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Ocean Blue - Ocean Blue - A night watch for the non-sailors



Good evening from Ocean Blue, tonight we are taking things a little easier after a couple of full-on days of fast reaching. Being rather short handed we have decided to throttle back and give the crew some much needed rest tonight. We have set a more conservative sail plan with poled out genoa and reefed main and hopefully the wind and sea state will remain a little calmer than it has been for the last few nights.

For the non-sailors amongst you, I will try and paint a picture of what a night watch was like last night - the sailors amongst you can probably skip this one and read someone else's far more interesting blog!

So a watch is our term for being 'on duty'. We have three people onboard so we are running 3 hour watches, meaning unless conditions or boat handling demands 2 people are on watch we get six hours rest between watches. Our boat is like a flat, albeit a small flat where nothing stays where you put it. In your normal flat, if you get a bit lazy and don't clear up before you go to bed, unless you are super rich and have a cleaner that comes in tidies up after you before you wake, you can be reasonably certain that whatever you left out the night before will still be there. Our flat is different - its almost certain that you will find your belongings somewhere completely different the next day! And that is because our flat is constantly moving in every possible direction, which takes us to the start of a watch:

A watch typically starts with being rudely awakened by a bright light and a call of 'wake up you're on'. Now in most environments that could be construed in many different ways but in our flat it means just one thing - time to go on watch. So now you are awake from your deep peaceful sleep (if you happen to be the type of person who could sleep deeply whilst balanced on the back of a bucking bronco), and you initial problem is simply getting up, because the designers at the marine equivalent of Ikea have clearly been to many sailing club parties and are aware that us sailors fall out of bed a lot and so have kindly supplied us with sides to our beds - i.e. we effectively have cots! So stepping over the edge of our cots we expect to find the floor - however its rarely we expect it to be: It will either come up to meet us jarring our knees as our heel hits the floor far earlier than expected, or if we are falling off a wave it will be descending fast - and we all know the feeling when we miss a step - well this is very similar.

So we get kitted up into appropriate clothing (which by this stage in the journey should be shorts, tee shirt and lifejacket), but did anyone tell you the skipper has decided to take a far more northerly route this year so the number of items of clothing is significantly higher?

Arriving on deck you are met by the person who is coming off watch and going to go to bed. A quick look around shows tonight is dark - not just the type of dark you get in suburban Hampshire, but they type of dark that means you cannot distinguish the horizon where the sea meets the sky! You have a quick handover chat - you discuss what the wind is doing, any other floating flats in the vicinity, and then having done 3 hours on their own the off watch crew is very keen to go to bed so you are alone.

In front of you we have a few instruments - just like a car dashboard really but with different numbers and dials. Most are pretty boring but for this watch, the interesting one is the one with a wildly swinging needle that looks as if it is on steroids. This tells us where the wind is coming from, and the game is to tame the needle and keep it pointing in roughly the same direction. Now when you go for a walk in the park in winter in suburban Hampshire, you know the wind is coming from one direction because that's the cheek that gets cold first and that is accurate enough. However because our sails (massive expensive bed sheets hoisted up a pole to catch the wind) rely on the wind coming from exactly the right direction we have to be more precise. So either we keep adjusting the angle of the sails, or we adjust the angle of the boat (we steer it, like a car, except most of the time we don't, we have a very nice hydraulic crew member (autohelm) who steers it for us - we just tell him what direction to point it in). On a long trip like this you tend to follow the wind (and if you ask Lesley, adjusting the sails does far more damage to your nails than adjusting the angle of the boat). So as the needle on steroids flies around the dial we have a little controller which tells our autohelm to go left or right, so you effectively play a very basic 80's style console game - 'chase the needle'. Its not helped by the waves and swell that come up behind us at random intervals and launch us downwards and forwards at precarious angles and slew the flat around. Depending on your point of view the effect of slingshotting the flat downhill at speeds up to 12 knots + can either be terrifying (Lesley), exhausting (Pete) or just plain fun (Derek).

Your other responsibility it to look out for and avoid those neighbours who have moved their floating flats into 'your' village. Out here we get very few (I think its far too far to Tesco from here for most people), but there are a few so you need to scan the horizon (which of course you can't find because its so dark) for any lights.

To help with this we do have a radar screen (like an old black and white tv I'm told by those old enough to remember them) which has a spattering of dots indicating the neighbour's flats and has better visibility than I do so thats a help.

So that is how we amuse ourself for a three hour night watch. On days like last night, you can end up clock watching until its time to get the next person up, but to be fair, when its warm and clear (I am still waiting for that night on this trip) its a magical experience alone in the middle of nowhere with no light pollution, enjoying a huge screen with millions of stars, planets, shooting stars and satellites. Maybe tomorrow...

Anyway off for a few hours sleep. We are trying to skirt north around what looks on the gribs like a massive wind hole at the moment so no chance of heading south just yet. The last two days we have covered just short of 190 nautical miles per day so we are cracking on.

Derek, Lesley and Pete.

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