I float in the darkness,
suspended motionless in time and space,
between the sea and sky,
While time creeps up behind me on a rising star
and the watery orb beneath my keel
Spins up the next archipelago
From the horizon.

Excuse the free verse, staring at stars gets to you after a while. Six hours is a long time to stand a watch overnight, but we think it is important on a doublehanded boat that each crew member get six straight hours of rest in a night. So I stand a six hour watch from ten pm until four am, and Robin stands a six hour watch from four am until ten am. Then we do two hours on/ two hours off all day.

So how do I kill six hours of waking darkness every night? Rarely does standing watch mean standing at the wheel the whole six hours - Aunt Mabel is our faithful if finicky mechanical helm holder for that. So, creature of habit that I am, I have a routine within the daily routine to help the hours of darkness spin by.

First, I have s cup of coffee with cookies, preferably chocolate frosted. I like to take the wheel and hand steer for the first hour or so. Just because I like to sail a boat. I mean, if you don't get a thrill of feeling the wind in your hair and your hands on the wheel as you steer your ship through the starry night, the you don't belong out here. Also, I get a feel for the weather, the helm, and seas, and the balance of the trim of the boat. Ordinarily, I would tweak the sail trim at this point, but tonight with the jib poled out there is no sail trimming to be done as one setting handles wind angles from 130 to 180 degrees and wind speeds of. ten to twenty five knots.

When the hand steering gets tedious after an hour or so, I spend some time balancing Aunt Mabel, the self steering vane, so that I can let her take over. Then I tune up my guitar and sing to the seas or the moon or the stars or the Booby on deck or whoever will listen. Tonight's set list was Southern Cross, California Stars, and Fishermens Blues. They all need some work.

Sometime in there it's time for the midnight logbook observations. At 1215 the latest weather updates are available, so I download them and take a look. Though in this tradewinds zone, not much changes with each forecast - east to southeast winds force four or force five forever.

At the one o'clock hour, I tend to check in with this blog as long as conditions are stable enough. When I upload the blog text I also download news headlines from NPR and the New York Times, so I have some idea of what is happening in the world. I am curious to see what is really in the climate and energy bill, but all I get is the headline and lede.

I do poke my head out from time to time to check for storm clouds or the plausible vessel that doesn't have an AIS transponder. But we haven't seen any vessels in over two weeks.

Sometime before two it's time for a pick-me-up of tea and chocolate to gird me for the darkest hour from two to three. I might hand steer again for a while, just to stay awake.

By three I can look forward to the end of my watch. I might pedal the generator and read some of Melville's Typee for twenty minutes or so. Then by 340 I am washing the dishes from the night and getting Robin's tea and snack ready for the beginning of her watch.

Todays sailing was rather uneventful, with the jib poled out and the wind more or less steady, under sunny skies with just one shower of rain. We heard that Invictus lost their autopilot - that is concerning, as the couple sailing her don't seem to have a hand steering watch schedule worked out, and it sounds like Robert is going to try to pull a marathon. Too many sailors count on electric autopilots for passagemaking, without a backup steering plan, and these autopilots fail all the time and can't usually be fixed at sea.

At ten this morning, Hitch the booby looked around, stretched his wings and clumsily took flight, clipping the rigging and falling into the sea in a way that was reminiscent of the drowned drone early in this voyage. But Hitch rose back up. He”ll be back, I said. And indeed, two hours later, he landed with a full belly of fish whose remains he proceeded to poop out onto the deck. So we have added deck wash down duties to our daily chores.

At 1815, Hitch hopped onto the life ring and took wing again. Robin said “Well, just the two of us again. ,How does it feel to be an empty nester?” I said, “don't worry, he'll be back.”