On the boat sleeping is a bit different than on land. Even with all the technology onboard, you do not just let go your boat on autopilot during the night (well some do, but we didn’t), because you might encounter another boat, or the weather conditions can suddenly change (we have experienced a perfect calm and clear night changing to strong and gusty winds with rain, lightnings and waves, just because of some naughty clouds). That is why we split the nights into watches.

During the trip, Rodolphe and I would be on watch for the first part of the night (8pm-12am), then go to sleep for 4 hours during which Jon and Trude would take the watch, and we would come back to the cockpit from 4am to 8am. So basically, instead of sleeping for 8-ish hours in a row and then have a 16 hours long day, we would split the sleeping into two sleeping times of 4 hours (and to be fair, a few one-hour naps here and there during the day in the cabin or on the deck). Some days I would sleep more (especially at the beginning when I was seasick), some days less, if instead I had a good book to read or felt the urge to climb on the mast to see what’s going up on there.

What is interesting with split sleeping is that it changes completely the way days are defined ; in the “real life”, after each sleeping time a new day begins. Because of that, the first 3-4 days on the boat felt like weeks, and then all this sleeping times would eventually feel like naps in a kind of endless day. Because you got time - a lot of time - and nowhere to go, everything you do is very intense. I usually read one or two books a month, in 20 days I read not less than 15 books (two of them being 900 pages long).

You got time to lose yourself in thoughts while looking at the sea, time to meditate, time to think about what you have done and what you want to do, about things and people you really value in life. Only for that, the experience of living on a boat for some time is worth it.

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