Managing Sleep Deprivation

Can you keep sailing for another 24, 36 or more hours if you had to?

By Bryce Potter

You never know when, or how, you’ll need to manage sleep deprivation. Any number of reasons can cause you to run short of sleep, no matter if you’re singlehanded or with a full crew, sailing from Seattle to Hawaii or Seattle to Port Townsend.

First, a disclaimer: I’m not advocating that anyone ever intentionally go to sea in an exhausted state for practice. If you practice these techniques, do so in a safe place when you don’t have to drive anywhere. I experimented with this in college, where my biggest danger was falling asleep in class. Stay out of the car and away from anything else that is potentially dangerous.

Think back to the longest day you’ve ever spent on the water. How tired were you? How long and how hard did you sleep that night? Could you have kept sailing for another 24, 36, or more hours if you had to?

Here are a few strategies that I’ve used successfully over the years to mitigate sleep deprivation:

Sleep early and often. It is much easier to stay rested than to fight your way back to alertness after you’re already exhausted. Once you’re underway and settled in, relax for a little bit. If you’re sailing with a partner, have a quick nap. Do what you need to do to keep a safe watch, but take it easy. Let your body rest and adjust to the rhythms of the boat. If you’re sailing solo, an alert rest can be almost as good as a nap for resetting your internal fatigue meter.

Plan your sleep to adapt to your body’s natural rhythms. Most humans sleep in approximately 90-minute cycles. The body will slowly descend into deep, restorative sleep, and then slowly come back out of it. At the top of the cycle, your subconscious will check around to see if there is any reason to get up. If so, you wake up feeling pretty good. If not, the cycle repeats and you get another chance to wake up not groggy in another 90 minutes.

By timing your sleep cycles, you can determine how long you should sleep for at any given time. For example, if you have to be up in 8 hours, you might actually do better to set your alarm to go off in 7 ½ hours. Eight hours divided by 90 minutes is 5.3 sleep cycles—your alarm will be going off just as your body is starting to descend into another round of deep sleep. Seven and a half hours is exactly 5 cycles, so you’re asking your body to wake up during the shallowest part of sleep, and it will be much easier.

Likewise, if your opportunity to sleep is limited, you can still use this to your advantage. If you’re racing and doing 4 hours on, 4 hours off, you might be better off sleeping for 3 hours each off watch rather than trying to squeeze in every last possible moment of shut-eye.

Everyone’s sleep cycles vary somewhat, and you’ll have to experiment to figure out what works best for you. When I was a student at Maine Maritime Academy I experimented with a number of different sleep schedules and I was able to isolate the one that worked best for me. Timing my wakeups helped a lot, but I found that my most efficient strategy needed more. I needed naps.

Naps are awesome, but you have to be careful with them. If you get too deep into your sleep cycle, they can leave you groggier than when you started. The trick is to wake up before your body descends into deep, restful sleep. I find a 20-minute nap to be about right, but experiment to see what works for you. If you wake up too groggy, try a shorter nap.

I found that if I took a 20-minute nap between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, I only needed 4 sleep cycles—6 hours—even with a full class schedule and my job. If I missed the nap, though, I was groggy and needed an extra cycle the following night.

I worked my class schedule around my naps during my last year of school, and it worked like a charm. These days, when I’m sailing in the Pacific Northwest in summer, the long days make a sleep schedule like this pretty nice. Even if I’m singlehanding, anchoring up for a quick nap in the afternoon makes the evening a lot more pleasant, and it’s easier for me to get up and go in the morning.

Those strategies are all well and good, but what if you have to run around the clock for some reason? (R2AK, anyone?) If you’re running 3 or more competent folks, I like a 4 hours on, 8 hours off standard watch schedule. It’s easy, once you settle into it. I find that I can keep my ideal sleep schedule with this system—I sleep 6 hours during one of my off-watches, and usually get an hour and a half nap (or two) during the other off watch, depending on what off-watch work the ship needs from me.

If you’re running double handed, there are a number of options:

I’ve tried 4 hours on, 4 hours off, and it sucks. The only advantage I can see of that system is that it keeps a crew too tired to mutiny, which might be why it was so popular in the past.

Six hours on, 6 hours off is definitely more manageable, and for up to a week or two isn’t too bad. When I did that working on tugs in Alaska I’d try to get 4 ½ hours—3 sleep cycles—every time that I was off watch. It works for a couple of weeks, but after that if you miss a cycle it’s pretty hard to catch up, and you can end up pretty tired if the weather is too rough to sleep properly. Occasionally, when we were tied up, we would be able to get 6 hours straight, and for everyone aboard that made a huge difference. There seems to be something magical about getting 4 sleep cycles in a row.

The Coast Guard seems to think so, too, and in a study that was done a few years ago recommended a watch schedule of 8-8-4-4, with the two 8 hour watches during the day and the two 4 hours watches at night. I haven’t tried this, but it’s worth a try. Six hours can be a long time to stay alert in the wee hours of the morning, but when the sun is up it isn’t so bad.

For the singlehanders, I’ve heard of round-the-world solo sailors sleeping 3 hours at a stretch, and getting through the rest of the day with 10 minute naps every hour. I tried a variation on this once, in order to effect sail repairs early in a trans-Atlantic race, and it does work. It is not fun. I had a lot of folks aboard who were sleeping a lot more than I was and were watching out for me. Stay safe, and make sure you’re keeping a safe watch!

Captain Bryce Potter grew up at Lake Tahoe, and worked as a professional ski patroller before embarking on a career at sea. He has studied and practiced wilderness survival and wilderness medicine his entire adult life. He is a graduate of Maine Maritime Academy and holds a 1600 Ton Ocean Master’s license for motor and sail vessels. He lives in the mountains near Seattle.

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First published in issue #95