A Lack of Sleep

I don't know about you, but there are times when I just can't sleep. And this boy needs his beauty sleep. It's impossible to look as good as I normally do without a good solid 8 hours of drool inducing slumber. Sometimes my mind spins on stupid things that have no bearing on whether or not I should be in dreamland. There are times when random thoughts keep me up at night, and the more I think about why these thoughts are keeping me up, the more awake I get. It's a viscous cycle.

One of the dumbest and most common things that keeps me up at night is when we buy a lottery ticket for a huge jackpot. For some reason, my mind likes to spin in the middle of the night on which shiny new boat we would get. The only thing that gets me back to sleep is spending hours on the internet researching boats (I love boats). The bad part of this story is that we are without an internet connection most of the time now that we are floating around on the boat. But the good part of this story is that we rarely buy a lottery ticket so I don't have to worry about being burdened with dreaming about our big winnings. The better part of this story is that we are already living our dream life, so even if we did win, the only thing we would change is the fact that we would have a shiny new boat to circle the globe in...and we would bring our friends along with us. Actually, I take that back, we would be so rich we would buy better friends (just kidding, our friends are the best already).

The last couple of nights have kept me up with random tasks that need to be completed before we take off into the big and mighty blue ocean. All of these tasks are things that I could be thinking about during the day when I am already awake, but no, I seem to want to dwell on them at night when I should be keeping Brenda awake with my snoring. And all of these things are things I normally do before any big sailing trip so it's not like these things are way out in left field. For some reason they just seem more urgent at 2 in the morning.

Check the belts and fluids for the engine, make sure the pumps are working, grease the rudder, stow EVERYTHING so it doesn't go flying across the boat in big seas, lash the dinghy down on deck, check the through hulls, prepare some quick grab and go meals, fill up with fuel and water, get out the ditch bag and liferaft (just in case), call my parents (just in case...just kidding parents, we'll be fine), attach the inner stay and hank on the storm jib (just in case), set up the jack lines for our harnesses, check the weather forecast, check the weather forecast, check the weather forecast (did I mention that one already?), charge the batteries for our headlamps, make sure the nav lights are all working, lash the anchor in the roller, plot our course on the chartplotter and computers, dig out the charts for the Pacific coast of the US, etc, etc, etc........... And this was just from night number one. Night number 2 was worse.

Heading out into the Pacific is much different than sailing around the San Juan Islands. The wind and waves are bigger, the chances for things to go wrong are greater, and there is no place for us to stop for the night when we are offshore.

If I think about it, it may seem like I am nervous about our trip down the coast, but surprisingly, sailing offshore in the big blue doesn't make me nervous. We've both had enough offshore experience to know what we are in for. We aren't total newbies. I'm not going to lie and say that days and days of no land in sight are my favorite thing, but it really doesn't scare me. The parts that I don't like are the lack of sleep (there are only two of us on board and we don't stop at night...do the math), the constant motion that makes it difficult to do anything, and the lack of sleep. Oh yeah, the lack of sleep. It's exhausting...because of the lack of sleep. This boy loves his 8 hours of sleep...which doesn't happen offshore. Because there is a lack of sleep.

The parts that do make me nervous are the little details that you do your best to prepare for. I am generally pretty good about the little details...maybe a little too good. I agonize over the little things. It's part of what made me good at my job when I was working and part of what drives Brenda crazy. I can visualize just about every scenario you could think of and over prepare for all of them.

Since we have limited space on our floating home, I can't bring along every spare part that you might ever need. We just don't have the room. I'm not nervous about things breaking or wearing out on the boat...because it's a boat and those things happen. And when things break, it's not the end of the world because I'm pretty good at fixing things. But I am worried that I brought along some of the wrong spare parts. Maybe I brought a doohickey when I should have brought a doodad. You just never know what is going to break and when it's going to happen and if you brought enough or any of what's going to fail. The more I think about it, that's what keeps me up at night. Did I bring the right stuff?

Who knows I guess. We've brought everything that can fit and we still have a few boxes of stuff that my Mom is delivering to us in Sequim that we are going to have to jam into some cubbyhole (thanks again Mom).

At this point, we are finishing up last minute preparations, provisioning, and waiting for weather. The weather is starting to open up off the coast of Washington and Oregon starting mid next week, so we are at least waiting till then. The trip from the San Juan's to San Francisco will take us roughly a week and if you are interested in following along during that week, we'll be posting updates to our Facebook page with our satellite communication system. Like us on Facebook and you should be able to see the updates in your news feed. The link to our page is here:

https://www.facebook.com/svadventurer

Also, if you haven't seen it yet, our newest video is up on Youtube. The link is down below.


Good Bye San Juan Islands, you'll be missed.
You guessed it, this is our home at sunset.

Me and my good friend Brad following orders from the Captain...being rail meat.

If the link for the video doesn't work on your device, you can copy and paste this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F39Zti1NMOQ

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