After a wonderfully civilized day of sailing, the night showed up wearing its worst outfit: thick clouds, rain, random wind, and complete, soul-absorbing darkness. One of those nights—the kind politely mentioned in the fine print, which you confidently assume will never apply to you.

Spoiler alert: they find you!

To be fair, we were lucky. No apocalyptic conditions—just one gust of 28 knots and a few minutes at 25kn. Still, it was exactly the sort of night that makes you wonder which defective neuron in your brain convinced you this „sailing-thing“ was a good idea. At 3:00 a.m., I could have been lying in a motionless bed, perhaps waking briefly to go to the toilet and feeling very annoyed about that. Instead, I was standing in pitch darkness, soaked by heavy rain, squinting at a radar screen and debating life choices: should I reef because there might be more wind coming, or start the engine because we’re crawling along at two knots and the autopilot has clearly lost faith in its own ability and possibly humanity!

Since we’re only double-handed (yes, Neli—I thought many times how wonderful it would be if you were here), we went with a conservative sail setup. The idea was to survive strong gusts without waking the other person. Brilliant plan—until the wind disappears entirely. Then the boat starts moving in a way that’s technically “acceptable” if you’re horizontal in bed, but deeply offensive to your stomach when you’re upright and staring into black nothingness with no horizon in sight.

But we survived. We came out the other side. The sky now looks… well, not noticeably brighter. But optimism is a choice.

And with a bit of luck, tomorrow I will buy Nutella.
And—dare I dream—even a liter of fresh milk.
Luxury. Pure, unimaginable luxury.