Posted on July 5, 2014 by cruisingrunner
Two days ago, when I came to a fork in the road I chose the left path, which the sign said was to the plage (beach). Today, I picked the right path, which the sign said was to a viewpoint, and it immediately went straight uphill. Truth be told, I walked most of the way up, but I enjoyed the views from the top, and then sprinted down the other side and came to another sign, once again telling me to go left to the beach. I walked a little way down the road and the scrambled through some brush and over many crab holes to get out near the water, and I found myself standing in some mucky muck, which is basically what’s usually underneath the lagoon, when it is fuller. I could see the beach, I think, far off near the point, decided it was too far and just turned around. This time I sprinted up the hill, no that’s not right. Once again, I walked and then sprinted back down. My legs were still very sore from the run and hike two days ago, and to top it off I was pretty exhausted from not getting very much sleep last night.
Now, cruisers are no strangers to lack of sleep, it sort of comes with the territory. First of all, there’s the obvious night watches when we are underway. We do 3-hour watches on Exodus, and I usually have the 11pm-2am and the 5-8am shifts. As you might guess, this really disrupts one’s sleep patterns. And then there’s all the things that might keep you from sleeping even when you aren’t on watch, like a rocky rolly boat, waves crashing against the hull, engine noise, or being woken up by the on-watch person because there’s lightening in the distance and we need to reduce sail. At anchor it’s only slightly better. In French Polynesia we typically get woken up at least once a night due to rain. The hatches need to be open because it’s too hot with them closed, so when it rains, we can get pretty wet inside. Lucky for me the hatch in our bedroom is over Tim’s side of the bed, so he feels the rain and bolts up to close all the other hatches. There’s also wind through the rigging that will wake me up if the wind gets above 18 kts or so. We keep an anchor alarm set to alert us if our anchor may be dragging, and occasionally we get false alarms from that, although not too much anymore, since we have a pretty sound anchor waypoint process in place now. What am I forgetting… oh yeah, radio traffic. We keep the VHF on, since you never know if someone or some vessel will transmit a distress call, but most nighttime traffic is really just a nuisance. There’s also boat motion in particularly rolly anchorages or those with high power boat traffic. Boat wakes can cause some pretty severe boat motion.
So, right, we’re no strangers to lack of sleep. But last night was different. Last night I tossed and turned and couldn’t get to sleep until well after midnight and then was up again with my mind racing around 5:00. It reminded me of life at home when I couldn’t shut my brain off due to all of the work stresses I would dwell on, except well, there was no stress. Just a racing mind. I would think about this blog and facebook page I just set up, the book I’m reading (Typee by Herman Melville), the boys’ school books, our upcoming passages, etc, etc, etc. None of these thoughts were with any angst of any sort, just thoughts going a mile a minute. It’s like my body was trying to manufacture stress, because maybe, somewhere, deep down, this Type A personality misses it a little? Nah…
Anyway, I should be able to get to bed early tonight, which will help since we intend to shove off tomorrow and should be on a watch schedule tomorrow night. We are headed for Mopelia, which is an even more remote island in French Polynesia than where we are now. It’s noot actually an island, but an atoll. Like the Tuamotus. I’m not sure about the running opportunities, but the snorkeling should be amazing.
-D.
Gresham Family Exodus 