On long ocean passages small crews set up a watch schedule which typically is something like 3 hour watches and 3 hour rests. With a larger crew (4 or more), the watch times can be shorter and the rests longer. With just two people the 3 hour plan still works pretty well, but with passages of less than two days, Mary Beth and I use an informal schedule where we are both usually in the cockpit together with one napping and one at the helm keeping watch. When the one on watch starts falling asleep and falling off the helm seat they wake the slumbering one and switch places. This works pretty well, but the off-watch person doesn’t really get good sleep, so it is not a good plan for multi-night trips.
There is a very odd, almost an “out of place and time” feeling when sailing in the deep ocean at night. Your world is small and isolated. You can see your boat (the running lights give you a sense of where it’s “edges” are), and you can see and hear water rushing by next to the cockpit, but you can only see for about 3 feet next to the boat, and this is lighted only by the running lights which shine only a small smidge of light down on the water.
There is also a very odd sense of speed. When you look at this water next to the cockpit it looks and feels like you are flying. I sometimes feel a moment of panic. That “what if there is something in the water I can’t see” instant. To a degree this concern is justified. You cannot see anything in front of the boat. If there were an unlighted boat, a whale, a shipping container, or a log, you would crash right into it no matter how diligent you are in looking around and scanning the horizon when on watch. When the moon is out, that little bit of extra light makes a huge difference in one’s comfort level. At least you might be able to see an outline of something in the water in front of you. On our recent passage, no such luck, no moon.
When underway at night we live by statistical probabilities – in simple terms “big ocean, little object”. The chances are overwhelmingly in our favor that there is nothing in front of the boat. But the chance of crashing into something is not zero so there is a lingering anxiety and an accepted risk that we may, somewhere and sometime, hit something at night in the ocean. And we might sink.
Life, however, has many risks that we accept. Driving a car is perhaps the biggest one and most of us accept it every day. I’ve read that every one of us has about a 30% chance in our lives of getting killed or seriously injured in a car accident in our lifetimes. Why don't we worry so much about that - what’s the difference? When driving we believe that we can see what is around us and we think we can control what happens to us. When sailing at night, we are forced to grapple with and finally accept that we cannot control what we cannot see.
But eventually, the sun does come back around…and the eastern sky glows.
Thanks for reading!
David
