Dear All,

All is well in the dark blue world. We continue on our lonely course with no boats in sight for over 3 days now. Is the world still alive?l

Tonight, I thought we would share with you an important element of life on board, which is the noise

You always read how noisy a boat can be but reality exceeds expectations and you can only sleep because you are completely exhausted by the time you reach your bed.

Rather than describe the noise, we suggest a method to recreate at home your own boat environment: best is to take your mattress from your bed and pull it into the kitchen. First open all the windows, open the taps of the sink at max pressure, take your washing machine, the dryer and and the dish washer and put your mattress right on them.  Switch the 3 of them on at the same time but without closing them as the noise would be muffled and not fully representative of the truth, plus a bit of humidity helps recreating the environment.  Hang about 10 frying pans and make sure you hit them as hard as you can every 2 minutes on average with another pan.  Use some aluminum foils by flapping them non stop during the whole night next to your ears. Next, take your car, preferably an old diesel model and, ideally slide the car between the washing machines and the mattress and switch on the engine 1 and 1/2 hour at a time twice a night. Take some old wood panels from your book shelves and make sure someone walks on them heavily,  ideally just above your head. Make sure you use the max rotation speed of the dryer, to recreate some of the random movements of the mattress. Ideally, you also want someone to kick your bed as hard as they can every 3 to 5 minutes to simulate the impact of big waves. Now, make sure you use your micro wave and the timer of your oven to try to recreate all sorts of alarms sounds, such as wind shift, max wind speed, radar, etc. Also, make sure you use an old badly tuned radio to recreate the VHF system. Finally, ask your children to come and wake you up every 3 hours: make sure they shake you hard. Sometimes, it would be good if they also shake you at random times and ask you to run to the street and pull 20 metres of rope as hard as you can without having time to get dressed (particularly when the starboard watch is on shift). Best is that a neighbour also throws buckets of water at you while you are pulling.

There you are. Enjoy and have a very good sleep too                                                                                                        

The well rested Noeluna crew