What Happens When Your House Starts Moving at 2 a.m.

When you live on a boat, you’re moving your home pretty often. And, every now and again, you have to start off at 2 a.m. It happens, and it’s about as exciting as it sounds (ahem, not very). But it is pretty different to a land house, so let me walk you through why we’d move our home at 2 a.m. and how it works when we do.

Why?

Well, in one word? Weather.

Imagine you’re sitting at the kitchen table, your laptop is open, you’re running PredictWind to see what the best weather window is, and you see there’s a storm coming through at the end of the window.

Seeing this, you decide to work backwards from the right arrival time and find that, to get in before the storm, you have to leave where you’re at right now at 2 a.m.

You’re thinking, ‘Okay, we gotta do what we gotta do.’

You get the crew to gather round and show them the forecast for the passage. You then tell them the needed departure time… and get silence.

Why silence?

Everyone knows it has to be done but really doesn’t want to get up around midnight and get the anchor and sails up.

Nevertheless, you go through the passage prep motions throughout the day, aim for an early bedtime, and set your alarms.

Most Common Reasons to Move Your Home at 2 a.m.

In case you were curious, here’s why we’re usually woken up at 2 a.m. to move the boat:

An 80nm passage. For us, we can make about 65nm in a day — sunrise to sunset — and 140–160nm in 24 hours. As you can see, none of those numbers are 80nm. So, to make sure we arrive before dark, we have to get up a few hours before sunrise to make the extra miles.

Hence, 2 a.m.

Waiting for good conditions to leave. Often, you will have to wait for a front to move through before you can set off on passage with the now-nice conditions. And sometimes, the front will be gone by 2 a.m. and you can leave!

Bad anchorage. Yep, also another thing — if the anchorage sucks and you’re awake anyway because of too much swell, then you just decide you might as well be at sea anyway and therefore find yourself turning the engine on at 2 a.m.

There are more reasons, of course. Emergencies are also on the list, thankfully these do not happen often at all. Most common for us is arrival time — we want to be getting into our destination before dark. If that means getting up in the dark, so be it.

What Actually Happens on Board at 2 a.m.?

Ding ding, ding ding, ding ding.

Eghhhh, what’s that? Is it 2 a.m. already?

Dammit.

Kris will be out of bed first, will make sure the conditions look okay, and then will turn the engines over…

BEEEEEP! Brrrm.

This will get everyone else out of bed. Though, I have to say, the youngest two will almost always roll over and leave the rest of us to get the anchor up.

Grabbing a hoodie and stumbling upstairs and outside: Bella to the helm, Kris and I up near the anchor, and Finn floating in between all of us with a torch.

Moving forward, the chain comes up, bringing the anchor with it.

Once it’s up, Bella will turn us around and out of the anchorage, getting us around the headland/reefs and out into open water. Finn and I will probably go back to sleep while the other two get the mainsail up, and then Bella will head to bed and leave Kris at the helm to take the first watch.

Most of the time, it takes me a while to get back to sleep — after half the night being still at anchor, your body takes a moment to get used to the movement of the open ocean.

Sometimes Kris will wake Finn up to help out with a watch, and then when 5 a.m. comes around, Bella will be woken for her sunrise shift and we’re suddenly into our passage rhythm.

The little two will get up and have breakfast, happy to see we’d already made some solid ground before they had to get up.

And then we’re away, off to the next destination, trying to forget about the early alarm.

Summary

I hope you’ve enjoyed finding out what it’s like when your home starts moving at 2 a.m.

I guess it’s kind of like getting up and getting in the car at 2 a.m… just, everyone in the family needs to get up and you have to turn your home into a sailing boat.

It’s honestly all part of it and not the end of the world, but it’s something unique that I thought might be interesting!

I would love to know what adventures you’ve gotten up early for. Do you like the excitement? Or would you rather sleep in?

Let us know in the comments!