I love this, I hate this, I love this, I hate this. I can’t make up my mind, not yet, though I am finding my caprice to be directly correlated with hours of sleep. 

It’s gray out today. If I were painting the seascape around us, I’d only use a palette of white, black, and blue. Not how I pictured sailing in Mexico. Though it is November and we are a hundred miles offshore.

I’m wearing long black joggers, a white long sleeved shirt, my Patagonia pullover, and black Helly Hansen jacket. It’s a cool cloudy 64 degrees out here. My hair is a mess, greasy, pulled back into a ponytail. I straightened it the morning we left in hopes to keep it tidy for the next week or so, but the humidity had other plans. Still, I brush it frequently to try and feel more human. Anything to feel more human: brushing my teeth, washing my face, using wet wipes as a makeshift shower. I pull my toiletries out of the bathroom cabinet quickly, one hand against the door to stop its contents from falling out as the boat sways with the swell.

I try to do oblique crunches when I’m at the helm and the sea dips my hips down left, down right, then more sitting crunches, straight up and straight down. I don’t know if they’re doing anything, but moving helps. My step count is abominable. I do empty-handed bicep curls, hammer curls, arm circles, lifts. Squats behind the wheel. I dance, too, to try and feel happy. It usually works, like forcing yourself to smile in the mirror when you’re sad. Garrett looks at me like I’m weird. I am weird. Especially out here, especially with eight hours of sleep in the last sixty. 

We’re in the middle of nowhere but surrounded by five other sailboats, presumably other members of the Baja Ha-Ha. Three are off of our port stern, full sails silhouetted in the late afternoon sun.

Oh, the sun. I loathe the short days. It happens every year, I’ve been through this thirty times, but the waning hours of daylight come as a shock. And since I apparently can only sleep between the hours of 7am and noon, my exposure to sunlight is shorter still.

I feel best during the last ninety minutes of my watch, past the halfway mark. Six hours of my own time are ahead of me. Six hours that I use to try to sleep, fretfully, or, more successfully, read and write. I do like the simplicity out here. I’m not on my phone very much, and apart from GPS tracking and boats miles away from us, we are cut off from the world. As someone who easily gets overwhelmed by all there is to do in life, I appreciate having a limited range of possibilities when we’re at sea.

Plus the air tastes so good. Fresh. Clean. I keep taking big gulps, bathing my lungs in its purity, hoping it offsets all of the diesel I breathe in when there’s no wind and we have to motor. 

The water is very blue right now, a deep gray blue, the foamy surface on it a stark white. It’s alive around me. That scares me a little, but invigorates me, too. A whale keeps breaching a mile or so behind us, throwing its body into the air, slapping back down into the water. “Please don’t come closer!” I call through the air. Jim wanted to see whales today and I consider waking him up but decide against it. Sleep is very important these days. A rare commodity. I think we’ll get the opportunity to see more whales. 

The sun is about to set, but the horizon is cloudy, so I don’t know how much of it I’ll see. It’ll be dark soon and the sea will look blacker, thicker, like extra dark chocolate brownie batter. I hope the clouds break so we can see the stars. My watch is over in an hour, and I won’t come back outside until midnight. I hope I can get some sleep in between. If not, there’s always 7am tomorrow. 

Three days and three nights at sea is a lot for me. I’m having a lot of ups and downs. We started off on a positive note, sailing downwind out of San Diego in a parade of 150 boats. The wind has let us sail a lot on this leg; we’ve sailed more hours over the past three days than we did the entire month cruising down the California coast.

We ran into trouble the first night. Jim was at the helm and Garrett and I were trying to get some sleep. The engine bucked and roared and stuttered, jolting us out of bed and up into the cockpit to investigate. “We need to cut the motor,” Jim said, so we did. There was no wind and no visibility; we were bathed in fog. I hand steered, disoriented, tired in the windless night, following Jim’s simple instructions to keep us around 120 degrees. I could feel my triceps strain as I tried to correct our course, as the compass rolled down to 90 degrees and up to 150. My neck was sore from looking down at the numbers in the glow of my red headlamp light. The men slept on either side of me, catching rest, ready to wake up and help when needed. Dawn broke at 5, slowly with the clouds, and by 6:30, it was bright enough for Garrett to dive into the water and investigate our propeller. He untangled a mess of yellow and purple rope from its blades; we must have hit a couple of crab pots in the dark. The depth reader had stopped working, it does that when we get past 300 feet, and Garrett got spooked by some of the unrecognizable sea creatures that surrounded him. We all three of us did. He scrambled back on board, tested the engine, and it was fine. We motored through the morning, relieved.

By that point, we were hours behind the rest of our fleet. The stress of that first night had taken its toll. We were exhausted. Try as we might, Garrett and I could barely sleep. Jim, on the other hand, is an excellent sleeper. Top notch. Starts gently snoring within minutes of closing his eyes.

The lack of sleep got to me. I cried in frustration in the privacy of my bedroom, mad at my circumstances. “I do not like this,” I would think, grumpy, as I peeled the sheets off of me and got ready for my night watch. “I do not like this one bit.” After the initial crankiness wore off, things would get better. I’d see shooting stars—one so big I swear I could hear it cutting through the atmosphere as it fell. I’d sit in the quiet behind the helm and notice that, for once in a long time, my chest wasn’t vibrating with anxiety. I’d watch the waves wash away from our keel, glowing a neon blue in the otherwise colorless night.

The days ran on, made up of three hours on, six hours off, breakfast, lunch, dinner, trying to sleep when you could. We felt gritty, in need of a shower, knowing that we probably smelled but unable to detect anything; this was our new normal. We sailed a ton, caught tuna after tuna, ate sashimi and fish tacos. The hours were passing, the nautical miles stretching behind us as we neared our destination. 

In the small hours of the morning on our last day, we started to see other boats around us, their navigation lights small green and red dots in the distance. The wind was building and our autopilot was strained, confused in the gusts and swell. I was on watch and got turned around once, started bashing upwind with 20 knots on the bow, bright blue waves splashing back at me. Garrett jumped out of bed and came to my aid, correcting our course, letting me go to bed in his place; I would make up for the last hour of shift when the wind died down. I gladly accepted, watching a few flying fish dart blue through the air as I made my way down below.

We came into port at 2pm that afternoon, navigating through crab pots and a crowded anchorage, found a good spot, dropped our anchor, and popped a bottle of champagne. We made it. From San Diego, California to Bahía Tortugas, Mexico, we made it.