Harbor night watch

There is not a lot of sand left in your bed, but you still feel a few grains of sand left on your madras when shifting from one side to the other. Just a few seconds ago some mean stranger decided to destroy your life by waying you up at 2.15 in the middle of the night.

Well, maybe it was not a stranger, it was obviously someone from your watch, but you are way too tired to remember who. Every part of your body is telling you to ignore the duty to wake up and instead just close your eyes and ignore it. You so want to. But no, you need to crawl out of bed and in some way manage to find your clothes, get dressed and open the door, that loud, creaking door, trying not to wake up your friends. Well, welcome to harbor night watch.

If you have never heard of harbor night watch we basically get woken up in the middle of the night, we put on respectable cloths and sit on half deck watching the gangway. We make shore no random person gets on the boat. This we do for 2 – 4 hours per person. We also walk rounds making shore everything on the ship works as it should.

That doesn’t sound too hard right? It is not, not hard really but so very physically challenging. The only really hard thing is managing to not fall back asleep but instead get up. While you are up and ready for your watch, time gets by very fast. Or well I guess that’s a question of definition. Some would say that the minutes feels like hours and like the time, as fast as you look away, is switching back a few minutes.

Even though all these things make shore that you do not look forward to night watch, the most challenging thing, physically, is the morning after. That perfect morning when you just want the seize the day but do not have the energy to. You get up on deck, getting met by a warm breeze and one whole other guard that is dressed like summer itself and looking fresh and wonderful even thought I could swear that if you were to ask any of them, they would say that they feel disgusting. Everyone is still so excited to go to the beach, but you… You are so tired, way too tired to even try looking as good or have the same excitement.

Although that is not the worst part, morning after harbor night watch, a morning where your guard is responsible for hissing the two flags and strike bells. The Swedish flag is fine to be honest, the spot where you should stand to his it up is behind a building and no one is even able to see you. Then we have the guest flag, it is a bit trickier because if you do that wrong, hissing the flag the wrong way, it means that you want to declare war. My friend did that once, painful memory, lovely story. When it comes to strike bells, I think most of the people on the boat is a bit scared to do this, for some reason we think it is embarrassing. Why? No idea, I can not explain it but if I were to choose, I would never strike bells on muster.

I am tired now, I had harbor night watch yesterday and I have so many more to come. Wish me luck.

Saga Eriksson Forsell - starboard