The alarm goes at five-fifteen. Not the alarm of the person who needs to be somewhere by a fixed time, the alarm of the person who needs to know, before the day starts, what the day contains. The weather has been running through the night on the instruments and the barometric trace shows what the pressure has been doing in the six hours since I last looked at it.
The anchor alarm has been silent, which means the boat has not moved outside the radius I set when we came in yesterday afternoon, but I check the chartplotter anyway because the anchor alarm is the backup and the captain who relies entirely on the backup without verifying it is the captain who discovers the backup’s limitations at the worst possible moment.
The weather first. The forecast I downloaded on the satellite last night against what the instruments have been reading through the night and what the sky is showing now through the companionway. The barometric pressure and the direction it has been moving. The wind strength at the masthead and the direction it came from overnight and the direction the forecast says it will come from today. The swell visible through the companionway from the motion the boat is making at anchor.
All of this takes approximately eight minutes and produces the picture of the day that the rest of the day’s decisions are built on.
The Rest of the Early Morning
The anchor chain, checked from the bow: the angle it is making with the water, whether it is bar-taut in the breeze or draped loosely on the bottom, the specific confirmation that the holding is what yesterday evening’s test suggested it was.
The depth reading at the current tide compared to the depth when the anchor went down, cross-checked against the tidal prediction for this location. The AIS display for the overnight traffic — what came through the area while we were anchored, what is in the area now, whether anything changed in the passage plan that the night’s conditions might have modified.
Then the water. Not the swim, that comes later, after coffee, after the full morning check has been completed and the picture of the day is assembled. The visual check of the anchorage from the bow: the colour of the water over the sand bottom that tells the experienced eye whether the clarity is what yesterday afternoon showed or whether something changed overnight.
The reef edge if the anchorage is reef-adjacent, the channel if the departure requires one. The sky for the specific cloud formations that the Mediterranean or the Pacific or the Indian Ocean produces as the reliable indicators of the day’s conditions beyond what the instruments are measuring at the single point of the boat’s position.
By six-fifteen the picture is complete. The members are beginning to stir below. Richard is starting the galley. The boat is ready for the day. This is what the responsibility of the captain looks like before the day that the members experience has begun. It is not glamorous. It is the specific work that makes everything that follows possible in the quality that the Naora voyage is built to deliver.
