People often ask us about sleep. When do we sleep? Where do we sleep? And even: Do we sleep on the boat? The answer is yes we do. And have done for the past 19 months. It’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times. One thing is constant: nighttime’s approach usually delivers a magnificant vista.
When we sail the boat thru the night, our sleep pattern takes on a whole new rhythm.
If we’re underway for more than 24 hours we take turns sleeping. Chris prefers a two hours on, two hours off schedule. Alex prefers a three hours on, three hours off watch rotation. It’s something we’re working on in the marriage, among other things.
Depending on the sea state, there is usually one optimum bunk to sleep in when we’re sailing at night. Most often, that bunk is amidships on the leeward side of the boat. Since one of us is always awake, we only need one good spot and we rotate there in a manner referred to as “hot-bunking.” The comfort and rest we get in that one optimum bunk all depends on the weather and the sea conditions. Sometimes it’s hard to sleep, but eventually we get caught up on our rest.
Sailing thru the night can be exhausting and it can also be transcendently beautiful and it gets us to some amazing places:
Eventually the anchor is down again and we usually have an abundance of new friends, and sometimes old friends, nearby to celebrate with.
Or maybe we’re invited to a bonfire on the beach or we go out in town, if there is one. When we do stay home the peace and quiet of an evening spent reading in the cozy cabin of our boat is blissful.
Or sometimes we splurge on a little bit of battery power and enjoy a movie night aboard with our little projector:
And eventually we go to sleep.
The conventional management of space aboard a boat like ours at anchor would see us use the salon as a living/dining room and sleep in the forward cabin. Instead, we’ve made the unorthodox choice to toss convention aside and to live and sleep amidships in our salon for three reasons:
- The ventilation on our boat is best amidships.
2. We’ve filled the forward cabin with gear and there’s no room for us to sleep there even if we wanted to.
- The settes in our salon pull out and make into surprisingly big and comfortable bunks.
(Note: Some 36-foot boats also have an aft cabin. Ours does not. We just have more gear stowed in various cockpit lockers back there instead. So sleeping anywhere aft of the companionway is not an option for us on our boat.)
The downside is that we need to put our bedding away every morning and transfer the space back into a sitting area, only to reverse the process again 12 hours later. On our boat, this has somehow become Alex’s chore.
It gets dark here in The Bahamas just after 6PM in December. If we do stay home and it’s calm we might be hesitant to turn on our cabin lights because they attract bugs. We often go to bed early. Shockingly early. Embarrassingly early. So early, we won’t even type the number. We’re not the only one in the anchorage with this habit. In the sailing world, they refer to 8PM as “cruiser’s midnight” and that holds true. Maybe we’re all just catching up on sleep from those overnight voyages.
We also get up early. An alarm goes off at 5:30AM to help ensure we don’t develop bed sores. Even with the early start, it’s a long night and we’re often awake in the middle of it. Sometimes by necessity to tend to the boat’s needs, and other times to fret as humans are wont to do, and other times to just take in the night sky and the pleasant breezes.
No matter when the lights go out, there are some hard sleep realities that we must confront from time to time. We have no heat and we have no air-conditioning. We do have the flexibility to move the boat seasonally in an effort to chase after pleasant climates, but even excellent execution of that little trick will rarely leave us with a boat cabin that sits at 72F consistently.
Like most boats, the temperature in our cabin hovers somewhere between the sea-temp and the air-temp. In June in Nova Scotia it was cold everywhere and all the time aboard the boat. Here in The Bahamas, the cabin stays consistently in the mid to high 80s during the day and rarely dips below 80F at night. Luckily for us, Sundance has 14 opening ports plus two dorade cowl vents that provide the best ventilation that we have ever experienced on any boat. And then it starts to rain at 1AM and we have to jump up and close all 14 of those openings one at a time and we wish there weren’t so many of them. And then is stops raining at 2AM and we’re hot and so we get up again and open them all. Then it starts raining again at 3AM… Fortunately, we do have a rain fly to cover one of our biggest opening ports. As long as we’ve remembered to set it up, we can leave that hatch open in all weather and that can be a godsend.
All this ventilation works best when the boat is pointing straight into the wind. This is exactly what she wants to do when lying at anchor–one of many reasons we usually prefer to spend the night on anchor instead of at the dock. All those rainy wakeup calls are an excellent opportunity for an anchor check.
Spending the night on anchor comes with its own set of concerns. For our well being and for the safety of the boat, it’s essential that the anchor stays put where we deposited it. Mostly it does. Good equipment, practice, and skill helps. But with an increase or change of wind or current, the anchor will occasionally lose it’s grip on the bottom and drag across the sea floor. It’s our job to notice this before we crash into our neighbor or end up shipwrecked on a rocky shore. Our neighbor’s dragging anchor is sometimes even more of a concern, especially when we don’t have much confidence in our neighbor or their anchor.
Anchor dragging phobia is not conducive for restful sleep. We sleep with one eye and one ear open and utilize a pair of anchor alarms to keep a technological eye out for us. Last year alone we spent 222 nights on anchor and had zero problems. In fact, we’ve had zero anchor issues in the ten years we’ve owned the boat. This track record helps to ease the tension. Unfortunately, this track record can also lead to tragic complacency.
Rolly anchorages are another affliction that can dampen our spirits in the wee hours. If conditions are wrong and wind opposes current in an anchorage or a swell from the ocean wraps around the protective corner of our chosen bay for the night, the boat can roll wildly from side to side making it difficult to lie still in bed. Rolling around uncontrollably and violently in bed is not conducive for restful sleep.
Chris is convinced these conditions are related to mathematics. He also asserts that dividing by zero, when we finally figure out how, will lead to a break-thru in yacht design mitigating all concerns over rolling at anchor. If you feel like nerding out over this concept, he explains the theory in detail in a past column in Points East Magazine. Link: HERE
Until that particular advancement in our understanding of the world occurs, we simply try to avoid spots where a rolly night could be expected. So far, our voyage has taken us thru regions of the world that are rich with great, well protected, and flat coves to drop our anchor in. We know this will not always be the case. In some places there just are no good options and we will have to endure the roll. Nose to the grindstone math people, we need your help.
If there is a breeze, sleeping in 80F heat in the tropics is something that we have acclimated to easily. The plentiful water supply provided by our water maker means we can take a cockpit shower before bed to rinse the salt off and cool down, something we find to be a helpful sleep aid. Once in bed, we often end up sleeping on top of our sleeping bags instead of in them. Alex has also concocted a tropical approach that forgoes the sleeping bag altogether and substitutes in a sheer sheet and a small bamboo blanket. A recent gift from a friend now has us sleeping on dreamy silk pillow cases that also help keep us cool. (thank you David N.)
If there isn’t a breeze, all that excellent ventilation is rendered useless. The boat becomes hotter and the sleeping becomes harder. Our fans are a worrisome power draw and they really don’t do much anyway compared to a good breeze.
In calm weather, bugs also become a concern. Our boat is well equipped with screens, but like the good downeast built boat she is, her screens are designed for the state bird of Maine, the mosquito. We’re pained to report that out here in the wider world, the mosquito isn’t our only concern when it comes to bugs. The little black bugs that people call “sand fleas” here in The Bahamas, or “gnats” on the ICW, or “black flies” in New Hampshire, or “No-seeums” in the bug prevention world, are our biggest nemesis on the boat and they slide right thru a mosquito screen like water thru a sea-strainer.
Eventually, we learned to purchase no-seeum nets to sleep under. The down side with these is that they block airflow and that makes the still air feel stiller and the hot nights feel hotter. Doug tells us that every good boat should have full length benches to sleep on in the cockpit and we are in total agreement. Relocating with our bug nets to the relative cool of the open air cockpit helps. Until it starts to rain. Our cockpit benches are a few inches shorter than we would like, but we make do. It’s kind of like when you need to sleep on a short bench in the airport or bus station, it’s not optimal, but better than trying to sleep sitting up. These still, hot, sweaty, buggy, showery nights are challenging, and we endured one just two nights ago. Awake and drenched in sweat, we both whiled away the hours untangling our bug-nets, slapping at flies, wishing the cockpit benches were eight inches longer, and composing this blog post in our heads. A mental draft was complete before dawn.
And then we think to ourselves, “If sleeping on a short bench in a bus station in a puddle of sweat is really our thing, well, Greyhound travel is a sort of voyaging too. And potentially bug-free. And dry. And if not completely bug-free then at least with a low bug-count. Maybe we’ve taken the wrong fork in life’s journey with this whole boat thing.” Then a spate of middle-of-the-night-self-doubt ensues.
These are the worst of times. Luckily, morning always comes and we regain our sea-legs and fight our way off that lee shore.
Even with our under-length cockpit benches, a move from the cabin to the cockpit can turn a bad night into a good one. And it can turn a good night into a divine memory never to be forgotten.
When conditions are right, these can be the absolute best of times and we just had one last night. Let us tell you about it: A gentle breeze is up and it’s washed away all the bugs. The wind floods thru the dodger window churning the warm night into a Goldilocks temperature. The night-glows from Miami, Havana, and Port-au-Prince are equidistant and far away, incapable of compromising the pure black above our masthead. The night is clear and moonless and the stars have the stage. It’s an infinitely large cast and a timeless show. The wind snaps out a rhythm in our Bahamian courtesy flag. A half mile away on the east facing beach a constant curl of waves growl in syncopation. Occasionally the surface of the water near our boat breaks with the thrashing and splashing of fish on fish violence (or lust?) adding intrigue to the night. These are the best of times–even with short cockpit benches. We marvel that a simple 8 knot breeze can turn the worst of times into the best of times only 24 hours later.
Stormy nights happen too of course. When they come, day or night matters not at all. We’ll save that subject for another blog post altogether. Stay tuned.
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