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Peter von Danzig - The night is also a part of the day!



Wow! The beautiful brown haired tough special agent just jumps behind a
pile of cardboard boxes to take shelter from a burst of bullets. The old
department building in which she busted the gangsters drug-deal is burning
and about 20 pretty angry Triads try to make swiss cheese out of her body.
She……“Hey get up! Time for your watch!“

We are 12 people on board, have no autopilot and a lot to do. Changing
sails for example is a good thing to spend some time: It takes four people
to carry the Genoa 1 on deck and to the bow. It is quite an act to set
this 100 sqft beast just to take it down two hours later and replacing it
by a double-head (two headsails at once) because the apparent wind just
slightly exceeds 16kn. This is the downside of having the luxurious
position of having the right sail for every wind condition. We change
watches every 6 hours during the day and every 4 hours at night. That
means: No chance to sleep in – getting ripped out of dreams every night.

And you guessed it: Normally the first thing that comes to your mind in
this situation is: “Oh no – please! … It surely is terribly cold outside,
wet and the four hours will feel like a lifetime.” But then, once you are
on deck, everything changes. The air is somehow mellow. The moon turns the
surface of the see in a pretty expensive and large bathtub of liquid
silver which reflects the light to our boat, painting everything in a very
special light that is bright and dark at once. Even the stars look more
pale than normal, because old Miss Luna is pushing the pedal to the floor.

Once the moon has set, the sky shows its incredible repertoire of stars.
What children learn in their books at home is not fully correct. The real
sky is not black with a few white dots on it resembling stars. The real
sky (at least here on the Atlantic) is bright, lit by a countless number
of stars. The darkness of the night only fills the tiny gaps between the
dots. People at home! If you are lucky and the sky is not cloudy tonight,
go outside and look for the big wagon (or saucepan or Große Wagen or
whatever you call this arrangement of stars). You might see four stars
forming some kind of a rectangle and some more stars on one etch of it. In
between? Probably nothing. Here it is sprinkled, like painted with
airbrush, full of stars!

This incredible play comes to an end when the sky ahead of us forms a
bright band of blue light and morning dawns. Where else is the night with
her beauty so close? Every day we sit several hours on deck and watch
this. Here on the water the night is part of every day.

So why only sleeping and dreaming at night? You can also bust drug-deals
with your brown haired hero during the day!


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