How often do any of us get a full night of uninterrupted sleep? I know for me it doesn't happen very often. There's always something - snoring spouses, cats who think that if they are up you should be too, barking dogs, bad dreams, phone calls from drunk or troubled friends, things that bump in the night, and the list goes on. Living on a boat presents a whole other group of things to add to that list like people in power boats who don't understand the meaning of NO WAKE ZONE, barking sealions and shrimp clicking against your hull.
The other night while tied up to the guest dock we were awoken by 2 gulls screaming at each other at the top of their lungs, as if they were in the middle of a heated argument. Now, gulls normally sleep at night, but I suspect the lights on the dock creates a false dawn for them which keeps them up all night which I suspect makes them grouchy as it would I and makes them more likely to get into heated arguments with their mates and scream at each other all night. I opened up the hatch and yelled at them, to which they didn't respond at all, they just keep on screaming. I sent the cat out, thinking he would scare them off, but he slinked over all stealth like to stalk them. 'Zero, that's not going to work', I said, 'We want them to go away, which they're not going to do if they don't know you're there!' So I got off the boat, walked down the dock toward them, they respond by walking away really fast, hoping they could avoid having to actually take flight, and finally they took off. I looked down the channel and noticed that there were a pair of quarreling gulls at just about every dock light as far as I could see, must of been that time of the year.
When we're out at anchor there are other things that interrupt our sleep. There's the constant concern about whether or not the anchor is going to drag, which hasn't actually happened to us yet, knock on wood. Some anchorages are much calmer than others, some are completely tranquil and peaceful while others are rolly and miserable. The anchorage at Paradise Cove in Malibu was the latter. There was one swell coming in from one direction which caused the boat to rock fore and aft alternating with a swell coming from a different direction causing the boat to rock side to side and to which the cat felt he'd feel a lot better about the situation if he could sleep on top of my head, and made me feel quite queasy. All this rocking was causing a number of creaks and cracks, clangs and bangs, pings and dings, and sloshing and splashing of which if no one sound is particularly louder than any other you can pretty much tune it out but there was this one clanging sound that was driving me nuts. I finally got up to try and figure out where it was coming from. I went toward the noise and the noise, sensing I had had enough, stopped. I waited, and nothing. I finally turned around to go back to bed and there it was again 'CLANG!' I turned back, but still couldn't figure out what could possibly have created that noise, I moved some things around, waited, no more clanging. I crawled back in bed and once more 'Clang!' it mocked me once more and then went silent. Just as I started to finally dose off again, the anchor watch alarm went off. I got up check to see that we hadn't actually drug anchor but had swung around with the changing wind direction. I turned it off, went back to bed, fell asleep and then was woken once more by water hitting my face because of a sudden rain storm. The weather report had said slight chance of rain after midnight and here is was 1am and it's raining and not just slightly, good thing they covered their bases, makes their forecast right no matter what happens. Meanwhile Jim slept through all of this snoring away.
A peaceful harbor
A time lapse photo taken from the boat, that's how still it was last night and yet I was up for some reason taking pictures in the middle of the night, maybe it was the snoring that woke me, it's always something.
