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| more photos of the bay below in link |
As some of you may have heard already: on August 8, in the wee hours, near Burgas, Bulgaria, while camping on the bay giving onto the Black Sea, someone broke into our old Volvo wagon via the rear passenger window and stole my field recording kit & tools suitcase, among other things. Inside the suitcase they grabbed was the Zoom H6 (a constant companion since 2015), the new hydrophone, two self-built piezo contact plate microphones, that Tecsun PL-600 shortwave radio, numerous cables and many home-made patches, various tools, walkie talkies and worst of all, the irreplaceable SD cards with the last few days and nights of recordings (about which I was very excited) and another SD card, recordings from 2021 from Romania, Poland & Bulgaria, some of which had not been archived yet). The experience I'd been contemplating of this beautiful Black Sea coast was primordial and exhilarating: rugged beaches, some still heaped with millions of tiny shells (future sands from former homes), with visible shoals and sand-bars, views of the ports, cormorant perches, foxes calling to each other in the scrub at night, a peninsula obviously once inhabited in Homeric or earlier times jutting out, steep cliffs falling off. I had long and fruitful recording sessions and walks along winding paths of wind-blown wild grass. I had hoped to bring listeners closer to these shores and into the electromagnetic pulsations of the ionosphere full of resonance and Perseid meteor showers....
I had started to snore most likely just when the glass shattered, the sound of breaking plastic glass masked and blended with the crashing, distantly lulling Black Sea waves. Nothing short of a miracle will replace the recordings but a little help from friends can go a long way towards recouping I and Karolina's expenses in replacing the lost gear and getting our home recording studio back in order and get us back in the field again. Our automobile insurance doesn't cover theft. In fact, the insurance company wouldn't even pay for the glass replacement. So the greater loss is the gear, the clothes, the tools, some medicines and the whole day spent enjoying the inside of a Bulgarian police station.
Donations to help us recover the gear can be made to my paypal account jeff.gburek@gmail.com or if you would prefer another means of support message us directly. Many thanks to our Bulgarian friends Den Stefanova and Rozaliya Mitrova who reposted here my all points bulletin days after the theft.
I would like to thank Nina Rholfs, Charles Whittaker, Bob Bellerue, Kenneth Bradburd for their contributions to the recovery campaign. And thanks to all who shared the post and offered condolences.
photo sets from Burgas Bay
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