Sunrise - ARC2021 - Day #14 on the SUNRISE

Sailing at night has it's own difficulties.
While the stars in the sky are beautiful and admireable, the sails are hard to see and wind as well as waves are mainly recognised by their effects, such as constant noises in all the cupboards with dishes and silverware in the rhythm of the seas, the increasing number of bruises on all crew members or the black mainsail halyard twisted around the mast by the warm wind of the night.
Also helming turned out to be more difficult then expected, causing increased numbers of crashgybes in the trade winds. Indeed, helming based on instruments only is already a challenge in it's own, but helming based on a windex display mis-indicating the wind by several degrees is asking for a little more. Our skipper managed the issue quickly despite the lack of a manual.
Further, although we had already marked the middle position of the rudder with white tape, the tape proved indistinguishable from the seewings of the leather protection at night. Thus, we used a cable binder to mark the postion: it's protruding end is easy to detect with our hands. Nonetheless, we quickly had to learn that this wasn't enough to prevent crashgybes at night, especially in the waves of the trade winds. Hence, in addition to our preventer, we placed the biggest fender we could find under the main sail sheet to reduce the impact of a crashgybe on our rig. Further, we turn on the lights in our foreship toilet and the pantry, resulting in the sails being illuminated from below.
Sunrise surely looks like the Flying Dutchman at night.