who is this brave and mysterious sailor named Franz?”

“Franz” was the name reproduced in the column; the adventurer was Fons Oerlemans. According to Freundlich’s account, inquiries to the Coast Guard and the Belgian consulate in Manhattan had failed to explain the voyage. The columnist also asked about supposed medical experiments.

In the VRT interview, Fons describes ocean-pollution observations, filmmaking and writing among his aims. His explanation gives the expedition a clearer purpose than the newspaper’s speculation.

The original column is known here through Freundlich’s quoted recollection. Its uncertainty belongs to the newspaper’s view of events at that moment. In Belgium, the crossing was already being followed through radio, and the amateur press had circulated its callsign and destination.

The Atlantic crossing still needed a difficult recovery

The VRT sequence records an aircraft search on January 14 and a dangerous drift toward the Orinoco mudbanks. Radio amateurs in Trinidad and Belgium maintained contact and helped direct a Coast Guard boat. Recovery then brought another problem: a towline fouled the assisting vessel’s propellers before a diver freed them. The film records the raft entering Port of Spain under tow on January 16.

Arriving in the Caribbean and reaching a harbor were separate challenges. This is an important part of the achievement: the ocean crossing was completed, and people ashore helped bring the crew and raft in.

Freundlich remembered the arrival being reported by the Associated Press. His columnist sent him the wire story and an accompanying photograph. Later came the QSL card, showing the raft and a map of the route. A contact heard in a quiet room in New York had acquired a face, a vessel and a place in his collection.

The voyage in the radio record

Freundlich described the journey as approximately 3,500 miles. His account does not specify statute or nautical miles, so that remembered figure should not be converted into a precise track length. The dates and the reported January 8 position provide more definite points in the story.

The letter about crossing in a steam boiler

Four and a half years later, Freundlich received a handwritten letter from Fons, then visiting North America with his wife. His epilogue mentions more than 700 QSOs and a proposal to cross the Atlantic in a steam boiler fitted as an underwater observation module.

The letter announced an intended departure in October 1979. That was a plan, not a record that the boiler voyage had already taken place. The Oostenderadio history places the later Seaview expedition at the end of 1980 and describes a six-month journey.

The boiler was a real project. In the later Practical Boat Owner interview, Fons and Kee describe Seaview’s underwater observation chamber and the long passage to Barbados. Their subsequent adventures also included a floating truck and the enormous bottle-shaped vessel Message in a Bottle.

Fons’s immediate reason for writing to W2JGR was more ordinary: he hoped to visit New York and wanted information about the city. He supplied no return address but promised to telephone. Freundlich ended his account by saying he never heard from him again.

That was the end of one correspondent’s contact with Fons. The wider story continued. Fons Oerlemans and Kee Arens later told their adventures in The Last Adventurer: Message in a Bottle. STORMKOP’s archive documents their connection with the Antwerp workshop and its acquisition of the bottle boat.

What ON4AXA/MM leaves us

What stays with me is Freundlich’s habit of listening. He did not know, when he switched on his new transceiver before work, that he would begin following three men across an ocean. He kept listening, recorded what he heard, made a contact and kept the confirmation.

Those ordinary amateur-radio actions became part of the voyage’s surviving history. The callsign connected a raft, its correspondents and the people waiting ashore. The coastal-radio record and television film show how much work lay behind the voices reaching the loudspeaker.

ON4AXA/MM deserves to be remembered as both a Belgian maritime adventure and an amateur-radio story. Its record includes a difficult crossing, people who made time to listen, and a connection that reached into a room on Long Island before the working day began.

Questions, antenna-factor records or height trials to share? Contact RF.Guru.