Since we generally make our passages with just the two of us onboard, keeping a watch at all times, as required by international regulations, is a challenge. During daylight hours, things are pretty casual – the more tired person takes a nap, and the other crew is then on watch. But at night, it’s a bit more tricky.
Over our time sailing, we’ve learned about many different approaches for covering night watches, covering the spectrum from nobody on watch (one family just shortened sail and then all went to bed), to one crew member being on watch all night and the other one being on watch during the day.
Aboard Oso, we roughly split up the night watches in half. Mike is on watch from 6 until 9pm, then Angie takes over from 9 until 1:30am. Mike then finishes the dark hours, handing the baton back to Angie at 6am as the sun is starting to rise. This fits our personal preferences pretty well – Angie is a natural morning person and would likely be up with the sun anyway, and Mike prefers to be up later at night and to wake up later in the morning.
The first few nights are a bit painful – it’s difficult to adjust to shorter sleep segments and to being up in the middle of the night. But around day three, something clicks and it gets more comfortable. We’re a week and a half into the passage now, and we’re well settled into the rhythm of the overnight watches.
All’s well aboard.
Day Eleven
12 53.0S 101 03.7W
189nm
