Time and tide

Monday was the first day in ages we had to do essential tasks - a giant supermarket shop, a laundry wash of almost all our clothes, a long list of repair and maintenance jobs and most important of all, using charts and tide tables to plan tomorrow's journey. It was, ridiculously enough, exhausting and at 10 pm we are still making lunch for tomorrow, with the half the list undone and a wakeup time of 0430, to catch the tide out of Inverness at 0530.

Your sense of time changes on a long trip like this. We've now done 470 miles, with about 550 still to go. It's often hard to remember which day of the week it is, and yet there are small deadlines to be met all the time - such as doing a fix on the paper chart every hour when we're on passage, or getting into or out of port before a particular tide window.  

Maybe that's partly why long-distance sailors do what they do; in order to lose the ordinary land-based sense of time.