No Sleep - Bad Day

At Sea
37 10.28 N 075 41.50 W

I need to do something about sleeping while at sea. On this passage, I got no sleep for the first.44 hours. Yesterday we had a bad day. Yesterday also my brain was affected by fatigue. That is a very bad combination. Here's the story.

We have been motoring almost 100% of the time on this passage. That's bad but that was our plan. Winds and waves are light, but they were directly on the nose. Tarwathie is a wonderful buat but she is not good at powering against wind and waves. We could do 5.5 knots under power with no wind, no waves, no current. We can't go faster because (I thiink) our propeller is undersized. Yesterday the head wind subtracted a knot from that - 4.5. Then the wind started blowng harder - 4.0. THen the stronger wind started kicking up waves coming toward us - 3.0 knots. Our estimated time en rouhte nearly doubled -- so much that I feared running out of fuel before we got there. Then I noticed that the engine was overheating. I was pushing it too hard. At that point I considered (and rejected) turning back.

Why not turn of the engine and sail? Well, that's a guaranteed way to get us there, but Tarwathie does not sail well to windward with light winds and facing seas. Our bast in those conditios is 60 degrees off the wind. Our speed made good (progress toward the goal) drops to 2 knots. With 80 miles to go, it would have taken another two days of slogging into the wind.

Well, the bottom line is that things got better. We got the engine temperature back to normal. The wind dropped to zero overnight allowing speed to increase to 4.0. Around dawn, the wind returned, but this tome at an angle 20 degrees more eastewad. That allowed us to sail. I finally got four hours sleep and when I awoke, Libby had all the sails up and we were making 6.4 knots. Hooray! As I write this, Cape Charle lighthouse just came into sight. That marks the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. Hooray.

All that stuff is true, but the really bad thing is that all day yesterday my brain was being steered by fatigue and pessimism. I must find a solution to sleep in the first day or two offshore. Reader advice is welcome.

All my life, I have been somewhat insomniac. No matter how tired I am, it takes me 2 or more hours to fall asleep. If my mind is racing, I can lay there all night and never sleep. On this passage, my mind was going nuts with worry and contingency planning. What if the weather changed so? Why did the engine overhead? How much fuel would we have left? Where could we stop part way there to wait for the winds to turn? Libby and I generally take 4 hour watches at sea. 4 hours is not enough for me to fall asleep. Drugs? No. I need to be ready to wake up and lend a hand on an instant's notice if Libby calls for help. Natural sleep enhanced by going to bed at the same time every night? Not as sea in a two person crew. Count sheeo? Attention deficit gets me. Before I count sheep number 10, my mind is back to worry.