Rude awakening

It was four in the morning and I had barely gotten five hours of sleep that night.

The waves constantly tumbling Gunilla back and forth as well as the extremely inconveniently placed air conditioning system right beside my bed had honestly made it quite a difficult challenge to sleep there, but somehow, I managed to catch a few hours asleep anyway. Still, I was wide awake as the previous watch turned on our headlight and woke us up in time to ready ourselves for our turn. With my head booming and the rest of the body screaming to get back to bed I forced myself up, brushed my teeth and changed to appropriate clothes. By the time I was done there was only a few seconds to spare until our watch began.

I must admit, the first half of the watch was not exactly the most fun. It was so dark I sometimes did not even know where my hands were. The lack of sleep combined with the unnatural amount of information I had to process turned my brain into a giant ball of mush, rendering it completely useless. For a half hour or so I just stood around there, not really aware of anything other than my immense craving for sleep.

One of the few things I actually do remember is the completely breathtaking night sky filled to the brim with countless stars, planets and everything in between. If you were lucky, you could even catch of glimpse of a shooting star, which our first mate Micke explained was a meteor burning up in Earths atmosphere. Probably the most surreal experience I have had in a while was lying on my back and just starring up towards the sky, watching all the stars slowly drift along with the movements of the ship. At that moment all of problems blew away like the wind.

/Erik Zapata Johansson