The Sleepyhead's Bedside Companion by Sean Coughlan

Author:Sean Coughlan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409050179
Publisher: Random House

When can lone yachtswomen sleep?

ALONE YACHTSMAN OR yachtswoman is a vulnerable figure, spending weeks at sea, contending with the weather, the oceans and fatigue. Sleep puts a solo sailor even more at risk, with no one to look out for danger, no one to check on the weather conditions, no one to plot the course, no one to steer. Falling asleep for eight hours isn’t really an option. So the people who race yachts single-handedly have to learn how to sleep in short bursts, avoiding long stretches at night or during the day when the vessel would be unattended. It’s the ultimate kind of high-stress napping: grabbing a few minutes whenever possible, constantly snacking on sleep, but never succumbing to a full night.

Ellen MacArthur, for her record-breaking, solo round-the-world trip in 2001, worked with a sleep expert on a system for taking short naps in a way that balanced her physical need for sleep against the need to be awake and alert for as much of the day as possible. The young yachtswoman slept for an average of five and a half hours each day, divided into chunks that averaged thirty-six minutes. This pattern allowed her to keep racing for ninety-four days, without succumbing to the exhaustion and confusion that comes with serious sleep deprivation.

When she talked about her sleep tactics after the race, she said that it hadn’t been that difficult for her to keep waking from these short naps. ‘I can’t describe the mechanism that makes me wake up, I just do it,’ she told reporters. ‘I will sleep for forty minutes and if the wind changes I’ll wake up.’

Not all solo sailors are so lucky. Others have to train themselves, using techniques such as a loud alarm that goes off every hour, forcing them to keep waking. It can take at least two miserable, sleep-disrupted weeks before the sailor is able to sustain themselves on a ration of short sleeps.

The way such solo sailors sleep has interested researchers. This pattern of regular napping is an extreme form of ‘polyphasic’ sleep, in which people have many sleeps each day rather than the ‘monophasic’ single sleep. Researchers have wanted to examine the possibilities of surviving such prolonged sleeplessness, with a view to its application in the military or in space projects. The endurance of the long-distance sailor holds out possibilities for how the need for sleep can be tamed.

See also Sleep training: quack alert.

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