
I like my sleep. As sleep traditionally is a night-time thing, I usually miss a good portion of the night. I am on the 10 to 2 watch shift, which has given me the duty/opportunity to better appreciate those hours for something besides reading or causing trouble, and I have enjoyed it thoroughly, in no small part due to my surroundings.
The weather on the crossing has been superlative. Whatever piece of wood the captain knocked on when invoking peaceful travels is a powerful one, as the seas we have crossed are living up to their Pacific name. Very little swell, light wind, only one brief period of rain have made our journey easy, and have made the ten to two most enjoyable.
I am on watch with Mike the Filipino engineer wizard. That’s right, I’m hanging out with Mike the mechanic, so eat your heart out all you eighties music aficionados. He is a witty dude who has Chuuk wired; when we travel together through town everyone acknowledges the guy who used to keep their cars running, no mean feat in this place. When we are on watch, we talk sometimes but often pass the hours in pleasant silence, taking turns doing engine room checks and using my iPod. Mike is a hard rock fan. He gravitates to AC/DC, Aerosmith, Van Halen, etc. on my iPod, and I find myself stocking it to keep him happy. Sure it is nice to keep the engineer happy, but I also do it for personal enjoyment, as Mike loves to sing along. He does so with a childlike disregard for what I may think about his singing. It is really amusing to sit just outside the pilot house and watch Mike, slumped in the captain’s seat, rocking back and forth and singing along in a quiet, high pitched, keening voice that, though awful, is quite Axel Rose-like when he is jamming out to Guns n Roses. Classic.
Aside from watching Mike jam, the primary source of joy on the 10 to 2 is the open ocean. Keep in mind that we are in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from land. During the daytime, the view stretches to infinity, where I feel that I can detect the clouds arcing downward to wrap around the curvature of the earth. The sea is this perfect blue described too many times for me to add my own trite description. Suffice to say that it is enchanting.
It looks different, of course, at night. The color is the source of midnight blue. I have a spot next to the pilot house where I set a chair. It provides a good view over the
railing and I can still see the radar through the window, not that there is anything on it. I sit on the windward side of the boat and am usually quite comfortable without a shirt, soaking up the mild breeze and the sights.
Our running lights are the largest source of light pollution for many miles, so the heavens are vivid in the clear weather. Distant galaxies are so bright and tangible that they appear as clouds. Red stars wink like the running lights of a stationary airplane forever frozen in its course. Every night the moon waxes and performs its descent at a later time in the watch, shifting colors as it drops into the sea, projecting that picture postcard line reflection of moonlight across the dark water as it falls. The stars here are different, in different places in the sky. My astronomy is weak anyways, but instead of the usual constellations, I have found friends visible from my port perch to keep me company. Instead of Cassiopeia I have the Penguin. I have traded Orion for the Bowing Man. Like countless generations before me I find shapes in the outlines of the heavens.
Despite messing with my sleep schedule, the 10 to 2 is pretty cool.