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The Art of 'Dog Naps'
11/22/00
Blaine Parks
How do two adults and two LARGE
golden retrievers manage a 40-foot boat during offshore passages?
Our methods certainly aren’t the only ones but they work for our
crew. We’ve had a few folks
ask about our offshore routine, so here is what works for us.
We start with safety.
The scariest thing to either Janet or I is the loss of a crewmember
or a boat mishap due to a preventable event.
We start with the basics. We
have a 6-person Winslow life raft that we store in our cockpit locker for
immediate access. We have
also assembled a “ditch bag” which contains those essential survival
items we would need in the case we’re required to leave
‘Charbonneau’ and enter the life-raft.
The “ditch bag” includes food, water, basic survival gear,
spare batteries, a VHF radio, and our 406Mhz satellite EPIRP and it’s
companion GPS. Those items
are for the direst of circumstances.
We spend a lot more of our time
preventing the need to ever use those items.
We rig jack-lines from bow to stern on both sides of the boat.
We wear our inflatable life-vest/harnesses and tether ourselves to
the boat whenever we’re in the cockpit alone, whenever we have to leave
the safety of the cockpit, or anytime during the hours of darkness.
In addition, we keep a personal strobe and whistle on our vests to assist
in locating us if we were to fall overboard.
The dogs have their own harnesses and tethers.
The next step is making sure that
the crew gets enough rest so they will be alert during their watches. We’ve devised a watch system that works for the two of
us. We split the daylight
hours into two 6-hour watches (6am-noon & noon-6pm).
Janet takes the first shift. Blaine
relieves her at noon. Before
relieving Janet, Blaine makes lunch. Janet makes dinner before taking over again at 6pm.
The remaining 12 hours are split into four 3-hour shifts.
We’ve found that 3-hour shifts are about as long as we can stay
alert during the evening hours.
When the sun comes up the next day, we start all over again.
Our food offshore usually consists
of anything that fits in a bowl. We’ve
had soup in a bowl, noodles in a bowl, tacos in a bowl, and sandwiches in
a bowl. We also keep lots of
“comfort food” in the offshore pantry.
Blaine prefers his ginger snaps and M&Ms. Janet prefers her
pretzels and miniature Snickers bars.
So far, seasickness hasn’t been a problem on’ Charbonneau’.
Janet has never been seasick (to Blaine’s chagrin) and Blaine
eats enough of his ginger snaps to have averted the malady thus far.
He’s in no hurry to break the routine!
What do the dogs do, you ask? They tend to hang out in the cockpit during the daylight
hours and then keep the off-watch crew company in the aft cabin during the
night. The aft cabin
can get pretty crowded with two 100 lb. dogs cuddling with one adult.
But those little 3-hour “dog-naps” give us enough sleep to go
on day after day as we click off the offshore miles and the dogs do keep
you warm on those cold offshore nights. Who says dogs don’t make good crewmembers.
That’s
our system and we’re sticking to it.
Checklists
for Offshore Preparation:
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