Message from Freya via satellite phone Monday morning (Australia time): 11.47 140.01. 3rd night out 355km left. I slept like a baby last night!

Other problems for a good night’s rest were the frequent encounters with sea snakes – this one above has just swallowed some prey, probably fish. It was really swollen fat on one end!

I saw about 4-5 snakes per day, and paddling the first three nights a few hours at night, I simply stopped paddling the last night as I didn’t want to flip up a snake with my paddle in darkness. Too dangerous, I decided…and paddling at night became to rough teh next nights anyway.

You don’t want to dangle your hands into the water at night…on turning my floats I was probably doing it anyway, and chances to just grab a snake instead of the float handle were probably low, but who knows…

Next animal “danger” was a bird landing on my hood at night – probably thinking about a great floating log in the water as a landing platform! I chased him away, just to see him landing on one of the floats! Beast! Don’t pick on my float!!!

Or the low flying “Flying Fish”, flashing like UFO’s about 1/2 m above the water – bet I had one crashing on my hood close to my face one night! It left a stinky fishy spot which kept me awake some time…

This very small one landed on my spraydeck at night.

Or the windchill…floating on the water mostly without sea anchor meant drifting sideways to the wind, and you simply like to turn your head or body into one direction only.

Or some rain…the Gore Tex hood is strapped tight around your face, but there needs to be a spot to breathe…so I better pulled down my neoprene visor including scarf to have som eprotection on the face and still being able to breathe.

Or some lovely breakers, more or less high, depending on the night’s sea state…what a feeling if they crash over your bed and face every so minutes, more or less strong, more or less frequent, not always unexpected as you can hear them coming and turn your face away, but sometimes you are really fast asleep!

So if you are not mentally strong and can force your body to some somehow quality rest, you will go downhill soon…and if the quality is hard to reach with deep long sleep phases, quantity rest needs to do the job for a while. This is why I simply didn’t paddle at night any more after the first three night’s tries for a few hours. It got dark at 7pm, and I was in sleeping position latest at 8pm. It got light at 6am, and I earliest started to do my morning chores at 5.30 am.