Episode 7: Sleeping Together :0

 A potentially delicate issue here, and one that our respective wives may, or indeed - may not, have firmly held opinions.

Sensible people, when they go sailing for extended periods, by which I mean more than a day, take with them a boat that comes complete with a lid. Beneath this lid one can often find all manner of mod-cons such as showers, televisions, beds and the like designed to make the sailor's overnight stay a restful and snug one.

As is well known though, we are definitely not sensible people. The nearest we are going to get to taking a bed with us is the vaguely bed-like form of the catamaran and the nearest we have to a roof will likely be something that we will have to wear.

Havng said all that neither Pole nor I are in the Bear Grylls league of hardiness and working out how to convert your average ex-olympic class racing dinghy into the kind of 'pied a mer' that will keep body and soul together for a month or so, is going to take some thought.

 My most recent previous experience of open boat cruising saw my daughter and I stomping around the West Coast of Scotland in my father's elderly Wildfire keelboat. Elderly it may have been, but it did at least have sides and a foredeck that offered some protection from the elements. Back then, I looked at the various options used by the Wayfarer cruising fraternity and I decided to shell out some big bucks on a tarpaulin from B&Q along with some gaffer tape. An afternoon with the scissors saw the construction of the kind of tent that would have Gary of Smith Covers postively cringing with embarrassment. But it did only cost about a tenner ... so .. not all bad.

 

Scotland smiled on us weather wise and the tent managed to survive the trip. Obviously, though, this kind of thing isnt going to do the job for our Round Britain efforts. 

My initial thinking was that we would simply use one of the hike tents we already had; pitch this onto the trampoline each night and we would be sorted. However, I was reminded of one of the nights of the Scotland cruise where we arrived at our anchorage in Canna at about midnight (navigating by seal grunt is an interesting experience which I must tell you of some time) and both of us felt simply too knackered to bother putting the tent up. We decided to take a chance on the weather and simply drape the tent over our sleeping position. Fortunately it didnt rain, but had it done so that night, I think we might have gotten ourselves and our sleeping bags completely soaked which would have ruined the rest of the trip rather. Lesson learned .... you need something you can pitch in five minutes even when you dont really feel like doing it.

The more hard-nosed of the hiking and mountaineering fraternity as well as our boys and girls in khaki make use of bivvy bags in these kind of crcumstances and this is where our thoughts are heading at the moment. I've never used one before but I get the feeling that it really could be a simple as dragging the bag out of storage, rolling it out on the tramp, climbing in and going to sleep.

Something like one of these (not my photo):

 

 Actually ... to be clear, I should say, 'something like two of these'!! We will have one each!!

This seems to tick a lot of boxes: Quick to set up and tie down to the boat (I dont fancy the idea of rolling off the boat into the water ... but at least it'd float ... hopefully), low windage, so less likely to cause the anchor to drag plus I can sleep completely isolated from Pole's legendary nocturnal flatulence. Mrs Pole tells me this is something to be avoided if humanly possible. The only downside I can see is that I will be stuck in a small tube with my own nocturnal flatulence .... but I dont mind the scent of roses:) 

Imagining what might happen as we pull into an anchorage on a rainy day shows however that the bivvy bag in itself is not going to be enough. We will likely be absolutely soaked and will need to be able to 'slip into something more comfortable' before hitting the hay. This would be a pointless exercise if the something more comfortable become soggy and uncomfortable while we were changing into it! The need to cook meals and just generally sit about on a wet evening  or morning also says that some kind of tarpaulin or cover would be needed to provide some shelter for that. We will have to wait for the boat to go together before we can finalise our thoughts on how that will work, but again, something simple and quick to deploy would seem to be sensible.

Given that we can put at least one waterproof membrane between ourselves and the elements we then need to consider how to insulate ourselves while sleeping.

I cant see anything that will be better to sleep in than a bog-standard three-season sleeping bag. I do wonder if we shouldnt be considering something that we could get out of quickly and maybe a simple quilt might be better.

It also seems pressing that we consider what will happen underneath the sleeping bag/bivvy combo and therefore what we are going to sleep on. The bivvy bag will be laid out on the trampoline, but the trampoline is the usual mesh-type that you see on most modern catamarans so there is the likelihood that water could come slopping through from underneath while we are at anchor. I cant really be sure just how cold this could make us. But it cant be good, so a good insulating layer between the sleeping bag and bivvy bag would seem tobe necessary. Previously I would have used what my Candian chum calls a 'foamie': one of those roll-up mats that you often used to see hikers using. The modern version of the old foamie is the inflatable insulated camping mat. These mats aren't just airbeds, but they also contain insulation like you would find in a jacket. We'll be getting one of these to start with to see what they are like, but it seems likely that this will be the way we go.

 

If anyone has any experience of this kind of thing, please do comment - we'd like to hear from you.

Next episode .. I'm hoping Pole will be able to tell you all about the rather marvellous hiking racks that he has made ... ;)