It's pitch black.  The moon hasn't risen, not that it would matter.  There is only a bit of ambient glow from the instruments in the navigation station.  I'm lying in my bunk trying to get some rest.  In just under two and a half hours, my watch mates and I are due back on deck.

But I can't sleep;  I can barely keep my eyes shut.  I glance over at the GPS unit in the navigation station.  It shows that we're doing 12.5 knots over the ground.  While that's pretty fast for a sailboat, in my bunk it feels like we're doing 50.  Everything is moving.  It's so loud that if one of my watch mates (only a couple of feet away) was actually sleeping well enough to be snoring, I'd never hear him.  The boat surges, and I feel it accelerate.  The water noise increases as the GPS shows us passing 15 knots and appears headed for 20.  Suddenly, I'm pressed forward as the boat sails into the back of the wave ahead of us and slows immediately.  The spinnaker sheet creaks in the block as it is let out quickly to allow for our slowing speed.

I suppose "creak" is a bit of  an understatement.  On boats such as ours, made from carbon fiber, every noise sounds like and seems as loud as a gunshot fired in a portable toilet.  Whether the sound comes from a line going in or out or the boat hitting a wave, every action seems accompanied by a bang. 

I'm a compulsive worrier at sea.  My goal as skipper is to do everything in my power to ensure that the boat is never the excuse for a poor performance.  Ashore, we spend a ton of time going through every piece of gear and replacing those that appear as though they may break.  Sailing, like Nascar, is a sport of attrition; to finish first, one must first finish.  Every bit of broken gear slows the boat and introduces the possibility of not actually finishing.

Each noise takes me further from sleep.  With every sound I hear, I must determine if it was caused by water or gear.  If the latter, was the gear making a normal operating sound, or did it break.  Was the break catastrophic?  Do I need to get up on deck?  Can it be fixed with all the sails up; or do we need to reduce sail, slow the boat, and try to fix it?

Bang.  Bang.  Bang. The spinnaker sheet is brought back in as the boat accelerates again.  The block is directly above my head.  From the sound, I can tell the ball bearings are overloaded in this breeze and beginning to flatten as the block turns when they do not.  I hear a wall of water rushing down the deck towards the cockpit from the wave into which we just sailed. 

Swoosh, trickle, drip, drip.  Hundreds of gallons of seawater rush down the deck and off the back of the boat with every wave.  For those on deck, the pressure from the water is excessive at times.  Often, they feel the tether on the safety harness that attaches them to the boat pulling forward as the water pushes the other way in a tug-of-war over the body.  If the tether looses, a sailor may well find himself becoming a new Pacific Island as he watches the boat sail away.  If the tether wins the tug-of-war, he is probably a bit wetter and increasingly cold.

Below, the water rushes down the deck above my head.  As it passes, it finds every tiny hole and pushes water through to trickle and drip down to my bunk and its two occupants: me and my sleeping blanket.  Neither operates well when wet.  The joke is that there is a lake by one of my watch mates' bunks.  At the beginning of every watch, we bail out the lake.  He complains about the lake; I complain about the river that runs through my bunk, feeding the lake. 

Finally, with about an hour left until my next watch, exhaustion takes over, and I nod off.  Any significantly loud noise wakes me instantly, and I'm up like a shot.  Hopefully, I will be able to sleep until the other watch calls that we're on in 20 minutes.  At the end of a watch, I always tell the other guys, "See you in three hours." To myself, I always add, "With any luck. As long as nothing breaks."

When the call finally comes (although "finally" is not the word I would use after only 40 minutes of actual sleep), we climb from our bunks.  Our body heat has warmed the wet blankets and mattresses, so we immediately get cold as we get up.

The boat is moving, bouncing around like a small plane in a big storm.  It lunges and bounces, surges and slows.  It is impossible to stand without holding something.  I put my gear on; it's just the way I left it: soaked and cold.  My hand reaches through my jacket to find it wet, clammy, and cold, like everything else.  I zip up in the vain hope that my body heat will dry the jacket a bit during the watch.  My harness goes on, and I secure it tightly in the hope I'll never actually test its fit.  A flashlight is turned on, and a snack is found in the galley.  We discuss whose turn it is to make coffee (not me this time). I grab a Red Bull and head up on deck.