Dan Best wrote:

Wayne.B wrote:
On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 05:38:00 -0600, Geoff Schultz
wrote:

Anything more than 4 hours at night is too long.

I agree.

Not necessarily. After much experimentation, we found that what works
best for my wife and I is that I go to bed at dusk, leaving her on watch
until midnight when we swap. I then take over until she wakes up
(usually shortly after dawn). During the day, we're less formal about
it, but generally switch back and forth every 3 hours or so. Obviously,
this won't work for everybody, but for us it does.

We tried all sorts of different systems before settling on this. I was
OK with just about any of them, but we found that unless she gets a long
uninterrupted break at night, after a few days the sleep deprivation
starts really getting to her. You don't want to be on the same boat as
my wife when she's sleep deprived. It ain't pretty.

In our case it is the other way around. I can sleep almost any time
and anywhere but Bob can't. I can also pretty much can wake myself
every couple of hours, so I can also do the anchor watches.

That's one reason I won't go more than an overnight offshore. It is
possible that if we actually did a multi-day passage that he would
eventually conk out and go to sleep when he was off-watch, but I don't
want to count on it.

Normally for offshore (which we've done quite a bit off on the last
trip we did - Miami to Ft. Pierce, St. Mary's River to Charleston and
Charleston to Cape Fear River), I will take a nap in the morning and
then relieve Bob for a little bit, but he won't sleep. So I will make
lunch

He will make dinner which we eat together in the cockpit during the
daylight, and I will go to bed right afterwards. I wake up about 11
and then take over from him and he will try to sleep. He usually
gives up sometime during the night (I once remarked that he'd been to
the bathroom twice and he complained that I was checking up on him,
but as he turns on the light in the head at night, I could see it
shining from the porthole) and comes back up into the cockpit. But
sometimes I'm still there at sunrise. Otherwise he will come back up
around 2 or 3 and I will go take another nap.

If he wakes up and sees it is daylight he thinks he's overslept and we
should be there and he starts doing stuff like shaving and eating and
stuff like that, and getting the boat ready to come into the harbor.