When you are doing long ocean passages, it's a lot harder than you think to stay awake 24/7 with a crew of 2.
I always get a kick out of this discussion and the reality of what new cruising couples do. Here is a typical watch shift.
Shift 1. sunset to midnight
Shift 2. midnight to 4:AM
Shift 3. 4:AM to sunrise
You know what happens at sunrise......whoever is on watch, goes to sleep. The sun is up so the logic is.....you don't need to keep watch.
Guess what, ships in transit don't keep night time hours. They run 24 hours a day and all you have to do is be unattentive for 20 minutes and you can get run down. Chances of it actually happening.....probably about 10,000:1.
The reality is, stuff happens out at sea. In 80,000 miles and 2 circumnavigations, I have had 2 close calls. One was at night, while someone was on watch and one was in the middle of the day and no one was on watch. We were down below playing cards and we heard the droaning of an
engine. By the time we got on
deck, the ship passed us by about 150'. If it would have been closer, we could not have gotten out of the way. I called the ship on the
VHF and they had no idea where we were.
We have a hard and fast
rule that we keep watch 24/7 if we are within 100 miles of land. After that, we rely on
radar with an
alarm set at 6 miles and we go to
bed. If the
alarm goes off, I get up and take a look around. That will usually happen 4-10 times a day. 95% of the time, it is a false alarm (sensitivity setting). The other time, it will be a ship passing far away and we would probably not have seen them if we were watching.
In order to keep a proper watch, you need a minimum of 3 people. 4 hours on, 8 hours off. Each person taking 2 shifts a day. Any less than that and you are kidding yourselves.
Long ocean passages has it's risks. getting run down is one of them. Hitting a partially submerged container or other large item is another. One time we hit a Whale Shark, off of
Indonesia. It was kinda like hitting a big fat bag of lard but it could have been something worse.
This guy was extremley lucky. It looks like the ships bulb struck him right between 2 bulkheads. Had it hit 1' one way or the other, we would have never known what happened to these guys.
One of the most shocking things that I ever saw was in 1985. We were anchored in Western
Samoa and a smaller container ship came in and there was a yacht's
mast stuck between the
anchor and the
hull. There was also a fresh scratch in the
paint, all the way down the
hull. I jumped in my
dinghy and went over to the ship. It was a German Capt but he spoke
English. They had no idea that the mast was there or that they even hit anything. That really scared the crap out of us for awhile.