SLEEPING

SLEEPING

There is something absolutely soporific about the motion of this boat!  ONO makes it almost impossible to stay awake off watch.  I start to read or write and soon my eyes close and I am off again.  We have a 3-hours-on-6-hours-off watch system – so today I went off watch just after midnight, slept until 0520 when Richard knocks on my door and wakes me up for the 0600-0900.  This is the most social watch with the blokes up for breakfast, and the time I am least likely to go back to sleep.  With another 60 Miles or so to get to Palma, my next watch will be 1500.  At the moment we have virtually no wind and have been on the engine since we left Sardinia – the mainsail is up and gives a little drive from time to time but we are probably short of fuel to make it into Majorca.  We will be passing one of my favourite anchorages with KiwiStar – the small island of Cabrera, 30 M South of Palma.  

Back to sleep – which often seems to be deep and dreamless.  It seems obvious but once I have made my ‘nest’ of foams, sleeping bag and pillow I am enclosed in a drifting womb-like space where it almost feels that I am floating.  If there is a sea running and ONO is surfing down waves, I am quite literally weightless for a moment – a bit like the split second when you go over a humpback bridge in a car.  The landing though is soft and pleasant, and even a boat at sea probably goes through less movement that a pregnant woman in the course of normal life.  I truly believe that even the most dedicated of insomniacs could resist.  This in spite of wave slamming, engine, radio, whistling kettle, creaking boom, rattling blocks….  The skipper, of course, is a special case and will wake to anything out of the ordinary.  Slamming is what happens when the boat reaches the bottom of the wave and crashes into it before rising up and over the next one.  It sounds like a big soft sledgehammer, hitting the hull and sometimes making it shudder in a way that really makes you trust and respect the designers and builders at Beneteau.